Learn a "Telephone" Whisper Prediction Magic Trick

One of the best ways to connect with spectators is to play with them. Top names in magic and mentalism play with their audiences, especially in shows where variety between routines is essential.

Turning your routines into games lets you engage directly with the audience, do something people can relate to, and build funny moments into your act. Derren Brown used to open all of his stage shows with a game.

Another element that makes games interesting is that the performer seems to let go of control, in favour of audience choices that define the outcome of the routine.

A great example of this is the game Telephone (also called Chinese Whispers).

I've always thought Telephone is an exceptional hook for stage and parlour routines.

Not only do people interact with each other, but it creates an atmosphere of quiet concentration, almost of silence, with private moments of hilarity between people and a strong sense of unpredictability that creates anticipation.

For anyone who doesn't know it, Telephone is the game where a message is whispered from one person to the next along a human chain. The longer the chain, the more you expect the final message to be different from the starting one, to everyone's amusement.

As a performer, you take advantage of this hilarity: the fun comes from the contrast between the message at the start of the chain and the one at the end. 

So you need a method that guarantees this discrepancy.

Telephone definitely calls for a prediction, but it doesn't end there. You can exploit the change between the starting element and the final one to physically transform an item passed along the human chain.

The human chain consists of a variable number of spectators. The performer can be at the start or end of the chain, but not in the middle — to push away the idea that they altered the message as part of the method.

Because you need to create a human chain of spectators, Telephone suits parlour and stage settings.

In close-up, this plot is limited. You can certainly show a card to a spectator and ask them to repeat it as the message for a chain of spectators. By the end, the card will be different — and the card on the table will have changed too. A top change is all you need to do this effect.

In stage and parlour, the possibilities are far more exciting.

The message passed along the chain can be accompanied by an envelope or a box containing the thing being passed. It can be written on a slip of paper hidden in the envelope, or it can be physically present inside the box.

A first spectator can think of a phrase to write in an envelope; that envelope is sealed and passed towards the back of the theatre. Every time it's passed on, the spectators whisper the phrase written inside. The last spectator holds the envelope until the end of the show, when the contents are revealed.

If it's a box, it can travel the opposite way. An usher comes in halfway through the show saying a parcel has arrived for the performer, and the performer, not wanting to be interrupted, asks people to whisper in each other's ear what the parcel contains. The usher then becomes the first link in the human chain, while the parcel is passed from hand to hand until it reaches the stage and the performer.

The goal is to give the whispered message a physical reference, and to justify the human chain so it makes sense and builds anticipation. You don’t want to put ten people on stage and ask them to act as the human chain. It’s better to keep people in the stalls and ask only the last and/or first person to come up on stage, to focus attention on the discrepancy between the two ends’ messages.

The performer needs to control what happens inside the chain.

Being in control of the message serves both to nail the prediction present in the parcel/envelope (more on the use of multiple outs later), and to make sure the funny discrepancy between the two messages is created.

At the end of the chain, people won't be able to retrace exactly where the message changed.