In my last post I mostly provided a lot of background information for the real topic I wanted to get into. In the end explaining the situation was a whole post in and of itself, so the real meat will be here. How to break out of the expectations of cultural hegemony.
For those who still don’t agree that this is something worth doing, there’s a blog post which explains the full reasoning far more succinctly than I ever could by girl on the net. It’s called The Facile Debate About Separating Art From Artist and its an SFW post on a very NSFW website. If you don’t want to read some filthy smut, just read that post and then leave the page. If you do want some filthy smut then you’re welcome I guess.
Anyway this isn’t about whether or not you want to burn down the Hogwarts in your mind. This is about how to actually do it.
Brand
Internet luminary ZeFrank once wrote about the power of a brand and the reason people try to attach themselves to it. His example was about cookies and grandmas¹. People might have positive associations with the cookies their grandma baked. Emotional, sentimental, nostalgic, familial, all kinds of feelings get stirred up by it. The people selling seven million cookies a day can’t really hope to replicate every customer’s grandma’s recipe, but they can evoke some of that emotion by depicting a kindly old generic woman in their adverts and packaging. By displaying things associated with the brand of elderly female relatives, products can evoke an attachment to something they aren’t related to at all. For a more concrete example, look at Aunt Bessie’s yorkshire puddings or Uncle Ben’s instant rice.
Of course, branding can also evoke negative feelings such as the growing distaste for J.K. Rowling’s ideology or the mascot for Robertsons Jam². In cases like these the obvious thing to do would be to simply detach from that brand. Invent a new brand or attach to a new one.
The same racial stereotype present in the Robinson’s Jam logo was also present in some of Enid Blyton’s books, notably Here Comes Noddy Again, in which layer editions saw said characters first renamed³ and then replaced entirely with elf-like goblins in the illustrations. That’s examples of simply detaching from a brand, and that’s also a thing you can do. Simply turn your back on it. But that’s not what this post is about.
Antibrand
Rather than positively associating with a brand like Grandma, Hogwarts or Racism, you can instead negatively associate with them. This is much more easy when the brand is a nebulous concept such as political correctness. Several entertainers have positioned themselves as being politically incorrect⁴ such as stand up comedians annoyed that mainstream audiences no longer buy tickets for misogyny and slurs. Then the audience who were fed up with political correctness could actively pursue that. This works for other brands too, there’s a whole weird industry of people producing video commentary about the failings of specific movie studios and franchises like Disney and Marvel.
What if the thing is deeply tied into your art form though? How can you not only shake off but directly push against the inherent connection between a wizard act and the most popular wizard media in modern media?
There are two ways that I know of, the direct and the indirect.
Direct Opposition
This is what Justin Wilman was doing in the Instagram reel I linked to yesterday. Specifically stating that the trick he performed was expired because of its perceived connection to J.K. Rowling. This is the art of performing in a style from a detached position and using it as an opportunity to comment on said style.
And its not just about name dropping a (hopefully soon to be cancelled) author after doing a throw away trick.
Penn and Teller hate mentalists⁵. They have a strong distaste for the magical establishment. Frankly they’re not keen on the entire perception of stage magicians in general. So how do they oppose these brands which seem indelibly attached to the exact things they’re doing?
Its pretty simple really. Their Lift Off for Love illusion expresses their distaste for showy vegas box jumping and calling it out that the assistant is doing the vast majority of the work. They perform the cups and balls with clear cups and specifically point out that this is against the rules of magic⁶. For their mentalism routine they state that they think mentalism is a big joke, cutting down the three main pillars of it, bodly language reading, neuro-linguistic influence, and actual psychic ability. Sadly I could not find a clip of this part of their show, but they did it when I saw them in Vegas and it was very good.
Pretty much every part of Penn and Teller’s show is antibrand. anti-government, anti-religion, even anti-magic. and controversially I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the parts of their show which are not antibrand, specifically those which are pro-science, are probably the weakest parts of the show. Entertaining yes, but their recent routine about entropy is literally just a camera trick and they make sure you know it.
