The thing about diary tricks is that they are predicated on a rather strange idea; that the performer has a pocket diary for the year, in which they have written a playing card for each day. The natural instinct is to give a reason for this. These reasons are often convoluted out of necessity, as there is no normal reason for a person to do such a thing. The only reason to put things in a diary is to act as a reminder, and the only reason you’d have to remember a playing card for each day is for a magic trick.
But… How many other tricks have these conceits?
Normal (or not)
There are tricks that require certain additional accessories, such as a specific piece of jewellery or clothing. Over the years, off the top of my head, I’ve seen tricks using medallions, good luck charms, origami finger rings, buttons sewn onto the wrong place in clothing, even holes in jeans.
That’s just visible stuff however. Often a routine will rely on an introduction to it’s premise wherein you declare yourself to be an avid coin collector, or a gambler, or a folklorist, or an inventor, or any number of things which would explain why you’re carrying the various props you use in any given routine.
The alternative is telling the audience that you just picked a dirty rubber band up off the street or something¹.
Tangent
A few years ago I saw a clip of a recorded lecture from Jay Sankey in which he put forward an excellent piece of theory, stating that magicians of the past were like Superman whereas modern magicians are Spider-Man.
Superman was born different, he had unfathomable powers, he could do anything and was nigh indestructible, whereas Spider-Man is just some kid who by pure chance got a very specific set of abilities, thus making him more interesting as a character because of his many flaws.
Similarly the magicians of old would announce themselves on stage as the great and powerful, larger than life personas about who you knew very little outside of their stagecraft. Conversely the majority of modern magicians are working in closeup gigs where a genuine connection to the audience could be the difference between getting more work next week or going to a food bank. If you ask most magicians who their character is, they’ll usually say “It’s just me at my most sociable” or something similar.
Which is similar to the comparison of Superman, man of steel, Earth’s mightiest hero, to the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, right down to the crushing weight of gig economy capitalism.
Jay Sankey is however possibly one of the most well known creators of these routines with strange opening premises. It’s difficult to square these two opposing ideas, of honesty and fiction within a single creator… unless you’re familiar with Jay Sankey.
The Cross Product
I think it’s fair to say that Jay Sankey comes across as being a little weird, a reputation he probably cultivates on purpose, but for the rest of us it’s difficult to square offering the audience a genuine connection with us as performers whilst inventing all these odd personality quirks as jumping off points for magic tricks. I know at least one magician who first met his wife at a gig (knowing his performance style and what he’s like, she knew exactly what she was getting into²) which only serves to emphasise that the audience are real people getting their actual first impression of you through each performance. if they later see you again and now the numismatism, fascination for statistics and Sherlockian interest in microexpressions is suddenly replaced by card hustling, obsession with far eastern yogi, and speed cubing, people will either quickly realise you’re making up these long term interests to suit whatever magic trick is popular this month, or they’ll think you’re one of the strangest people to have ever lived.
The Dot Product
Back when I was on the Talk Magic forums, before forums became defunct and everyone and their dog moved instead to facebook groups³, there was a post that people kept commenting on, constantly bumping it back up to the top of the forum as a hotly contested topic. The discussion started as “Should mentalists avoid doing magic?” With the implied statement that mentalists should be convincing an audience that what they are doing is purely psychological, and the addition of a vanishing silk handkerchief might imply that trickery is afoot (it is). Over time it evolved however to a far more interesting discussion about whether magicians need to have a “power set”.
That is to say should magicians define themselves in terms of the things they can do, much like a superhero. Are you fast? Strong? Psychic? Telekinetic? Can you teleport things or travel through time? All these are excellent causal premises for a subset of tricks, but as soon as you define your character in this way, you then have to look at every new trick through the lens of how you would achieve it using your powers… and not all of them are going to work. Again however, this uses the Superman model of thinking, where you expect the audience to buy into a fictional character you’re creating, like a circus strongman or an oracle act.
But no one ever discusses the same idea with regard to background conceits with tricks. Some magicians are purists, as in they do 100% coin work or 100% card and gambling routines. Some are mentalists, strongmen or geeks⁴, and those lend themselves to a consistent backstory, which honestly probably isn’t far from the truth if you’ve decided to entirely focus on one aspect of magic.
Bump Mapping
But what about the rest of us? How to be honest with the audience while decorating your character with a diary full of playing cards, a good luck charm, a set of ESP symbols and a UV torch? Well as with so many things in life, the solution may well come in a song by They Might be Giants:
They call me doctor worm
Good morning, how are you? I’m doctor worm.
