Mailbag #92

[W]ho was the one who thought merely cutting a chosen card to the top is obvious, yet when you do a double undercut the technique suddenly becomes invisible? —ML

It’s a fair question, although I don’t think anyone ever thought it was “invisible,” they just thought it was somewhat less obvious than cutting directly back to the same location.

When we tested controls, we found that the only way to really make people think a card was genuinely lost in the deck was to use a control that allowed them to mix the cards in some manner. Otherwise, you’re just kind of kidding yourself.

My go-to control these days is to cull the card to the bottom and either cop it (if I’m standing) or lap it (if I’m sitting) or drop it over the side of the pool (if I’m swimming).

---

 LOL......I do [Tequila Hustler] with a cigar cutter shaped like a bullet and tell spec he is suspect in a murder, then go thru the routine.   I had NEVER thought of doing it as a sexual hustle, but I tried it and it was hilarious!!  My wife, who normally rolls her eyes at stuff, suddenly became verrrrrrrrrrrrry interested, if you catch my drift. —A

Hopefully you had her rolling her eyes in a different way.

It’s funny because there are a lot of 13-year-old boys who get into magic and think it’s going to impress a girl and make her fall for him. Most of them grow out of that notion. But they overcorrect and think that magic can’t be flirty or sexy. They go so far as to think women don’t like magic.

If you have the emotional intelligence to be able to identify the right situations, the right people, and the right tricks—magic can be a huge means of seductive connection with people. I don’t write too much about it here because those of you who know, already know. And for those who don’t, I don’t really trust you to wield that power responsibly.

I do have a book on the subject partially written. My big dilemma is trying to think how to get it in the hands of non-creeps.

---

Do you belong to any magic subscription sites? I’ve subscribed to half a dozen or so and I’m not sure it’s a good use of my money.

Joel Dickinson’s Patreon has some good stuff. He’s started hosting lectures now which is what keeps me subscribed. I miss the Penguin Lectures.

Ben Earl’s “Family” subscription service has some nice stuff but delves into a lot of subjects and moves I’m not really interested in.

The Netrix is not for me at all. I like a lot of Craig’s individual releases but the stuff here doesn’t do it for me.

Fiver Friday by Ollie Mealing - I got in on this when it was cheap and I feel it’s been worth it. I probably wouldn’t pay the price it’s at now though.

Magic Stream - This is Ellusionist’s streaming service. It’s not too bad. But it mostly seems like a dumping ground for their lower tier effects.

Are you a part of any subscription services that you’d recommend? I have a hard time quitting them because I keep thinking the NEXT release will be the one I really want to have. —AS

The only thing close to a subscription service that I would recommend without reservation is a digital subscription to Genii magazine.

In general, most all of these subscription services are bad deals.

I’ll look at one that I like: Christian Grace’s Magic Monthly. This costs about 17 dollars a month and you get two tricks each moths. So… $8.50 per trick.

That’s a pretty good deal on a per-trick average. Your average instant download effect is maybe $10-$15.

But, of course, you get to choose the tricks you want when you’re buying an instant download.

Here you’re blindly paying $8.50 per random trick which you may or may not do. It might not even be a premise you’re interested in.

Perhaps you’ll want to do one out of every five tricks Chris releases on his site. Well, then you’re paying about $42 per trick you like. If it’s more like one out of 10, then you’re paying $85 per trick that you’ll be doing. That’s not a great deal. But I still support Christian’s site.

I don’t think it’s smart to view these subscription sites as you panning for gold; paying your monthly subscription fee and just hoping to find a nugget of something valuable. That’s going to be disappointing in the long run. The very best things these people create are most likely not going to be uploaded on their subscription service.

I think it’s better to think of these subscription services as a way for you to be a benefactor to the creators that you like. Don’t think of it as “buying tricks.” Ask yourself, “Would I be genuinely upset if this person stopped creating magic?” There are a lot of magicians I like, but it wouldn’t bother me too much if they quit magic to manage a garden center. But for the few magicians I’m really into, I definitely want to take whatever opportunity I can to support their work. Just the act of supporting their work brings me pleasure.

Thinking of it this way makes me less inclined to pay for many subscription-based magic services. But much more content with the ones that I do.

