In my post about Troublewit I kind of wrote a cheque that I didn’t fully cash.
I said that by recognising and codifying the things you hate about a routine you can methodically attempt to fix those things and produce some brilliant shining original masterwork which has none of the identified problems.
I then listed out the problems of Troublewit and noted that it was unsalvageable garbage (which, don’t get me wrong, it totally is) because fixing those problems would take it so far from it’s origins that it completely morphs into an unrelated allied art or, worse still, gospel magic.
What happened to be benefits of hatred? Did I lie to you?
No. No I did not. I did however decide to split what I wrote in two because it got too damn long. This is the second half of that article, in which Stacy Saves the Linking Rings.
So to open, here’s all the things I’ve hated about the linking rings¹.
- Lack of context
- Lack of motivation
- Proof reverse-proof
- Impossible becomes difficult
- Too much noodling
- Overly repetitive
- Anticlimactic
Let’s tackle these one at a time.
Lack of context
The linking rings are the linking rings because they are the linking rings. Rings like that do not exist outside of a magic show. If you ever see a magician with rings like that you immediately know what happens because that’s all they’re for. Contrast and compare another magic staple such as rope, which is used in the real world and has many contextual links such as seafaring, freight, and BDSM.
The only way to contextualise linking rings is to either joke that they’re something else, like King Kong’s Prince Albert², or lean into the meta context by lampshading the fact that you’re in a magic show.
Lack of motivation
Some people think this is the same as context but it’s not quite the same. Motivation is all about the why. I really wish more tricks came with a why. Why are you doing this? Linking two solid rings has very few real world applications. Other tricks have possible reasons. Calling a card to the top of the deck might help win games. A rope escape might be useful if you’re kidnapped. A torn and restored routine could help in a farcical scenario involving a misunderstanding about a winning lottery ticket.
The basic motivation for lining rings is to prove you can do it. I’ve also seen some good routines which involve faux teaching as a premise, but you have to handwave that premise early on to explain why the audience doesn’t actually learn anything in the finale. Ultimately it’s hard to cast the routine as anything other than showing off. Speaking of which….
Proof reverse-proof
Proof reverse-proof is my name for the phenomenon of the magician showing something to be impossible before then showing it to be possible. The linking rings is all proof reverse-proof because you show the rings and bang them together to prove they can’t be linked, then you link them, by then you spin them to prove they’re definitely together and can’t come apart, then you take them apart and prove that they’re separate again.
This is where the flaws start to blend together, the lack of context is why you have to make such a big deal of what is and isn’t possible. We live in an age of scientific marvels, so for all the audience knows, these are special going together rings³.
Impossible becomes difficult
Even you can prove the impossibility, as soon as you link them together you show that it is less impossible. After all, you just did it. Everything you do after is based on this new expectation of it being possible, because you did it. So if you link more together or link them in the air, or while one is spinning on the stage, or do that flicky thing with a chain of 3 where the bottom one jumps up and links to the top one, these are no longer impossible actions, they are difficult actions. No matter how much other magicians may be impressed, I shouldn’t need to explain that for a lay audience, difficult is easier than impossible.
Too much noodling
Noodling is sort of like magic idling. It’s the totally unmotivated addition of phases. Even if you can prove linking the rings is impossible, and linking 6 is even more impossible, and your character is the sort of person who loves to show off impossible things, that still doesn’t explain why you’re now going to hang the rings like a poor simulacrum of a 19th century lantern, or a dragonfly, or a hanging chair.
This kind of action is necessitated only by the requirement for the act to fill 15 minutes, which is also why….
Overly repetitive
Whether it’s adding more rings to the chain, breaking them up and putting them back together again, or arranging them in different ways, it’s hard to hide the fact that the linking rings is one impossible action repeated several times.
Many magic tricks suffer from this problem, but others at least try to build away from it, such as the cups and balls starting with vanishes and reappearance, then moving on to teleportation and assembly, followed by penetration, a faux explanation leading to multiple productions.
Linking rings doesn’t have any of that. It doesn’t even have the big finale.
Anticlimactic
It’s generally considered good practice for a multiphase routine to go somewhere, and end with a big climactic finale.
With the linking rings you either end by taking them all apart again, or end by putting them in a great big chain, which was almost as long just before the finale. It’s not like an 8 ring chain is suddenly exponentially superior to a 7 ring chain. The average human brain can’t even really recognise numbers above 7 without counting.
So how do you fix these problems?
Well my routine uses the following solutions:
- Context:
The rings ARE going together rings, assumedly from a magic set. - Motivation:
I do not know how to use them, and I am learning right there on stage, all my actions are motivated by this process. - Proof and Unproof:
When I bang the rings together and they don’t link, that is actually my failures to make them work paired with them malfunctioning and working when I don’t want them to. - Difficult to Impossible:
My inability to work the rings implies difficulty rather than impossibility. By leaning hard into the idea that I don’t know how they’re doing it, I hope to slowly cultivate the audience to the point where they don’t know how I’m doing it. If they choose they can then convince themselves that it shouldn’t be possible. - Literal Noodling:
All states that the rings enter are entangled states that the rings get me into, and I then get out of them, seemingly by accident. - Non-Repetition:
Except as a rule of 3 call back I never enter the same stance twice, there is always a different combination of which rings are in certain places on my body and which rings are linked together. In addition to this the routine is split into 4 phases, the first of which mimics a regular linking rings routine, the second entering my entangled style, but only with two rings, the third uses all 3 rings for more complex tangles and the final phase is all 3 rings join together and I’m trying to get them apart. - The Climax:
The big finale is me finally getting all 3 apart with a single motion, placing me in an applause cue⁴, which I then cut off with a joke to get myself into the next part of the show
I’m quite pleased with my linking rings routine which is why I do my best to ensure no magicians ever get a chance to watch a recording of it.
That is all.
¹ In their defence, I’ve never seen a single routine with all these problems. Well… Maybe a couple.
² I refuse to explain this joke, you know where Google is.
³ I mean we call them linking rings. Since these rings only exist for this trick, you could argue that they are special going together rings, which is why the proving they aren’t is so important.
⁴ I don’t even pretend to understand how applause cues work, but one day I really must do a deep dive on what part of our monkey brain makes us need to flap our meaty palms together at the sight of a person with their arms open wide.