This style of magic can come across as preachy and on the nose, which may indeed be your brand. It’s certainly served Penn and Teller well. Penn Jilette’s fans regularly tune into his podcast to hear his various libertarian atheistic rantings with practically zero magical content⁷.
But that might not be your style. Which is why I also mentioned another way.
Indirect Opposition
I’m going to ask you now what the following people have in common:
Al Bundy, Alf Garnet, Ali G, Al Murray, and Weird Al Yankovic.
I’ll give you a moment.
That’s right, every single one of them has performed a parody of a certain type of person with the intent of ridiculing them and somehow been seen as a hero by the group they’re mocking⁸. I don’t know why they’re all called Al and at this point I’m to scared to ask.
The formula they used was pretty much the same every time, do an honest character piece which encapsulates all the negative aspects of their antibrand. The people on the inside of that brand recognize those flaws in themselves and assume it is a heartfelt warts and all homage. But those with no appreciation for that brand look at it and they’re in on the joke.
If you want a good example of incorporating indirect opposition into magic, look no further than Ian D Montfort.
Ian D Montfort presents himself as a genuine psychic and spirit medium and at no point says what he does is fake or expresses his true feelings about other self proclaimed mind readers and clairvoyants. I think it’s pretty clear however that he thinks they’re a complete sham. In his act he is a twisted parody of a spirit medium, using the same kind of trickery to prove his efficacy but with none of the positive affirmations that tell the audience what they want to hear. He’s essentially Derren Brown meets Raymond Day.
The key thing is that he takes all the aesthetic and verbal cues from the thing he’s pushing against, but allows the parts of it which people have positive associations with (speaking to deceased relatives, being told pleasing fictions) to fall into that background instead bringing to the front negative things (old unwanted relationships, the cold reading misses, and frankly unpleasant fictions) into focus.
Applying this to an antibrand for Rowling, you would keep the aesthetics of the robes hats and wands but de-emphasize the feelings of wonder and infinite possibility, concentrating instead on the negative aspects of the story. You know, the antisemitic tropes in the goblins hoarding gold in the oddly consumer capitalist society where wealth disparity is somehow greater despite everyone being able to just conjur all the things they need. The weird shit like lycanthropy being an analogy to aids but also some werewolves intentionally infecting kids. The fucked up names she gives people of different races. The fact that house elves are slaves, one of whom befriends the protagonist and is successfully freed by him, but the greater issue of an entire species in identured servitude is not just ignored, but actually reinforced by the narrative as a good thing which the elves like actually and the main character mocks his friend who tries to liberate them. You know, that stuff. The stuff they left out of the movies because they correctly realised a mainstream family audience would see that and say “What the actual fuck?”.
And that’s before you get into the really bizarre stuff from after the books, when Rowling expanded her world to include gross misrepresentations of other world cultures, bizarre factoids about wizards freely shitting in their robes, and Anthony Goldstein – Hogwarts’ singular Jewish student⁹.
An act comprised of this kind of pointed satire would attract plenty of interest (and maybe a few lawyers, so keep that in mind) but more importantly it would let people know where you stood on the cultural divide and slowly wrestle away that deathgrip it has on magic culture.
But I would ve remiss if I didn’t issue a word of warning.
Poe’s Law
This form of parody is, you would think, very clear. No one would go away from the Ian D Montfort show thinking he was actually psychic. Well think again. At the end of his showreel there are interviews with audience members who went in skeptical and came out believers.
To paraphrase Stewart Lee on the topic of political correctness: you have to be careful telling jokes which parody right wing views because you don’t want people holding those views to enjoy your show and think you’re in their side. To quote him more directly, “You don’t want those people coming up to you after gigs, because that’s Al Murray the pub landlord’s audience.”