Dustings #87

I received this email a few hours ago…

A guy pausing his wedding ceremony to do a magic trick is a bad enough idea in the first place. I’m sure his wife was like…

But look, if you’re going to stop your vows to shine the spotlight on yourself for a bit in order to do a Dan Harlan trick, I recommend going full-trainwreck and doing Fart-Toon.

---

Here’s a good resource for anyone who is a magic wallet afficionado or collector, or just buy-curious and want to do some research with a lot of options in the same place. It’s chamberofwallets.com and it has information on over 220 magic wallets.

---

If you have issue #9 of the Love Letters newsletter, this is a good idea from Jonathan FC in regards to the variation on the ACAAN trick that opens that issue. (It won’t make sense if you don’t have that.)

Just a small touch for this effect i thought you would like.

I still havent performed it but i like the look of your version.

For 1 of the 4 outs... put the deck inside the box of the deck you will be using during the performance. Leave your "touching" deck out on top of this full box. And make sure the deck inside the box is a different color deck (both to the box and the deck in use)

I think thats a nice out for the effect. And it still feels inevitable.

---

Another email I received recently…

Oooohhh… how Joshua Jay closes his show? I always assumed it was something like this…

A Critical Examination of the MindReader Trailer

A new Christian evangelical movie is out called MindReader. Let’s watch the trailer to see what type of insights we can get into the film.

It opens with a shot of a marquee for The Great Dexter.

The movie takes place in 1974. Was anyone still calling themselves “The Great ____” at this point in time? That seems like something that was at least half a century out of vogue. Someone should bring that back. I miss the days when magicians were like, “Damn. If I don’t describe myself with an adjective, someone else is going to choose one for me. And I’m probably not going to like that one at all.” It’s a good technique because it turns any overt criticism into a mixed message at the very worst. “Joshua Jay the Magnificent sucks shit.” Well… which is it?

We then get a clip of Dexter’s show. It seems like his whole schtick is getting people to write things down on pads and then he tells them what they wrote on the pad.

That’s a lot of pad-based magic. He then asks the audience, “Please, show us your pads.” A line shared by both Dexter the Great and Dexter the Menophiliac.

We also get a peek at Dexter’s promotional material,

This is, of course, a direct rip-off of the Alexander tag line.

I’m a big believer in intellectual property and I feel like Dexter should have to change his to “The Man Who Also Knows” or “One of At Least Two Men Who Know.”

We are then given a surprisingly accurate seeming review of the show as being a “boring routine at a two-bit theater.”

But then we learn that this “boring routine” is “packing out” the theater every time they put on a show.

That makes the opening marquee more confusing to me. If he’s so popular, why is he part of a variety show? This is 1974. It’s not vaudeville. This show seems wildly out of place. I mean in 1974 people were going to the theater to see Godfather II and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They weren’t going to variety shows featuring The Great Dexter, a puppet act, a singer, and comedy xylophonist Professor Lamberti.

As for our main character, Dexter himself is part Jesus Christ and part Mitch Hedburg.

He closes his show by saying, “My name is Dexter and I don’t really do magic, I just read minds.” Which doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. They put it in the trailer as if it’s somehow meaningful, but I don’t really get it. If he closed his show by saying, “I don’t really do magic, I just read pads,” that would at least feel somewhat more accurate.

Watching the rest of the trailer, I’m not sure exactly what is going on in the movie. It seems like the local magic association is trying to get Dexter’s show taken down because… they can’t figure out his tricks or something? Or they think his shitty mind reading is going to make their magic irrelevant or something like that? I’m not sure.

They might be right, given that this—hilariously—is the shot used to illustrate the local magic association.

I genuinely think Dexter is maybe supposed to be a proxy for Jesus? 🤷‍♂️ I really have no idea. This is a movie that’s being shown one theater at a time at the moment. So I’m going to have to track down a showing if I want to fully understand it. The only thing it says on the movie’s website is:

“The year is 1974 and The Great Dexter is the closing act in a variety show at The Temple Theatre. His amazing mindreading act fools everyone, including the local magicians’ association. As Dexter’s popularity grows, so does the association’s jealousy as they try to shut his act down and figure out how it’s done.”

Other than that, there’s not much to go on. The site has a “gallery” page, but is it technically a “gallery” if it only has one picture?

