I am a bad loser. A terrible loser, like absolutely dogshit at handling competitive failure. I’ve had post-competition meltdowns that made a magic club briefly decide to stop holding competitions.
I am also a bad winner. Once I was so chuffed to win one award at a magic club that I carried the trophy with me at the next competition and used it as a prop in my act. These are trophies which you get your name engraved on and give back. Giving it back was hard. So hard that when I next won one of these and went to get it engraved, I simultaneously bought a miniature copy of it to keep.
I’m a fucking freak in any kind of competitive situation. It’s a miracle I’m allowed to compete in these things at all.
And what makes it worse is when I put in a lot of effort. Like… 7 years of effort, to make an act as original as possible, and lose to slightly altered commercially sold routine.
So when I came second with my Toothfairy act in the recent magic competition I wanted to have a rant about it but given previous public rants had not gone down well I instead turned to some non magician friends of mine. I told of the long process of creation that went into my act, and the fact that I was beaten to the prize by a guy whose act was basically super lemon with extra steps and less imagination.
Now, given that I recently told members of that magic club to read this blog here, I should probably tease the conclusion of this blog and admit that my judgement was clouded at the time and there was a lot more to the winning act than that, which I will discuss later.
But when I told my non-magician friends about the 7 year development of my act, with the entirely home made props, premiering against an off the shelf routine and lost, they all said I should complain and get him disqualified. Obviously I wasn’t going to do that, but it’s not even a thing I could do. It’s simply not expected that magicians invent their own tricks, or even write their own routines.
But I realised two things during that conversation:
- Most magic as performed is not particularly original
- Normies do not know this fact at all
I guess a lot of audiences see magic in a similar vein as standup comedy, and I’ll concede there’s a fair bit of overlap, but the number one thing that audiences understand about standup comedy is that the absolute worst thing a comedian can do is use someone else’s joke. Is it any wonder that they think magic works the same way?
This is because it’s way too easy to think in terms of effect, not routine. Back in 2011 when Dynamo walked on the Thames, Criss Angel accused him of copying his act, and at the time a lot of people thought that it was because Criss Angel must have walked on a famous river in America using the same method, but he wasn’t complaining about the premise or the effect or even the method. Criss Angel complained because Dynamo did this:
Standing with your legs together and arms outstretched like Jesus on the cross to compare your power to the almighty isn’t just blasphemy, it’s copyrighted blasphemy.
Most magicians use mass produced props to perform tricks which are a hundred years old to audiences who think they came up with it on the spot. Even apparently new stuff is a modification of older method. Breaking down my Toothfairy act, it’s:
- Jay Sankey’s Paperclipped
- Harry Lorayne’s Roll Your Own
- Silent Mora’s Travelling Marbles
- Pop Haydn’s teleportation device.
They’re all old ideas but they’re combined in a way which obfuscates their origins and makes them feel like a single continuous thread, using reincorporation and theming.
Making your own props really really helps with this process, because if two people perform a trick with the same prop, even if the premise and routine are different, the prop will be recognised. This is sort of what clouded my judgement about the winning act, because the finale used the props and structure of the routine Super Lemon by Alex NG and Henry Harrius. The lemon was produced however in the act of forcing a card under a handkerchief – an effect invented by Wayne Dobson, and the presence of a paper ball at the end was a reincorporation from an origami joke routine at the start.
So even though the sources were more easily identified, the resulting combination was still quite innovative. It was just hard to see that through the rage of losing with a routine I’d spent 7 years working on, against a trick that came out 3 months ago.
I’ve spoken before about how no magic is truly authentically 100% original, everything is based on an older idea or principle or method. It’s evolution far more than intelligent design. But – and this is the mind-blowing portion of tonight’s entertainment – Stand up comedy is also based on ancient principles and techniques.
Subversion of expectation is essentially the root of both comedy and magic, except in magic it’s the subversion of the outcome of a series of actions (but I saw you put that ball under the other cup) and in comedy it’s a subversion of a narrative (but I thought you meant brown and sticky like glue, not brown and stick like) but it’s the same. And just like how magic has techniques and principles to lead people to a different expected outcome, comedy has established techniques and principles to lead people to an unexpected narrative twist.
My favourite comedian (Stewart Lee) actually lampshaded this fact on the show he co-hosted with Richard Herring This Morning with Richard Not Judy in a segment they called Lazy Comedy Slags.
These original two segments were all about a common technique of comedy called the Pull Back and Reveal, named after the filmic technique of filming something in closeup then pulling the camera further away to widen the field of view and reveal surroundings that recontextualise the events initially seen.
So I’m not a comedian but I am going to recontextualise this blog as an opportunity to say well done to this year’s winner of the Pentacle Club Close-up Competition. I hope he enjoyed receiving the award from President Jezo at the recent formal dinner, an event I have long had zero interest in attending because of the stuffy dress code and carb heavy menu. When I’m president we’re going to have our formal meals at Rocker’s Steakhouse then go next door for Karaoke.
Can you imagine if I’d actually won that thing? I’d have to dress all smart, go to a Masonic hall, and shovel down mashed potatoes until my diabetes blinded me and made my feet drop off.
Fuck that shit, I love coming second.