How to Really "Deliver" Your Magic Reveal

You often hear it repeated in magic that, whenever possible, the performer should let the magic happen in the spectators' hands.

It can mean creating selection processes that sit in the audience's hands (and are often used as forces); magic effects with a strong interactive, playful component; routines that give real weight to the participants' freedom.

One moment in a magic routine that's hard to take out of the magician’s hands is the revelation – the moment a prediction is revealed, a chosen card is found, or a thought-of word is guessed, and so on.

Generally, it's a moment kept firmly in the performer's control. What would happen if it weren't?

Order the item you want to reveal, and have it delivered mid-performance.

This idea came out of a routine I'd been working on for a lecture tour I'm doing later this year. I wanted something that broke the fourth wall, upended the standard format of a magic lecture, and created a moment people would talk about for a long time.

The tour is in Italy, so I decided to have a pizza delivered.

Here's how it goes:

Almost halfway through the lecture, the host gently interrupts me to say I need to choose what to eat later. It's an awkward moment, but the host insists. They're holding a menu.

I don't have time for this, so I ask someone in the front row to choose for me. I ask them to take the menu, find something they like, and remember it. They can tell me later; I don’t care.

I move on to the next routine. A few minutes pass, and the doorbell rings mid-explanation. Someone answers it and finds a delivery addressed to the person in the front row. It's the pizza they chose from the menu.

We take a ten-minute break. Everyone eats that pizza.

The choice of pizza is closely tied to the country the tour is in. As we'll see, you can have anything delivered, as long as it makes sense with the performance and with your audience.

The idea is that the revelation isn't simply spoken by the magician, or written on a billet, but is physically delivered. Not only that: it’s not the performer who technically does the reveal, but another unwitting person whose job is, quite literally, to deliver your reveal.

This breaks the fourth wall and also creates a disruptive moment that nobody’s expecting. Whether you’re performing for an audience of laypeople or magicians, if you can introduce a controlled disruption, it won’t go unnoticed. See it as a variation on the classic theme of the “magician in trouble”, but instead of pretending you made a mistake or revealed the wrong card, you interact with the reality outside of the trick.

There's also an element of giving more than people expect: if you literally offer pizza during your set (or the intermission, in my case), you create a moment people will talk about for months. It's a fun moment that breaks the audience's expectations and creates a sense of community, play, and interaction.

Some key elements:

To make sure the timing lands, have a confederate signal you when the delivery is on its way so you can begin the force selection process. In my case, the lecture host is my confederate. Without a stooge, you can watch the notifications on your smartwatch or phone to work out the best timing.

Even without a confederate or notifications, you can simply schedule the delivery for a specific time, then do your force fifteen minutes before it's due, move on to more routines, and let the doorbell interrupt your performance.

This works great if you’re doing a little show for friends and family at someone’s house. The idea is that the delivery's arrival is a genuine interruption of the set, a kind of controlled disruption that breaks the patterns people expect.

To force the item the spectator chooses, you can use several methods.