How to be the Famous Magician in Your Community

Writing my book, Magic for the Rest of Us, was a surprisingly cathartic experience. It gave me the opportunity to spend six weeks really working through a lot of thoughts on magic.

There's one line of thinking in the book that I really love about how dedicated hobbyist magicians actually have far more in common with famous magicians than they do with working magicians.

We tend to think about the three main types of magicians as though they are placed upon one line from left to right. Hobbyist magicians are on one side, famous magicians are on the other, and working pros are in the middle of the two.

In actual fact, this line is more like a circle, with famous magicians connecting directly with dedicated hobbyists.

While working pros have to worry about things like instant resets and pocket space, famous magicians and hobbyists do not.

While working pros rarely have 24/7 access to venues and the opportunity to use anyone as an accomplice, famous magicians and hobbyists can.

While working pros are often restricted to how long they can wait between a setup and a reveal, famous magicians and hobbyists are not.

While working pros will find it difficult to personalize tricks to every spectator, famous magicians and hobbyists almost always can.  

If there's one lesson I'd like readers to take away from reading my book, it's that they should strive to be the famous magician in their community.

This is less about their celebrity status and more about their ability to take their time, be generous, and care about the people they perform for.

It doesn't take much to be the famous magician in your community.

Send Ahead

In the book, I write about how much more exciting it was for my grandfather to show me his magic tricks immediately following the excitement of going into the attic to retreive them.

This got me thinking about how much the lead-up to magic matters.

When I work on well-run TV magic shows, I pay great care and attention to "warming up" the spectators.

There's a casting process, and even then, we'll be really delicate when they arrive to choreograph where they'll be and for how long before we film with them. Often, on TV magic shows, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the spectators are the talent and not the magician. It's often the magician with the worse dressing room or, the less safe route to set.

If you are a grandparent reading this article, imagine how excited your grandkids might be to receive a mystery parcel a few days before your arrival.

You took the time to wrap it carefully and included a handwritten note. On it, you ask your grandkids to keep the box's contents in a safe place and to keep an eye on it until you get there and show them a trick in the coming days.

What's inside the package? Well, it's what appears to be a regular deck of cards. But you've managed to punch a hold in the top left corner of every card and in the box itself. Threaded through the hole is a combination lock – keeping the cards inside of the box and creating a visually interesting item.

Can you imagine what the grandkids would act like when you arrive days later? Would they have the locked deck in their hands as you walk to the door? Would it be placed somewhere secure in one of their bedrooms, waiting to be retrieved?

The deck itself is, in fact, an Invisible Deck. This means that once unlocked and removed from the box, you can spread the cards to reveal one card reversed in the deck – the one they freely name.

You have taken a simple trick, but by applying the same thinking famous magicians and their teams of consultants do for TV, you elevated what could have easily been just another card trick to one the grandkids will remember for years.

Card Through Window

I'm not one to perform magic often. My skill set is in writing, not in performing. For the most part, I do a good job of politely avoiding the need to perform a trick. But, when you're the kid in your small town who left to go work for Dynamo, people ask to see tricks when you go home.

Over the years, I've found that working with accomplices helps me tremendously.

There are perhaps several reasons for this:

• I've spent plenty of time seeing famous magicians perform at gigs with accomplices helping them perform more impossible magic.

• Relying on an accomplice takes a lot of pressure away from the performer, who can invest their efforts in more important things.

• Asking someone to be an accomplice is perhaps the best way to deal with an annoying spectator.

We all have that one friend in a large group who doesn't enjoy the magic or pesters all of us to find out how the trick is done. Surprisingly, these people end up being some of the best accomplices out there. People rarely expect the involvement of the person who usually criticizes magic, and I often find their criticism actually comes from their lack of involvement in the method side of things.

There are probably three friends who I have asked to be an accomplice within my friend group at home – I'm 99% sure they all believe they're the only friend ever to be asked to help me with the method to a trick.

I will say now that the best use of an accomplice is to hook them up with a smoke device. Then, perform a trick that involves a hero spectator holding something like a card in their hands. Ask all of the friend group to put their hands above and on top of the hero spectators' hands, too. You will never quite imagine how strong the reaction will be when one set of those hands activates the smoke device, and the smoke pours out from all your friend's hands.

There are lots of interesting uses for accomplices. They're great at inputting things for reveals or sending you secret messages. But when I try to recall the best trick to use an accomplice with, it is likely Card Through Window.

I say this because although many have tried to come up with stronger methods, there simply isn't anything better than secretly handing off the signed card to the accomplice to go and stick to the glass window outside of the home/venue.

The obvious way to do this is to palm off the signed card, and as the hero spectator shuffles the deck, you hand off the card to your accomplice behind your back.

Of course, this isn't always possible, depending on the size of the room/crowd. And I think the method of handing it off is obvious in the worst of ways. Sometimes, an obvious method is the best method if it feels so obvious that there's no way it could be the method – but handing off a card behind your back to an accomplice feels obvious and realistically possible.

I've been toying with an idea for handing off cards to accomplices which I'll share now. I'm very much ready for someone to inform me that someone else has come up with it, too. Very exciting; the fact I had this idea proves that anyone else could.

I'm going to explain this quite linearly and concisely, but in an ideal world, you would want to perform the hand-off as part of a trick, rather than in the way of a process as described below.

1. A spectator chooses and signs a card.

2. The signed card is returned to the deck.

3. The deck is shuffled.

4. To prove how difficult it would be to find their card, you ask three friends to choose cards from the deck, too.

5. You ask if any of them chose the signed card – they did not.

6. The three cards are returned to the deck.

7. The deck is then shuffled by the hero spectator.

8. When they're satisfied with the shuffle, you take back the deck.

9. You throw the cards at the window behind your friends.

10. One card penetrates the glass; it's the signed card.

In step three, you perform a false shuffle and keep control of where the card is located in the deck. In step four, you perform the easiest classic force of your life when the third friend (your accomplice) chooses a card (the signed card). Your accomplice already has an extra card that matches the deck you're performing with – they switch this card for the signed card as everyone looks at the card the first and second friends randomly chose. Finally, in step six, the accomplice hands back the non-signed card and then slips away to place the signed card on the glass outside.

Performing it in this way, you can stand with no spectators at your side or behind you. I'm imagining a group of friends all watching you with the window behind them. The fact that no one was ever near you enhances the illusion.

What I like about this method of hand off is that there is nothing secretive about the hand-off itself – you are quite literally handing them the signed card.

It's the hands-off hand-off.