I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine who may well be the only other human being who reads or is even aware of this blog, when the topic turned to what makes a good magic trick. I’d been rolling around an idea for a while that we should start a podcast, but wasn’t sure what theme to use. My latest idea was “Magic Fixers” where we would take old rubbish tricks we don’t like and see if we could spice them up to make them work in a modern world.
Sort of like a weekly instalment of This post on the Linking Rings
I have some killer ideas for the Hotrod trick.
But the problem was that in discussing the kinds of things we could fix I made a startling revelation about magic, magicians, perception, reality and barbecue sauce.
Or mustard.
Or spaghetti sauce.
But not ketchup.
I’ve secretly always known this, in my past blogs I’d mentioned before that there’s no such thing as a universally good or bad trick, there is only a trick that is good or bad for any given performer.
Actually no, there are bad tricks. I refuse to budge on that.
But for the rest I think it’s important to understand the difference between ketchup and other condiments. Starting with the story of Ragu. Or at least I think it was Ragu. Might have been Dolmio. Or another company that makes pasta sauce.
What matters is that they kept getting complaints about the pasta sauce they made. Some people thought it was too chunky, some thought it wasn’t chunky enough. Some said it was too spicy, some said it was too bland. In short, it felt like no matter how they tweaked the recipe, someone always complained.
Then a marketing genius realised that the reason you couldn’t make the best pasta sauce is because there was no single best pasta sauce. The winners of that race wouldn’t make one perfect sauce, but rather they would make several. A spicy one, a chunky one, a sweet one, and so forth. In the end they did focus testing and came up with a range of sauces which was the smallest range that could satisfy the most people.
I would love to tell you more details about this story but I can’t find the original source (or sauce) of it, and when I google for it, all I find is recipes for marinara.
What’s important however is that this holds true for other condiments but not all. That’s why you can buy sweet, tangy, spicy and sticky barbecue sauce, English, French and American style mustard, smooth, small chunk, and original Branston Pickle, but tomato ketchup is always just ketchup.
A long time ago someone invented the best ketchup and all other ketchups are derivatives, right up to the point when someone invented the best ketchup, beetroot ketchup, which tasted amazing and they stopped selling it at Sainsbury’s.
I am still angry.
But anyway, magic tricks are like a good spaghetti sauce. Some people like chunky, some people like tomatoey, some people like carbonara (God help them) and some people are absolutely besotted with Lloyd Barnes’ Lux, I don’t get it.
What on Earth is the appeal of a trick which uses chemical and optical technology so blatantly that the average lay person would probably come up with at least 4 methods before the trick was even finished!?
That was the question that made me start thinking about pasta sauces and what is the magician equivalent of a chunky magic trick? A spicy magic trick? What are the axes of magic taste?
What follows is my attempt to codify it. It might be wrong, it might be right, it might be incomplete, but it’s a start to work from.
Rome didn’t invent tagliatelle alfredo in a day.
Also, before we start, just a note to say that this is very little to do with method. This is about the visual and tactile choreography of the trick. Method features a little because some of the types preclude certain methodologies, but it is not the main focus. I have aligned these on 3 axes.
Visual to Tangible
Balletic to Clean
Aesthetic to Natural
Visual
This is where the journey started. The realisation that Lloyd Barnes is a very visual magician, looking at his releases, the gaff deck, the wallet weapon and Lux are all designed for a visual moment. The Wallet weapon is an odd one because it’s a switching device, suggesting it should be invisible but he actually shows in the trailer that it is intended to be such a clean switch that you can use it for a visual bill change as well as the primary impossible location effect.
What I find interesting about these effects as a gestalt is that they have no resistance to explanation. The wallet is un examinable (probably not a big deal but go with me for a moment) the gaff cards are just that, gaff cards that are used for a visual effect then immediately taken out of play, and Lux leaves evidence on the spectator if used with the routine from the trailer. That is to say the mark which vanishes from a spectator’s arm is still kind of there, and if you perform this to a person in a pub who goes to a nightclub after, the blacklights will reveal that fact.
Entirely visual magic is seen in the moment and then goes away, with no repercussions, no interaction, no examination.
For a visual magician
real magic is when you see something happening in the moment.
Tangible
I personally am a tangible magician. The tangible equivalent of a visual card change is a change where a card is placed face down in the spectators hand, and when the turn it over, it’s different. This, to a tangible magician is stronger because the expected thought pattern for the spectator is “The card changed while I was holding it” rather than the much more feasible “This card was switched before it was handed to me.”
Tangible magic therefore requires memory on the part of the spectator. They don’t see the change in the moment but they see they examine the thing before and after and they get to examine and feel it, to know there’s nothing fishy about it. Just as the peak of visual magic contains such complex gimmicks and angle sensitive sleights that the effects can literally only be seen by a single spectator in specific lights and in a specific time frame (like a TikTok video), at the peak of tangible magic the strongest effect is experienced by the one person interacting with it. In many ways, mentalism is amongst the strongest tangible effects because the volunteers feel it in the deepest place of all – inside their own minds – and the rest of the audience has to maintain good faith that the person up their having their mind read isn’t just in on it.