Beyond the one-picture-gallery there’s little more besides the trailer on the movie’s site. Well, there’s a link to get a signed picture of the actor who plays Dexter at ChristianMovies.com. And it was on that site I also learned about one of the diretor’s other Christian films. I didn’t look into this one, but the title sounds like it could be a look at one of the church’s darker periods and the forcible oral sodomy of so many young altar boys.

The Limits of Visual Magic: Part Three

Before I continue in this series, I should probably make clear a differentiation that might not be obvious.

In this series of posts, I’m thinking about tricks where the magic happens visibly. A card that changes into another card with no cover is an example of that.

But there are many effects that register with an audience through their eyes that I’m not counting as “visual magic.” For example, if I take a bottle and put it in a paper bag and then scrunch up the paper bag, the audience is seeing that magic take place. But they’re not seeing the magic moment itself happening visually. They’re not literally seeing the bottle dematerialize. They saw a bottle placed in a bag. Then they saw the bag get crunched up. The magic happened somewhere between those moments. Just like some of the test groups saw the face of the card, then the face was turned away from them, and it was a different card when it was turned around. That’s magic that they perceive with their eyes (as opposed to, like, mentalism or something) but it’s not what I mean when I talk about “visual magic.”

That’s probably clear, but I just wanted to get that distinction on the record.

---

In the last post, I wrote about testing a visual card change. When we re-tested the visual card change and allowed it to be examinable at the end, the scores for how “impossible/amazing” the trick was increased significantly. But the score for their enjoyment of the trick didn’t go up that much.

In previous testing that we did on examinability, when the “impossibility” score went up, the “enjoyment” score went up similarly.

[You can’t really compare the raw numbers between these two tests because they happened five years apart and we had different instructions and a different scale that people were rating on back then. But you can make assumptions based on the percentage changes in the scores.]

In that testing, we performed a color-changing deck routine, a coin routine (where three copper changed into three silver (or vice-versa—who knows, who cares)), and a Rubik’s cube effect where a cube instantaneously solved itself.

In that old post, I wrote:

While I had assumed being able to take a look at the object of a magic effect would make the trick more powerful, I was a little surprised by the magnitude of the difference. But another surprise came when my friend looked at the scores given for "overall enjoyment." When comparing the examined tricks to the non-examined tricks, he found that examination increased the overall enjoyment score by almost 25% on average.

I asked my friend to break down the per-trick increase of enjoyment that made up that 25% on average.

The card trick went up 33%
The coin trick went up 28%
The Rubik’s cube trick went up 14%

Here I saw, again, that the trick where the magic happened visually (the Rubik’s cube effect) did not have a correspondingly big increase in the enjoyment factor, even when impossibility increased significantly. (For that trick, the impossibility score more than doubled.)

Ignore the “examinability” aspect here because that’s a different subject and doesn’t really play into the conclusion I was coming to, which is this:

I think there is a limit to how much audience’s can appreciate magic that happens visibly.

This is why the enjoyment scores for the visible tricks we tested were the least impacted by increased impossibility scores.

And while I don’t personally quantify “enjoyment” when I perform, I do quantify the memorability of a trick, as talked about in this post. That is, I keep track of how long after a trick the person I perform for still talks about it or mentions it. And that’s probably fairly comparable to enjoyment.

When I scanned through my data for “memorability” I saw that most of the highly visual tricks I did had little to no resonance. People rarely brought them back up again.

Here is my theory:

500 years ago, when you pulled off the chicken’s head (that’s not a euphemism for masturbation) and re-attached it, I think people said, “That was some kind of trick or this man is a genuine wizard.”

These days, the “wizard” thing is off the table. So it’s just. “That was some kind of trick.” In other words, “There’s some way of making it look like you pull off and reattach a chicken’s head that I don’t understand.” And at this time in the arc of humanity, people are just much more comfortable with the idea that they don’t know how something happened. Through all our waking hours we are surrounded by technology that we don’t understand. So just seeing something that you can’t explain isn’t the experience that it was 500 years ago. Or even 50 years ago.

The impossible has lost its novelty.

When they see a card that changes visibly in front of their faces, they pretty much have a grasp on the nature of the experience: “This is a magic trick and I don’t know how it’s done.” I think they appreciate it visually, but I think it’s limited in the enjoyment they can take from it.

