Mailbag #127
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I know you said that you were interested in eventually checking out Josh’s new memorized deck work, and I was wondering if you’ve been following any of the initial reviews and impressions. The main area of contention being discussed on the Cafe is the fact that the stack can’t really be displayed face up. You’ve made clear your feelings about that inspectability of props for the casual performer, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how you feel about a memorized deck that can’t be casually displayed to be “random”.—FB
I wouldn’t leave Josh’s stack in a wide ribbon spread on the table for people to examine for very long.
But to be fair, in my decades of performing, the amount of times I’ve spread a deck of cards in a wide ribbon-spread to be examined is almost never. It’s not something I really do. I spread the cards from hand to hand. And when doing that, I would have zero issue with using Josh’s stack.
You know how people who don’t like rap or country or polka will say about songs in that genre, “These all sound alike!” That’s because, when you don’t have a familiarity with something, it all kind of blends together because you’re not accustomed to picking up on the nuances of that thing.
As magicians, we see an “obvious” pattern in these cards. Laypeople won’t. I only perform for non-magicians, so that’s all I care about.
Years ago, in our focus group testing, we tried to test how long you could leave a Si Stebbins set deck in front of people before they noticed anything about.
So a Si Stebbins deck was false shuffled.
Then spread between the magician’s hands face-up.
Then given to the spectator to look through while we said, “Take a look to make sure they’re well mixed.”
Then spread in a wide ribbon-spread along the table.
Then we would say, “Is that fair”
And finally, “Do you notice any pattern in the cards at all?”
This isn’t precisely what we did, because I don’t have the exact details of this test in front of me. But this is pretty close.
The question was, at what step along the way will they bust us? We would wait a beat at each step to give them a chance to question anything. (And they had been lectured that we wanted them to try and catch us out on things.)
I think we only tried this a couple dozen times because no one ever really noticed anything—not even the red/black pattern—until we specifically asked them to look for a pattern. And even then it wasn’t everyone who noticed it.
Mostly, people’s eyes just are absorbing a bunch of colors, letters, and numbers. I don’t think they’re really processing anything.
So, yes, I’m hypersensitive about inspectabiliy, but I’m not super concerned about people noticing patterns in the cards. Especially given the casual way I handle cards and perform.
I love the gift card crawl.
This might ruin it, but it’s an opportunity for a sort of unknown personal. When you get together, you add up the total value of all the gift cards, and it matches a prediction. Seems like something you could just drop in as you are getting ready to go on the crawl. You have all the cards, someone (you) wonders how much you have in total, somebody adds it up, it matches the numbers drawn by your nephew on a piece of paper on your fridge, that sort of thing. —PM
Yeah, the opportunity is there for something like that. I wouldn’t do it the first year, or else it will feel like that’s the reason why you organized this thing. Let the novelty of this type of interaction carry things for the first year or two. Then maybe introduce some ways to spice it up.
I just read your mini-essay on this topic. And not sure if you were aware, but Michael Close wrote a seminal essay on this topic in one of the Workers books, and his logic always bothered me. He basically contends, as does your friend, that it's NOT fun to be fooled because (I'm paraphrasing, but I recall something close to this) "If it was fun to be fooled, Richard Nixon would still be president."
I took issue with this, and mentioned it to Mike, and he wrote a clarification/modification to his position in his recent Paradigm Shift books, and he basically comes to a similar conclusion that you do. Anyway...I know your essays often break new ground and explore topics that have never been fully fleshed out before...so thought you might like to know about this.—JJ
Thanks for the reference. I assumed this was something that had been discussed in the literature (or, at least it should be… it’s like a foundational question of the art form). I didn’t remember Michael’s original essay, but I must have read it at one point (unless I only went through his Workers series on video 🤔).
I’ve been thinking more about this question. I sometimes think people come to conclusions like:
People don’t like to be fooled.
People just want to know secrets.
People think magic is corny.
And they tell themselves this because:
People don’t like to be fooled by them.
People just want to know their secrets.
People think their tricks are corny.
So instead of thinking of it as their own failure, it’s a failure of the art itself.
But I have bad news for you. In my experience, people love good magic. They like being fooled by it. While on some level they want to know the secret, they understand the value of the mystery as well. And they think really good magic is cool as hell.
Magic is often portrayed as lame, and magicians as dorks, in popular culture because there are a lot of dorks doing lame magic. This is not an issue with magic. It’s an issue with dorks.