The best aspect of tangible magic to my mind however is that it often leaves a piece of itself behind. Impossible objects, created in the moment, taken home by the audience as material evidence of something they otherwise might have assumed they just misremembered.
For a tangible magician
Real magic is something you can physically experience.
Balletic
When wizards on television and in movies conjure spells they do so with choreographed motions, a twirling finger ballet as shapes are drawn in the air and energy is spun from the ether. Some magicians have this same energy as they make magical gestures, sometimes even to music.
From elaborate card flourishes and wand spin vanishes to literal dancing on stage as an illusion is setup and displayed. Balletic magic is all about motion to cause the magic. With a routine full of flourishes and motion, any movements required to initiate the effect itself can be motivated as part of the dance. This creates a strong connection between the motions of the performer and the effect itself. Whilst an audience might not know exactly how, there is no mistaking who was responsible for what they experienced.
For a balletic magician
Real magic is the result of a magician’s movement and skill
Clean
Conversely the clean magician feels that any extraneous motion is visual noise, getting in the way of a pure effect. The perfect ACAAN is the holy grail of clean magic, an effect where the spectator names a card and number and all the magician does is count down to that number and shows the card. No flourish, no action. The performer doesn’t seem to do anything at all. Clean magic entirely comprises motivated actions, every motion is overt and clear. Any sleights are hidden invisibly, rather than being lost in the noise of constant movement.
If a signifier is required to show the moment of magic, a snap of the fingers is as elaborate as it gets.
For a clean magician
Real magic happens effortlessly
Fantastical
I’ve spoken about the aesthetic of magic before, and advocated for a new paradigm, but the more I think about it the more I think there’s a line to be drawn around magic that has an intentional aesthetic at all. The aesthetic of magic could be the classic aesthetic of drawing room conjuring with silk scarves, canes, shiny linking rings and varnished boxes, or it could be an aesthetic like The Witch¹, with aged and weathered props that look older than antique, gnarled sticks and hessian sacks. It could be a far eastern or asian aesthetic, which I have spoken about somewhat unfavourably before, but it certainly marks the props as belonging to a fantasy scenario instead of the real world. Fantastical props could look like sci-fi props, as used by Rudy Coby’s Lab Man, or the kind of seance equipment used by Derren Brown.
Whatever the theme is, what matters is that as soon as you see these things you know you’re watching theatre, you are in the magic circle².
You can just sit back and exist in a world where a large ornate key is haunted, a woman can be levitated from a stone altar, and a human being still owns a tea chest.
For an fantastical magician
Real magic uses special magical objects to create theatre.
Natural
Of course you can’t pull out a tea chest, or to use its real name, a sucker sliding die box, at a restaurant table. Maybe you could get away with a silk but ideally if you want to do magic in the real world, you want to do it with real objects.
Natural magicians use their keys, their wallets, borrowed objects, items on the table like a salt shaker or a paper napkin. Cigarettes, candy, paper cups, pens.
Sure sometimes natural magicians will have special props for doing magic, but they will be props that exist outside of magic. A deck of cards could be for poker, balloons are sold in party shops.
One of the most amusing ways I’ve seen this applied is the number of tricks once done with string or cord being done instead with nice white headphone cords such as those popularised by Apple, an innovation in magic that came about 2 years before the introduction of airpods and the removal of headphone sockets from most mobile phones.
Natural magic has to move fast to keep up. Props that were once natural, like cigarette cases, pocket watches, or silk scarves, are now sufficiently anachronistic that they have become fantastical.
There’s an increasing hunger for natural magic, as magicians such as Paul Zenon, David Blaine, Dynamo and Troy took television magic away from studios and out into the streets, with an aesthetic more akin to a hidden camera show, meaning every prop has to fit in to the world invisibly.
For a natural magician
Real magic can be performed anywhere using every day items.
If these three axes are placed on three perpendicular edges of a cube, I’d argue that every magic routine and effect can be placed somewhere inside that cube, like a 3D political alignment chart, and by averaging out the kinds of effects a given magician performs, they can be placed on that alignment chart as well.
Which I am going to do in part 2 of this article.
Watch this space.
¹ The Witch, for those who don’t know, was a magic act on Britain’s Got Talent. I hesitate to call The Witch a magician any more than I would call The Phantom, another act from the same year, a magician. Each of these acts had several creative minds involved in both the writing and performance, and it would have been nice to see acts focusing on the overall effect above their personal brand, were it not for… well… actually that’s a topic for another time.
² the magic circle of theatre, not the London based magic club. The magic circle in theatrical terms is a demarcated space in which the normal rules do not apply, a fictional space in which you can suspend disbelief and enjoy the show without worrying that the person who just got stabbed is actually dead because this is a performance of Macbeth and that actor is ‘stabbed’ 8 times a week. It’s not real.