But when the card changes in an implied way, they have less of an understanding of what they just saw. Did the card itself change? Or is there some possible way it could be secretly switched?

And if you add more of a narrative on top of the change—maybe you say it’s part of something you’re practicing to cheat at a poker game later; or you say the card never changed, you actually got them to misremember the card they saw—then you can create even more fuzziness around the nature of what they just experienced.

And I think that “fuzziness” is part of what people appreciate or hold onto most from a magic trick these days. They don’t just want to see the impossible, they want to experience the mysterious.

Impossible ≠ Mysterious

An impossible visual trick is just another one of the many things they don’t understand.

One final piece of evidence I have for this comes from the “memorability tracking” I’ve done for almost six years now.

A lot of the quick, visual tricks I have in my repertoire are ones that I often perform in the Distracted Artist style. That is, I perform them on the offbeat, as if unintentionally. And then there are times when I perform them in a more traditional style. And the memorability scores for the Distracted Artist performances far exceed the traditional ones. Why should that be? In one case I say, “Watch,” and I ball up my napkin and make it vanish. In the other, I wipe my face after the meal, ball up my napkin, and make it vanish without paying it any attention. Then, when my friend comments on it I say, “Oh did I make it vanish? Oh yeah, I guess so. It’s an old habit. Muscle memory.” In theory, you might expect the performance where they’re focusing on the napkin and watching it disappear would be more memorable than the one where the trick happens incidentally. But that’s not the case. The Distracted Artist performance makes the nature of what they just saw a mystery. And that’s the element that seems to stay with people.

I believe the tricks that really resonate with people are not the ones where they’re just saying, “How did he do that?” It’s the ones where they’re saying, “What exactly just happened?”

When a trick is too visual, it removes the “what” aspect and leaves only the “how.”

The Instant Replay Switch: An Everydayness Technique

An “Everydayness Technique” is a concept I first mentioned in this post. The idea is to use natural, everyday actions to hide magic techniques.

We can see this in some professional magic scenarios. For example, instead of twirling a wand (a theatrical and conspicuous action) in order to divert attention from a secret action, the magician might push his glasses up the bridge of his nose. That movement will likely still draw the eye and create the necessary misdirection, but it is so commonplace that it won’t draw attention to itself and it will be forgotten.

As amateur magicians, performing casually in social settings, we can take more advantage of these types of everyday actions because the scope of things you might do while sitting with your friend on the couch is so much greater than the scope of things you might do standing on stage or performing for wedding guests. You have a much greater library of actions that don’t seem out of place.

The Instant Replay Switch is ideal for when you have an item at the end of a visual piece of magic that cannot be examined without a switch.

Here’s how it works.

Let’s imagine you’re showing someone a cigarette through quarter trick.

You ask your friend to take out their phone and record something for you. You have a new trick you’re working on and you want to get a good look at it from an audience’s perspective.

You have the cigarette thru quarter gimmick in your right-hand finger palm. You ask your friend for a cigarette and a quarter. (Most people don’t have either of those things on them. But knowing you, and the trash you hang out with, your buddies probably all sell loose cigarettes for pocket change outside of the liquor store. So your friend has no problem lending you these items.)

You take the cigarette and quarter in your left hand.

You take a few steps back and tell your friend to get ready to record a video on his phone.

As he turns on his phone and gets to the camera, you just drop his quarter in your left pants pocket.

You have him record you as you push the cigarette through the quarter.

Now you pause. “Did you get that?” you ask. “Let me see.”

Now you go over and stand side by side with your friend. You are on their left. As they play the video for you, your left hand with the gimmick goes into your pocket and switches it for the normal quarter.

Right after the cigarette penetrates the quarter in the video you say, “Hold on, let me see that.” And you hand them the cigarette and the quarter so you can take the phone from them. You’re not saying, “examine these.” You just freeing up your hands to take and operate the phone. Then you scrub through the video a couple of times while they are holding this fully examinable cigarette and quarter.

Some of you will immediately get this. Some of you might think, “Wait, how could this be a better technique than simply doing a false transfer of the gimmick for a normal quarter at the end and then handing the normal quarter to them?”