If you want to actively oppose something in satire you need to be brutal, lest it come off as a lighthearted ribbing by a true fan. Ironically you usually end up having to know more about a thing than casual enjoyers of it in order to rip it to shreds. You think the average enjoyer of the books is even aware of all that Pottermore stuff? To know that garbage you either need to be an avid stalker level fan of her work or consider her an existential threat whose cultural impact must be closely monitored to look for weak points like the fucking deathstar.
In closing then, my advice is threefold:
- Don’t do a wizard show.
- If you have to do a wizard show, pick a better thematic source¹¹ and be outspoken about your distaste for those uptight wizards who went to private boarding schools.
- If its pretty clear that the people hiring you want a Harry Potter show, and if you’re brave enough, write an act which is so singularly subversive that every single person watching goes away wanting to boycott the books and movies of JK Rowling and instead wishes to see you again.
Or you could just tell the bookers that you won’t engage with her work, maybe even shame them a little for indoctrinating kids into a reactionary movement.
The choice is yours.
¹ I would link to the blog in which he made this observation but I can’t find it, so I’m working from memory. I think perhaps it has been removed from his archives because it used it as a jumping off point to explain why people attach themselves to things we don’t think of as brands, such as taking the blame for crimes they didn’t actually commit.
² I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader, I’m not about to put a picture of it here. Once upon a time that mascot was on billboards and prime time television adverts. The 70s were nuts.
³ One of them was originally named the N-word, which I didn’t even know until I found an insane article defending Enid Blyton from accusations of very clear racism. Yes it was a different time and lots of other authors were doing it, but that just means they were all racist too. Enid Blyton is just the only one whose publisher tried to bury it for the promise of future sales of a popular franchise.
⁴ The funny thing is that political correctness referred explicitly to people being disingenuously outspoken about progressive causes in order to further their public perception. This no longer works as an insult because there is an increasing number of people who genuinely support progressive causes, so they are called woke instead. But here’s the thing, many of the people who were once called politically correct for feigning progressivism have now ditched all that to instead call genuine progressives woke.
⁵ This isn’t as widely known as you might think because they only mention it when doing their mentalism routine. You can infer it however from their general stance of not lying to the audience about posessing genuine abilities that they in fact do not.
⁶ I distinctly remember them saying that they broke the rules of The Magic Circle but all the TV clips I could locate didn’t do this. This is also a branding thing, back when The Magic Circle was a well regarded organisation there was a degree of antibrand cachet to be earned by getting thrown out. Now that Penn and Teller are more famous than The Magic Circle amongst audiences, The Magic Circle gets antibrand cachet by refusing them membership, even though they regularly visit as guests, and every time they do the general membership cries out for them to be let in permanently. It’s kind of astounding how few magicians understand Kayfabe.
⁷ Okay so I can’t fully back this up because I’m not an avid listener. I know he occasionally does some magic content because the only bit of his show I ever watched was when he called out Jay Sankey for being a dickhead on Fool Us.
⁸ Al Bundy was a hero to schlubby husbands exasperated with their nuclear families, Alf Garnet played by a Jewish actor was loved by antisemites, Ali G made other white faux gangsters on council estates want to emulate him, Al Murray was seen by right wing nationalists as a management champion for their cause, and Weird Al Yankovic hits a little close to home because as a massive nerd I thought his song All About The Pentiums was an anthem for computer lovers, when in truth I fear it’s no different to his fat-suited songs about obesity and Amish Paradise. He just thought we were funny characters to write about.
⁹ But at least she must have delved into the details of how a real world ancient monotheistic culture of worship such as Judaism would reconcile the existence of actual magic derived not from God’s light but instead from arcane study and the weilding of man made artifacts, right¹⁰?
¹⁰ Nope.
¹¹ without being too cliché, there’s plenty of actively unproblematic I tropes woven in the works of Terry Pratchett alone, along with great designs from Paul Kidby who does the new art on the books. Failing that you can pick from Tolkein, Arthurian legend, The Worst Witch, Dungeons and Dragons, Doctor Strange, and probably hundreds of things I’m not even aware of.