The Case for Using Stooges in Magic

Picture this: I’m a small child and at my grandparents. Papa laid the table, and Grandma cooked us dinner. At the end of the meal, Papa decides it’s time to entertain us with a magic trick. He takes a coin, places it beneath a napkin, pinches it at the very top, and holds it over the middle of the table.

One by one, he invites us to reach under the napkin and feel that the coin is still there. I reach under to feel it, and the coin is still there. My brother does the same, as do my Dad, my aunts, my Mom, and my Grandma.

Then, Papa performs a magical gesture, throws the napkin into the air, catches it with his other hand, and uses both hands to show that the coin has completely disappeared.

We had absolutely no idea how he did this trick.

The method? My Grandma was a stooge. When she reached under the napkin, she secretly removed the coin and hid it in her lap. Papa just had to ensure that Grandma was the last person he asked to reach under the napkin to check that the coin was still there, when, in fact, she was stealing it away.

Being “in” on a trick was very unlike Grandma. Her stern and sometimes quite commanding demeanour did well to balance out Papa’s practical jokes and general whimsical care-free comedy. Never in a million years would I have guessed that Grandma would be in on the trick.

Twenty years later, I found myself discussing using a near-identical method for a TV show. Once again, I was suddenly hit with a huge realisation. The claim that magicians never use stooges is a lie designed to be told to spectators, but for some reason, magicians went along and believed it, thinking it applied to them, too.

There are certain methods in magic that I do believe are genuinely worth avoiding. Using a stooge is one of them, but the idea that you can never use a stooge is a load of nonsense. But let’s start by discussing why it’s so important that your audience does not believe you use stooges.

There’s No Coming Back

There are certain controversial methods, like stooges and camera tricks, for which there is no coming back if you get caught using them. For this reason, even the most famous in magic use them only on the rarest of occasions — but use them, they do.

You don’t have to be a genius magic consultant to imagine that a good way to, I don’t know, pull someone’s teeth out, then blow them back into their mouth, or make someone’s pregnancy transpose from one stomach to another, or to make a spectator levitate and vanish mid air, might be to use a stooge.

A lot of magicians have a hard rule that the hero spectator can never be a stooge. That you should only use stooges in roles that are more commonly referred to as accomplices or confederates. Heck, every consultant has at one point hidden inside of a table for a trick, or put on a stupid outfit and pretended to be someone they’re not to act as a confederate.

But there’s a real danger to getting caught with one of these controversial methods. I like to think of them as “Explain Aways”. If you get caught, it becomes very easy for a lot of your audience to use them to explain away all your magic.

Sometimes, just the idea that you’re using a stooge is enough to unsettle all your magic. This is why magicians are so careful to tell you repeatedly that no stooges or camera tricks are used throughout their shows. It’s worth noting again that it is a lie that magicians never use stooges. When those magic specials tell you there are no stooges in their shows, even when they’re telling the truth, they’re saying it for the layperson.

My first job in television was for a show executive-produced by Derren Brown, though it did not feature him as a performer. Many TV shows across all genres use casting websites to find contributors to appear on them. Reality shows, game shows, and documentaries all save time and money by ensuring that the person cast actually wants to be on TV by using these sites. On the show I worked on, a memo was passed around to not use those casting websites. I don’t believe Derren knew about or had a hand in this memo.

But several years earlier, the tabloids reported that the main contributor in a Derren Brown show called Apocalypse had a profile on a casting site for people who wanted to be on TV. I’ll be honest, I don’t know if they even used the casting site to find the contributor, but the fact that he had a profile was not a good look. It was enough for people online to simply imagine that he might be a stooge, and so the whole show began to unravel for certain viewers. Of course, the dent was small, but I believe it caused enough hassle and was easy enough to avoid that they chose to cast differently on the show I worked on.