I’ll tell you. Here’s what we’re trying to avoid. We’re trying to avoid the moment where there is a peak level of suspicion on the coin and we do anything other than hand that coin to them directly. In a normal cig-thru-quarter performance, the cigarette goes through the quarter and people are thinking, “Wait… let me see that coin.” And what normally happens after that is the magician puts the coin away or he puts the coin in his other hand and then hands it to the person. Neither of these are good options. What they want is for you to hand that quarter directly to them. The moment you do something other than that (without a good reason) that trips their suspicion.

What we’re doing with this switch is giving them something to do other than just be suspicious. At the end of the trick, they will still be curious about the quarter. But handing them the quarter at this point is no longer the most obvious thing to do. First off, they have a phone in their hand and they’re recording. Do you want them to stop or keep filming? And now you’re asking to take a look at the video. So their mind is occupied with something other than: “I need to see the quarter.”

Not only that, but they weren’t really your “audience” here. They were helping you out with something. For an audience, it makes sense to prioritize handing them the quarter to examine. But with this dynamic (where their role is “cameraman”), not immediately handing them the quarter doesn’t seem as unusual. You’re never actually denying them the thing they want most in the moment.

What I’m trying to avoid is any moment that rings false. There’s no action in this choreography that doesn’t feel totally normal. It’s not that using this particular switch will completely prevent them from considering there was a switch. But what it does is prevent them from being able to identify one moment where they feel the switch happened. If they feel they know when the switch happened, then that means they feel they know a switch happened. But if everything flows cleanly and feels natural, then there never is that one moment when the switch must have occurred. And therefore their certainty that it did occur is lessened.

Mailbag #91

Curious to hear your thoughts on this:

Feels like your wheelhouse-ish. —MJ

✿✿✿

I’m really interested in Chris Rawlin’s new effect Predictable. […]

Were you a part of this release? I assume so. But I don’t want to support it if he didn’t get your okay first. —NL

✿✿✿

Another one for the “Jerx Did It First” list. I’m sure you’re hearing this a lot but Chris Rawlins has ripped off your trick and produced it as a stand alone item. […] I do your version all the time and this feels like a step backwards to me. (Sorry if you were involved in this or if you’re actually Chris Rawlins.) —EV

These are representative of a bunch of emails I received over the break. Emails that fell into one of three categories:

1. “This looks like something you would like.”

2. “Are you involved with this release?”

3. “You got ripped off.”

In my most recent book which came out in 2022, I had a trick called, “Kill 100 Strangers or Kill 1 Loved One.” The trick reframed Out of This World as a demonstration not of the spectator’s ability to separate red and black cards but of your ability to anticipate or know your spectator’s preferences through a series of either/or questions.

So to answer these questions:

1. Yes, it does look like something I’d like.

2. No, I wasn’t involved with the release.

3. No, I don’t think it’s a rip-off. Chris emailed me after the last book came out to tell me he had a similar idea in the works and showed me some of his early prototypes. And I told him at the time I had no issue with him moving forward with the idea.

While the tricks are quite similar in the story that they tell, his is different enough in prop and method that even if he had come to me saying he was directly inspired to produce this after reading my effect, I still wouldn’t have had an issue with it. So I certainly have no problem with anyone supporting this release and I’m sure I’ll get one myself

---

I bought the Chronoforce app last week[…]

primarily because I liked the idea of having a Lotto Prediction trick that I could have on me at all times.

However, the first two times I performed the trick (which were also the ONLY two times I performed the trick) they guessed the method. Once was for a group of people at work and another time for people in my church group.

What do you think of this app? Is there a way to disguise it better do you think? —BP

I am very intrigued by this app. I’ll definitely be picking it up and trying out some ideas I have with it (which, if they work out, I’ll include in a future newsletter).

I can sort of see why the lotto prediction effect could be a bit transparent to some audiences for the following reasons:

1. There is a disconnect between their actions and the “chosen” numbers. They’re tapping the screen and then seeing a number in the milliseconds place. This is not going to give the same level of conviction as a lotto routine where they are openly choosing numbers themselves. It’s even less conviction than if they were rolling dice to get a number or pulling ping-pong balls. Because at least those actions are in the physical world. So some spectators are going to inherently “feel” this disconnect.