I’m interested in things.
I’m not a real doctor but,
I am a real worm.
These five lines, particularly the middle one, are to me the perfect way to approach an authentic magical character, and all the oddities it might entail. My name is Amazing Stace. I’m not really Amazing, but my name is Stacy, and here’s some things I find interesting.
In the modern world it is possible to develop an interest in something and, after a couple of hours on youtube, feel well informed enough to tell other people about it that same day. Unless your intent is to make it into a character, the best way to introduce a new idea is not “This is something I have studied for years” or “When I was a child I started collecting these” or “I have a psychic connection to all living things which has affected me for my whole life. Pick a card…”.
Instead try “I heard the strangest thing on a podcast the other day” or “My friend is always looking up weird things on the internet and he showed me something” or “do you ever just follow random links on wikipedia to see where you end up? That’s how I found about this…”
The benefits of this are threefold:
- This has no bearing on you as a person. Okay maybe the wikipedia one is a bit odd, but we’re all constantly being bombarded by utterly random information all the time. Recommended youtube videos and podcasts, sponsored google results, blogs shared on facebook, twitter threads that get retweeted to your timeline. We live in an algorithmically generated chaotic information landscape, so it makes sense that you’d end up picking up a lot of nonsense along the way.
- Verisimilitude conquers truth. That is to say it only needs to sound plausible enough for you to have believed it. If you come up against an actual expert in the field⁵ you don’t have to defend your stance on ghosts or UFOs or numerology or psychology, because it’s not your stance. It’s a blog you read, which might have been misinformation and you can drop it like it’s hot the second it comes under fire. If anything, giving an audience member the opportunity to educate you about your premise will help you flesh it out in future and could be fun for them too.
- If applied correctly destroys the notion that magicians are all lonely shut-ins. Collecting or studying things for years as a backstory sounds quite isolating, and the idea that magicians have no social life is a damaging stereotype, no matter how accurate it happens to be. But listening to podcasts is something people do while they exercise or travel, watching recommended content makes you seem open to new ideas, anecdotes from friends suggests that you have friends. Introducing an odd notion in these ways actually serves to make you appear more normal.
Specularity
Finally, if you perform a magic trick that does appeal to a long term deep seated interest, or use an experience from your childhood, keep that part in. In fact, seek out tricks that can appear personal to you in this way. There’s a kind of textural difference between something you feel in your bones and something you adapted from an idea you saw in an unskippable ad. I have a few tricks where I can have my cake and eat it because the premises are nonsense, but the nonsense is based on things I saw at Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, a chain of exhibits I’ve been visiting since I was a child. Amusingly, turning one of the exhibits there into the basis of a magic trick brought me to the personal revelation that the exhibit itself was achieved by the same method as the trick, even though it is presented as a great feat of skill and the person who made the related artefact is regaled as an artisan of superhuman ability for producing it.
Make of that what you will⁶.
¹ This is part of the suggested presentation of Jay Sankey’s Babylon Band.
² Honestly the strongest proof that magic can be used as part of a dating strategy, but not in the way people think. If you perform regularly you end up meeting and having a well presented and rehearsed interaction with thousands of people, at least one of whom might be oddly charmed at the point where you give them a yellow rubber glove and ask them to feel around inside your mouth. Anyone who knows the guy I was talking about now knows exactly who I mean.
³ I might talk about this at great length later, but I think the move to single consolidated social media sites as a replacement for isolated specialist forums has been the greatest blow to internet subcultures since their formation. In fact I will talk about this later, it’s just too much to get into in a footnote.
⁴ Okay so there are a few things I need to just clarify here, I’m not saying that weightlifting is magic, but the specific feats of a strongman act, tearing a phone book, bending a nail in your teeth etc, are all heavily reliant on technique rather than raw physical strength. Much like how there is a huge amount of skill in a clever multiple shift and bottom deal, but if you present it as centre-dealing from multiple places in the deck, it’s not actually show of the purported skill, it’s a magic trick. Also anyone who has seen Nightmare Alley is probably confused as to why I mentioned geeks. I don’t know what it was like in the 1920s, but these days a geek act is a series of sideshow magic effects such as piercing the skin with a spike, swallowing razorblades, eating lightbulbs and regurgitation on queue.
⁵ I once had an audience tell me that I used the word superposition incorrectly in my geometric presentation of Card Warp.
⁶ One of my personal interests is graphics programming, hence why the headings in this article are various terms related to 3D graphics. It started with Normal and Tangent and I just couldn’t help myself. There’s no reason to pin this footnote to the last line, but I wanted to mention it.