Clubhouse is a new audio chat room app that has amassed an incredible number of users over the pandemic. Will the demand for a social app for group calls outlive the world going back to normal? Who knows.

One thing we do know is that Magicians love the app, and they’ll be there for good. Magicians love to “Jam” and are usually at odds because they tend to live so far away from each other. Clubhouse solves that.

But the app has highlighted something about magic jams. You’d think an audio-only app would be bad for magic hangouts, as it’s quite limiting to the ability to perform strong magic. Most magicians would say magic is a visual art form.

But when magician’s get together, be it at a convention, club or simple get-together… do they ever really perform magic? Sure, there’s the occasional card sleight that gets shared. But you rarely see a magician wheeling out their stage illusion or producing doves in a Pizza Express. Even at conventions, it tends to be magicians showing off the bargains they bought in the dealer hall.

Anyway, lots of magicians on the Clubhouse app. Lots of laypeople on Clubhouse. Not much magic being performed. But audio-only magic is nothing new. There’s a long history of examples and published effects for two existing categories of audio-only illusions…

Radio Magic

The closest magic genre we can look at for Clubhouse performances is radio magic. Though there is one fatal flaw, and we’ll get to that.

I’ve been into BBC Radio 1 with Dynamo and watched him perform for Greg James. We toured local radio stations later that year to promote his arena tour. Dynamo performed elaborate bespoke tricks for radio that also appeared on his television series earlier in his career.

When magicians ask me about radio magic, I usually recommend choosing a trick with a captivating story they are good at performing. I think visual magic works perfectly fine. Listening to the host describe the trick is often incredibly engaging.

I listen to The Daily, a podcast news show. Whenever they play out a recording of someone down at an event describing the situation, I’m hooked. You’re forced to pay attention and listen to every last detail.

For many years now, radio stations have recorded and published videos of their interviews. A lot of radio stations quite like being able to push listeners to their video content. Think about how often you hear hosts tell you more info is available on the website; bonus clips are online. Even the best radio games are visual, too. It’s a good thing to perform something people can watch online later.

In summary, radio magic advice goes:

• Stick to what you know.

• The host is your primary, and the listener is your secondary.

Magicians can stress out about performing a trick for the listener. This always strikes me as odd because when magicians get booked on television interviews, they seem to immediately understand the viewer at home is the secondary audience, not the primary.

I often think back to this clip of Doug McKenzie performing on radio. He fully commits to his primary audience, leaving the hosts to describe the trick. Always let the host be the one to describe the trick to the listener.

When Kanye performed at Glastonbury, he restarted a song he’d messed up multiple times. The live crowd were not impressed. In Kanye’s world, the millions of viewers who would watch the perfectly clipped off performance online were more important than the 30,000 watching live at the pyramid stage.

Don’t be Kanye.

The people in the radio studio are your primary.

Their reaction is as important as the trick.

But Clubhouse isn’t like radio…

Sometimes Clubhouse rooms have hosts, but often it’s a much larger group of speakers all in different places around the world—no studio.

The first thing we need to decide is who is your primary and where is your secondary. Before you get caught up with the idea, you need to fool everyone in the room or that everyone listening needs to play along. Consider how powerful it might be to choose one spectator you feel will give a great audible reaction and go for gold.

Phone Magic

There’s a surprisingly long history of magic published specifically to be performed over the phone. These tricks normally involve some “do-as-I-do” routine. Whereby the spectator perhaps ends up thinking of a pink elephant in Denmark. Or they grab a deck of cards in their house and play along with a set number of steps.

I quite like magic over the phone; it feels impossible and bizarre. I’ve never had this category of magic performed to me, but it does seem to leave quite a lasting impression on those who have been a victim.

It’s intimate and engaging. Especially when the spectator gets to grab an object they have with them. Oddly, phone magic becomes superficially more impressive the further you are from the spectator too.

If you choose to perform a trick to someone in a Clubhouse room who happens to be in the same country you find yourself in, it might be less impressive than choosing a speaker who’s in Australia or LA.

This is great because it probably doesn’t impact the difficulty of the trick.

But Clubhouse isn’t like a phone call…

Phone calls tend to be between two people. Several tricks designed for phone calls, specifically do-as-I-do tricks, are meant to be witnessed by one person alone.

The trick could be spoiled if everyone else in a clubhouse room plays along to reach the same conclusion. Of course, this seems to depend on your presentation. We’ve all seen magicians performing do-as-I-do tricks for an entire audience of people who almost seem more impressed that it worked on everyone in the room.

This has always sort of baffled me. The way my mind works, my instinct tells me a trick is less impressive when you see it multiple times working exactly as it did for you. “A great magician never repeats a trick” or whatever. My mind sits in a theatre full of people tearing cards in half and thinks, hang on, aren’t we just repeating this trick 100 times but all at once? My instinct seems to be wrong here as I see many an audience utterly delighted to find that everyone followed the magician’s instructions perfectly…

Perks of Clubhouse

The number one perk of performing on Clubhouse is that the audience cannot see the performer. This means you can get up to all sorts of trickery. Be it a google search, peeking a Marc Kerstein trick, or playing along with a card trick (only face up) at your end.

The second perk of Clubhouse is that the audience cannot see the spectator. This means you could happily facetime them throughout the trick, without the listeners in the room realising you can see them as well as hear them. Heck, you could even be in the same room, or they could be in a room you know well or sitting with a friend of yours. The deck they’re using could be one you sent them, but the people listening assume it’s one from their games cupboard.

It’s also relatively easy to add a confederate into a Clubhouse room.

But Rory, I want custom magic for Clubhouse.

This is what I will always end up hearing eventually. And so, I’ll start to throw up some ideas designed specifically with Clubhouse in mind. I don’t mean from a method perspective. I mean from a presentation perspective.

My mind would go straight to the “pull down to refresh the room” feature. In the app, listeners can pull down the reload the room, and in doing so, they’ll get to see any updates, like speaker changes and if anyone has changed their name or profile photo.

My instant recommendation would be to use the pull-down to refresh feature in your trick. If you’re performing a play along at home trick, you could force the same celebrity to every speaker in the room. Ask them all to replace their profile photos with the celebrity and then, all together, pull down to refresh the room.

You’ll then see utter joy when everyone in the room refreshes and see’s nothing but photos of Steve Coogan (presumably, the celeb you forced).

That might be a great group reaction, but you could also perform a version of an “in-on-it” routine with the same device. Let’s say you’re performing to one person in the room and want to make a prediction for everyone else; well, you could update your photo and ask everyone else to pull down to refresh.

Often, when I’m consulting, I present three recommendations:

1. If we had to do it today.

2. If we had to do it in one week.

3. If we had an unlimited budget.

More often than not, a zero budget option is the same as the today option. This formula of presenting three recommendations, especially in an interview, has got me several consulting gigs.

Suppose we had to perform on Clubhouse today. I would recommend performing a simple prediction using the pull-down to refresh feature.