2. You’re repeating that same thing (“stop the stopwatch and we’ll look at the numbers in the millisecond position”) multiple times. And when you do anything multiple times, you magnify the weaknesses. Here you’re magnifying the fact that the stopwatch itself is doing a lot of the heavy lifting insofar as picking these “random” numbers goes. You’re focusing more attention on that than you would be if you only used it once.

3. You’re performing for groups. I don’t think this lotto prediction is a great trick for a group of people. The secret to the trick (that the stopwatch is doing the work) is not a secret that you can really disguise via the strength of your performance. The stopwatch is clearly essential to the effect. So you’re really just hoping that the concept of “trick stopwatch” doesn’t occur to them. But let’s say 10% of people come to that conclusion. When performed one-on-one, you have a 90% success rate. But when performed for a group of six people, the likelihood that at least one of them has this idea is about 50%. And that one person will possibly (perhaps likely) spoil it for the rest of the group. So your 90% success rate one-on-one becomes a 50% success rate when performed for a group.

Again, I’m not saying it’s a bad app. I think it looks great and I plan on testing out some ideas with it. I’m just pointing out some of the potential weaknesses of the lotto prediction effect.

I think those particular issues are more specific to this usage of the app (the lotto prediction) than other tricks you could do with it that place less of a repeated focus on the app. So I would steer towards the effects with this that didn’t use the same feature over and over. And I would be more likely to use the feature that allows all the digits to add up to the force number, rather than just the numbers in the milliseconds place. Then at least they know that a direct result of their choice (“I intentionally stopped at 13 seconds”) is playing a part in final number. That would be less transparent, in my opinion.

The Limits of Visual Magic: Part Two

Okay, so picking up where we left off yesterday.

We have the card that changes a couple of times—either visually or in an implied fashion.

The testing we did gave slightly higher scores for both impossibility and enjoyment for the implied change rather than the visual change.

My feeling was that when something happens that is that visual, a spectator’s mind has nowhere else to go besides: “I guess there’s something funny about that card.”

I don’t like the “Too Perfect Theory” mainly because the name is so inaccurate. Every effect people use to illustrate this theory has one big glaring weakness. It should really be called the “One Big Glaring Weakness Theory.”

If a cop pulls me over looking for a dead body in my car, and I say, “You can look everywhere except my trunk,” that’s not The Perfect Crime. That’s just me not accounting for the most obvious solution.

That’s usually what happens with tricks that people label as Too Perfect—there’s an obvious solution the performer has accounted for. Your first job as a magician is to eliminate those possibilities. That’s not a problem with the trick. That’s a problem with the performer.

So what happens if we account for the “trick card” explanation in the visual card change? How would that affect the spectator’s perceived impossibility and enjoyment of the effect? And how would we even go about eliminating the “trick card” explanation?

Well, to explain that, you need to have an understanding of the layout of the performing setting during the testing.

The testing was done for five participants at a time, around a circular table, with the performer a few steps back from the table.

So, in performance, the card would change once, then again, then the performer would step up to the table and slide the card to the person at position three to examine. Then it would be passed around the table for everyone to look at.

The reason this clearly gimmicked card could be examined is because the person at position #3 was not another random focus group participant. They were also a magician who would switch in an examinable card in the process of sliding the card off the table. But they sat through the entire testing, playing the part of another spectator (and helped out secretly with a couple of other aspects of the performance as well).

We did five rounds of this testing, performing for 20 people in total.

With the added element of the card being examinable at the end, the “Impossibility Score” rose from 6.8 (when we tested it as a non-examinable trick) to 8.9. This is a huge rise, but not surprising to me. We had tested “examinability” in the past and seen that it had a significant impact on how impossible audiences would find an effect.

The more intriguing thing to me was the other number—the enjoyment score for the effect.

With the unexamined visual card change, the enjoyment score was 6.2.

With the examined visual card change, the enjoyment score was 6.5.

So it went up a little, but not significantly. I was surprised by this because in the previous examinability testing we did (linked above) when the impossibility score rose significantly, the enjoyment score rose significantly as well (on average).

Why didn’t this trick have a similar boost?

That question led me to re-examine some old testing results. The conclusions I drew from that re-examination and how it’s affected some of my thinking in regard to magic will appear in the final post in this series next week.