I Hate When Magicians Do This...

Oh, it’s time for a rant. As a professional magic writer (yes, I’m equally amazed it’s my job), I must tell you there’s one thing magicians do that upsets me more than you can imagine. They do it ALL the time—I don’t know why, but they do, and it pains me every time.

My close magic friends know how much this upsets me. They’ll send me clips of magicians doing this to wind me up. At Blackpool Magic Convention this year, one of the illusionists did what I’m about to describe, and my friend Jacob, AND HIS NON-MAGICIAN GIRLFRIEND, both turned to see my reaction because they knew how much it would wind me up.

I’m in Montreal this week and not feeling my best, so I decided this week was finally the time to write a brief rant about the one thing magicians do that annoys me more than anything.

I can only describe the offense as a way to waste all of our time as an audience. It’s terrible writing, and it undoes everything that came before it. One version of it happens often and is the easiest to describe — I’ll start with this.

Imagine a stage illusionist performing an impossible illusion, like sawing someone in half. A second person is secretly inside the illusion box to accomplish the trick. Then after the magician finishes the trick and the person is back together, they choose to make a second person magically appear from the illusion box.

They do this because they can. There’s no reason beyond the fact that they can. The problem is that by doing so, they undo all their earlier efforts and waste all of our time. Now that we know a second person can appear inside the box (or was in there the whole time), the trick is considerably less spectacular.

Illusionists do this all the time, and it’s not limited to sawing in half illusions.

Magicians do this too — they’ll make an object vanish and appear somewhere else and then suddenly decide to duplicate the object magically. The transportation effect becomes less impressive if you’re magically duplicating objects.

You need to ask yourself what is the trick you’re performing and focus everything on enhancing that trick. A lot of the time, magicians will do something because they can and not because they should.

The biggest offender for stage and close-up magicians is the “undoing prediction.” These drive me insane. Imagine a magician is going to read your mind. They spend several moments struggling to figure out what you’re thinking, perhaps reading your body cues or getting you to count in your head. Then, after all this reasonably believable nonsense, they reveal they already predicted what you were thinking.

What?! What do you mean you already had what I was thinking written in an envelope?! Then wtf did you waste my time for five minutes pretending to read my body cues?! Why would you do that if you knew what I was thinking all along, you tit?!

Audiences are not fools, and no one likes having their time wasted. We’re all remarkably able to tell when our time is indeed getting wasted. When a magician spends five minutes getting you to imagine typing your pin into an imaginary cash point only to reveal they knew your pin all along — your time has been wasted.

There are some ways around this particular offense. You can either present the prediction as a magical change instead. Pretend you went back in time to write it or that you made the prediction object suddenly appear. You’re clarifying that it wasn’t always there.

The second way around the offence is to present the mind-reading section as though you are “confirming your prediction.” You think you’ve got this right, but you want to confirm. This works particularly well if you go to read someone’s mind and tell them they need to change it because they’re not thinking of the right thing just yet.

All in all, there are three questions you should be asking yourself:

1. Am I only doing this because I can?

2. What trick am I performing?

3. Am I wasting everyone’s time?

You’ll be surprised how often you find you are wasting time.