Theory

Here is my 101% objective, 4-point originality scale. I expect everyone to strive to go “up the ladder.”

1. Every week, you get an email from Penguin or Vanishing Inc about the latest self working trick that is guaranteed to turn your audience into smithereens and requires no sleight of hand. You buy it and add it to your show with a bunch of other purchased effects.
2. You take your favorite effects and retheme them with edgy patter and add some sex jokes.
3. You read a bunch of magic books, watch shows and reviews, and do research into the canon of magic. You find interesting effects and look for ways to improve the handling. You make the concious decision to simplify or embiggen certain tricks.
4. You create original magic for your show.

If you’ve read this blog for a while, you may think that I have a lot of disdain for the level ones. The truth is, magic isn’t known to be a get-rich-quick career so most people who do it actually do enjoy the craft.

Sometimes people ask me whether magic shows are still interesting for me even though I know how its all done.

I have to politely (because I live in the real world) correct them and say that I’m not omniscient and I don’t actually know how a lot of magic is done. Especially that of higher caliber magicians. (Which may be an tautology because the better magicians tend to do better magic. (Which may not be a tautology because better magic doesn’t necessarily mean more fooling.))

If you’ve ever been to a concert before, you may have recieved a program. It’s basically a small booklet that contains the list of music that will be played.

Consider having a program for your magic show. Souveniers are always fun and it helps the audience remember the show. It’s also a good way to provide historical context behind the magic we do without taking up any show time.

If you’re worried about people looking up the methods to your tricks, don’t be. You should be more worried that they’ll forget everything and all the time and effort you’ve invested into this accursed craft is for nought and your life has been nothing more than a brief flash of light in a dark galaxy.

The latest season of Daredevil is pretty good and has a great magic moment. I’m not sure if this season counts as the fourth season of the Daredevil series or if it is its own thing that just happens to be continuing the previous story. The scene I’ll be discussing takes place in the third episode. Matt’s team needs to bring a witness to the courthouse. The opposing team is trying to prevent this at all costs.

Die Hard (1988) is a classic action movie. Go watch it if you haven’t already seen it. Otherwise this post won’t make sense. There’s a surprisingly long section on wikipedia discussing the motifs in the movie. It touches on issues of masculinity, corporations, and xenophobia, all of which are too complex to discuss on this blog.

This post will focus on the scene where the protagonist John McClane approaches the main villain Hans Gruber who has taken Holly, McClane’s ex-wife as a hostage. There’s been plenty of action movies which end with the villain taking a person hostage such as True Lies (1994) and Air Force One (1997) but what makes Die Hard worthy of discussion on this blog is how this scene relates to principles of magic.

Real magic doesn’t exist. Therefore, every magical effect has a flaw. A common argument people make when they want to denigrate an effect is to focus soley on the flaw.

Discussing the method to a trick isn’t inherently bad. In fact, it is necessary to understand how practical the trick is and whether it fits in the environment you’re working in.

The issue is when people use the existence of the flaw as a thought terminating cliche. An example argument tends to go like “This trick uses a gimmicked device. The gimmick is obvious. Therefore this is a bad trick.”