Years ago I went on a course run by Wayne Goodman on how to work a restaurant residency, and the latter half of this was actually working a restaurant, and trying to put us in the kind of situations that may arise. For example he would tell us to work a table which, unbeknownst to us, he had visited a few minutes prior and told them to refuse a performance.
I never had to face this particular fate as the table he told to reject me was so keen to see me perform that they ignored him and eagerly asked me to continue.
One challenge he set however was to approach a table and not perform a single trick until he gave us a signal. In short, we had to use the time to build rapport. We all just used the opportunity to make small talk, explain that we are magicians, just sweat it out until we could finally do the one thing which we thought gave us value as human beings.
But it needn’t have been that way.
I have been a fan of Carissa Hendrix ever since she started the Shezam podcast with Kayla Drescher, but since then I’ve seen her develop her alter ego persona of Lucy Darling and she rapidly became one of my favorite performers. I love a good character act, and like Rob Zabrecky and John Van Der Put (Piff the Magic Dragon) she has managed to totally remake herself. Unlike those other two however she is very nearly unrecognizable in and out of character. She changes her demeanor, her voice, her mode of speech, her makeup, her hair and her outfit. It’s incredible. But this isn’t about that. This is about what she did next.
You see, the average character act, much like the average stage or parlour magician has a fixed set that they perform with a mostly firm script. They deviate very little from this script because stage time is precious and they have to fit everything in reliably every time. Like a factory process for entertainment. The problem with this is that in an increasingly connected world, building an audience pretty much relies on putting out snippets of your act as advertising. This was once responsible for the phenomenon of the TV comedy special, where a comedian would tour an act, record the final show and then sell it to TV before writing and touring a new show. As soon as the material goes on TV, its done. Everyone has seen it. If you’re not big enough to get on TV you just have to put your out on YouTube. Its a race to the bottom where you need to come up with new material, only to put it online so everyone already knows your act. This is particularly bad in the age of reels, shorts, and tiktoks.
Magicians, I would argue, have an even harder time in this system¹.
Comedians have found a way to work around this however. Look at comedians like Gianmarco Soresi and Matteo Lane. Their shorts are mostly clips of crowd work.
Crowded House
Crowd work, for those who don’t go to comedy shows, are not prewritten jokes. Rather, they are improvised moments entirely made up on the spot through audience interaction. Whereas many assume comedians only address the audience in retaliation to a heckle, with experience comedians learn to extend their acts and sharpen their funnybones by setting aside a portion of their time to directly speak to the audience, commenting on their appearance, asking about their jobs, hobbies, relationships. Mining the crowd for humour.
There are even comedians who have entire shows which are 100% crowd work. Matteo Lanes “Advice” specials are shows where he invites the audience to bring questions, approaching his show like an advice column, so he never performs the same show twice².
The question is, how do you apply this to magic? I tried to discuss this with my close personal friend Kieron The Mighty, and he said he’s been doing crowdwork for years, and that many others do it, but I think he misunderstood the level of crowd work I was talking about. Crowd work as performed by magicians is much like the way magicians use volunteers, they don’t really invite the audience to interact beyond answering a few closed questions, usually to either assist in remembering their name for the duration of an effect or in order to distract someone for necessary misdirection. There was a time where if I tried to picture magician crowd work I either thought of the camp insult comedy of Mel Mellors, making rapid fire subtle digs at the grooming or dress sense of the front row³ or the prop comedy of someone like Mike Hammer, for example asking an audience member to bring their chair to the stage and then sending them back without it⁴.
So lets talk about what Carissa Hendrix does differently, and why it is so special.
Lucy Darling
Lucy Darling feels like she shouldn’t exist in the real world. This is fine, because she doesn’t really exist in the real world. She’s a character out of time who only exists in a theatrical space where she holds court and maintains meticulous control. She has the vibe of a movie star who died of a valium overdose in the 40s Yet somehow, through the magic of live theatre, regular ordinary people can interact with her and she never breaks character.
There are other magicians who never break character, Rob Zabrecky comes to mind as one example who also feels out of time and out of place. But they all stick to the script, have minimal audience interactions beyond talking at volunteers. What sets Lucy aside is that she actively pursues conversations with the audience, interrogating the front row about their names, jobs, relationships, choice of drink, and butt stuff,just like a comedian doing crowd work⁵.
Now I’ve never seen her live but I have seen some of her routines in lectures and so I know that in this process of asking about their drinking and reading habits she is priming them for her participation in a think a drink and appearing book routines. This contrasts to how most magicians (myself included) obtain volunteers for such routines, which essentially involves asking blindly if someone will help them with the next trick.
I have never seen a magician literally give the stage to an audience member.
The result of this is that she can snip the humourous crowd interactions for her shorts and reels, allowing for better brand promotion etc. Initially I wasn’t sure whether this was done with artistic intent and just happened to produce social media content or if it was done for social media content and it just happened to be amazingly good theatre, until I watched this interview clip with Carissa out of character, dropping the most banger piece of theatrical magic theory this side of Eugene Burger. Seriously if you only click one link in this post, make it that one. At the time of writing, that interview was five years ago. No one that switched on to the world of art and theatre just lucks into a great performance. She has studied.
¹ There are three reasons why I think this is. Firstly magic as an artform simply works better in person, where there is no question of authenticity and where the audience cannot slow down and rewatch the tape to unravel any wonder they may have felt. Secondly creating a new act takes longer for magicians because as well as having to come up with a new script, narrative, theme, etc, we also need to learn or create new tricks and buy or make new props. Thirdly there are simply more places to work up new material for comedians. Comedians can attend open mic events, or just throw a new gag into their current act to test it out. Its hard to throw something into a magic act off the cuff, and it’s even harder to find a place where magicians can go on and do a tight five.
² Yes, some of the interactions can fall flat, so you might imagine the crowd work can’t possibly always be entertaining. The secret sauce to a lot of this crowd work is the inverse of the oft lauded heckle stopper lines. Whereas magicians are always looking for one-size-fits-all gags which can stop a heckler in their tracks and win the audience back. Crowd workers have prewritten lines which rather than flattening a bad interaction, can be used as a last resort to get a laugh from an interaction which is going nowhere. These are not included in online crowd work clips because they may be repeated in future. Typically they resort to meta commentary on the value of the interaction itself, and self deprecation to excuse the downtime and get a laugh in the process. After this they can just move on to someone else in the audience, reroll the dice.
³ This material is mostly pre writtten and quite repetitive, particularly when he compared the Blackpool Magic Convention Gala Show three years in a row.
⁴ This probably sounds insane, and it was, but you have to belive me when I say it works. Mike Hammer is the only magician I know who actively advertises his shows adversarial relationship with the audience, which is sad, mostly because he is not the only magician I can think of who has an adversarial relationship with the audience.
⁵ I recognise that most of the clips here cover multiple subjects, so linking them to specific themes is probably a little unfair. I just wanted to include as many clips of her as possible to get the immaculate vibes across.
