Magicians in the Philippines: Be Wary of Boring Moments (Part 2)
Today I’m gonna keep my promise. As a magician performing in the Philippines, I usually don’t keep my word, but today I will.
A few days ago, I said I would give my readers the list of a magic performance’s “natural boring moments” that have the potential of putting people to sleep.
You can find the list below. It’s not a complete list. You may want to add to it. I’d appreciate it if you would, because I’d like to know your experiences on this matter.
Before I rattle off the list, let me explain first what “natural boring moments” are.
In a magic performance, the “natural boring moments” are the points of the show that wear out onlookers. It’s the part of the show that is dreary, dragging or even downright dreadful. People usually find them tedious instead of amusing.
These boring moments are “natural” because they are built-in or integrated into the show. The performer need not do anything to make them boring. These moments do it for him. They are boring by nature. As a result, a magician in the Philippines who wants to be entertaining has to employ techniques to counter the lack of excitement these “boring moments” produce.
Here’s my list. I will merely identify the boring moments. I will reserve for future articles the techniques to use to counter their hypnotic effects on the audience:
Shuffling A Deck of Cards. This is a necessary evil. You have to do it as prerequisite to the miracle you are about to perform. However, shuffling cards can be boring to lay people. Yes, shuffling cards—specially false and fancy shuffles—entertains magicians. It even impresses gamblers and casino players. But lay audiences? They may find a one-hand riffle shuffle entertaining at first. But do it after every card is chosen without dropping a laugh line or uttering some sparkling patter. As sure as the word sure, you will wear out the audience faster than you can get your order from a fast-food restaurant.
Letting a Spectator Shuffle the Cards. This is even worse. It is more boring than if you were to shuffle the cards yourself, specially if the spectator you have chosen does not know how to handle cards well. When the spectator spills the cards all over the floor, and you and some helpful spectators crawl around the floor to pick them up, then that’s a first-class way to bore people.
Cutting a Deck of Cards. This has the same soporific effect on the audience as shuffling cards. False cuts and fancy cuts like the Leodini Revolution Hot Shot Crouching Tiger Impossible Ultimate Invisible False Cut may entertain people initially, but a repeated exposure to the spectacle of a magician juggling cards endlessly bore audiences to the extent some of them may contemplate suicide.
Asking a Spectator to Perform Multiple Cuts. This is even more boring than you cutting the cards. The only reason why you ask a lay person to cut the cards three dozen times is that you miss the location of the card. No audience member would like to cut cards more than three times unless you can make it entertaining to her. She would rather be cut in half than cut decks of cards for you.
Counting Cards. This is the ultimate punishment that one can give to the audience. Whether it’s you or an spectator who counts the card doesn’t matter. Either way, counting cards induces sleep. Don’t do it unless you are running a health club and you want to give people a healthy, refreshing nap.
Too much Explanation. In some performances, specially in mentalism, the performer sometimes thinks he needs to explain every minute detail of the performance and to give the audience a background of the effect. All this in the name of building up an act or creating a mood. Say, a bizarre looking stone is introduced in the show. The performer then launches a discourse on the origin of the stone—that it was discovered in Yangtze River during the Ming Dynasty by a village lass who swallowed it to join in the afterlife the man of her dreams who was killed in battle with…Oh well, unless you have a talent for engaging storytelling, you will put the audience in a state of stupor long before the girl has consummated her suicide.
Math Magic. Using too much numbers in a magic performance can be an exhausting enterprise for an audience to watch. Rolling dice several times to force a page for a book test, adding numbers more than three times, doing complex mathematical calculations (someone’s age plus somebody else’s age, reverse the total, divide it by two and then multiply it by itself) and the like. I must admit that there are Magic Squares that can be entertaining (John Archer’s, Chuck Hickok’s and Geoffrey Durnham’s versions are entertaining), but as a general observation magic peppered with numbers sends audiences into a catatonic state.
Too many of the same. Three card tricks in a row, three predictions in a row, five Oil-and-Water in a row…well, you get my point. People have a satiation point. If they get too much of the same thing, even if it’s as exciting as having sex with a porno star, they get bloated and will refuse to have some more of the same stuff.
Endless Magic. Endless love may be a notion many magicians in the Philippines would romanticize to have. But an endless, run-on magic show that goes on and on and on without an end in sight will tire lay people. In some instances, it will make them retch.
Bringing audience members onstage. Inviting people to go up the stage to help in the show can take time and leave an empty stage for several seconds. In live performance parlance, this is called a “stage wait”. Often, “stage waits” can be deadly, because it technically pauses the show and leaves people in a state of suspended animation. This usually happens when the performer makes the mistake of choosing people seated at the back of the theater. It just takes too much time for them to negotiate their way to the stage. A stage wait can also occur when the magician wrongly chooses a shy or uncooperative person, spending precious moments to coax them into helping.
Music Miscues. When the sound man searches forever for the right music to score the performance, the audience will not only lose their patience. They may also choose to take a nap rather than watch an epic struggle to find the music.
Technical Snafus. The speaker squeaks; the microphone refuses to amplify your voice; the power goes dead because a waiter has stepped on the electrical wire; a bulb explodes—all this can produce dead moments that kill audience interest and douse people’s inclination to watch your show.
Okay, I have given you a list of “natural boring moments”. In a future article, I will suggest how one can counter these “boring moments” and make them interesting, if not entertaining.
Stay magical,
Leodini
sir leo kmzta poh, i always do my color changing deck routine in my shows,a green to blue deck, when it turns to blue the audience were amazed but then they keep challenging me it bring it back to green deck and we all know that,its not that easy, i just give them a joke regarding that deck, sir can you help me construct a joke that will surely hit them to the heart in laughing regarding a color changing deck routine?? thank you so much sir, thank you…
Hi Greg,
One of the greatest misconceptions in magic is that magicians, to be funny, must tell jokes.
Well, let me tell you this: don’t tell jokes when performing magic.
A joke is like this: “One day a grade one pupil came home and excitedly said, ‘Papa, I was the only one in class who was able to answer my teacher’s question!” The father was pleased. “Good job, son!” he said. “What was the teacher’s question?” The boy answered, “Who did not do his homework?”
That is a joke. You don’t tell jokes when performing magic—but I said that already.
What you do, instead, is drop funny lines, amusing comments, and bits of business. The classic line, “Hold out your hand. No, not that hand. The clean one,” can be funny if it fits your character. You see, for lines to be funny, they should fit your character. That is the greatest secret of being funny in magic.
So first, define your character and then write lines appropriate for that character. Lines, to be funny, should be character-based. That being the case, it’s you who can write these lines better than anyone else, because it’s you who know best your character.
Thanks for bringing up this topic. Your comment reminds me of a topic I’ve been wanting to write about.
Stay magical,
Leodini