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My wife and I are part time magicians. In my experience, people who share your mindset become magicians. At the risk of just repeating exactly what the person

My wife and I are part time magicians. In my experience, people who share your mindset become magicians. At the risk of just repeating exactly what the person you're replying to wrote: The reason that non-magicians often feel let down when they find out how a trick is executed, is that it often feels like an insult to their intelligence. Magic toys with and exploits your assumptions. As soon as you find out that those assumptions were incorrect, and that you were just lied to by a prop (for example), your experience and perception of that illusion goes from "OMG" to "oh, that's all?" What we want the methods to be is some grandiose Ocean's 11 like "heist" with tons of sneaky maneuvers and difficult sleight of hand ... but MOST magic tricks, including the ones that Penn & Teller fool you with (not the ones where they tip the method) are not that. Penn & Teller have said themselves that (paraphrasing): "if the method is more interesting than the trick, the trick is not very good ... and that's when we show you the method. But the tricks we actually want to fool you with are just a bit of gaffer tape and a lie." The fact that you say that you appreciate magic tricks that involve a lot of sleight of hand, or require technical mastery, kind of supports what we're saying. Most magic tricks aren't that. To understand why, look at it from the point of view of a professional magician trying to pay the bills. I can do card manipulation. I have a card manipulation act that I perform. It is by far the most technically challenging routine that I do and it has literally taken me years to get to the point where I can execute it and perform it. It's closer to juggling than it is to what most magic is (though it's still magic because I'm producing playing cards and fans of playing cards at my fingertips in short sleeves). Now imagine that the majority of my act was that type of trick. I have bills to pay. I have crowds to entertain TODAY... and if I make just one mistake in a performance, the trick falls flat. Penn & Teller tip cups & balls because the methods employed in that trick are genuinely entertaining to watch. And the "let's have the audience lie"... I'm pretty sure you're referencing a segment in their 1990 TV special "Don't Try This at Home" where they had a large semi trailer truck run over Teller while surrounded by an audience who could see how it was done, which they tipped at the end. I wouldn't call that "lazy", I would call that using a medium to convey a message. Magic doesn't work on television. You need to see it in person to really appreciate that it wasn't done with stooges/actors and camera tricks. That's a thesis that they have carried with them over the years. No one would do that "trick" in any other venue than in a television special. You can't get a big truck up on stage... and if you're doing "instant stooge" type of work, where people on stage from the audience are in on it ... at the risk of getting philosophical, they didn't even experience a magic trick. So it's not so much that the method was "lazy" ... it's that it was completely ineffective, and thus not even a magic trick for a certain group of people. Which was the entire point of the segment.

tialaramex 2y ago
You're correct about the TV special with the truck. I don't agree that magic doesn't work on TV. Regardless of whether it's a TV show or performed in front of me the nature of magic† (as a performance) is that the performer gets to decide what to show and obviously they aren't going to leave only a single possibility open to explain what I saw, that's something Penn has talked about - there's only one way to do that trick in The Prestige so you would never do that trick. I've never seen Penn & Teller live, but I have seen Derren Brown both on TV and in person. Now, on TV one of the things which most impresses me is Derren's use of forces. There are a handful that even an amateur who knows what they're looking for can see in some of the TV shows and there are more places where it's obviously a force but I can't figure out how it's done. In person though, that experience is actually less fun, because of course the force doesn't work on me. So he's forced a theatre full of other people to do what he wanted, and they don't know how. It didn't work on me in the TV audience but that's fine, I'm not the target - when it doesn't work in a theatre full of people it's a bit disappointing. When I listened to a recording of "Thou shalt always kill" I knew from the outset what the last two lines would be but that still kinda works, again in person it wouldn't land the same. † If you claim not to be a magician, that this is real, then it's not up to you what is shown or not shown, if Millikan's drop experiment only worked with this custom made box and a specified oil recipe then it's just a trick. We do the experiment in whatever circumstances are available and it works because it's measuring a fact about our universe, it's not a trick.
- gspencley 2y ago
  I think what you mean by "force" is what magicians call a "psychological force." This is when, through suggestion, the spectator will name or do something that the magician was trying to get them to name/do, while having it look like the spectator had a free choice, through no other means than applied suggestion. These do "work", but as you pointed out they are not sure fire. You get the best results when you can do it on a large group of people and you're upfront about the fact that it won't work for everyone. Although in Derren Brown's case, one of the things that makes him a genius in the world of magic is that he reversed that dynamic. One of the brilliant things about Derren Brown's "brand" of magic is that by blending stage hypnotism and parlour tricks, he does a lot of things where when you think you're watching a demonstration of stage hypnotism, it's actually a parlour trick that is dressed up to look like stage hypnotism. In other words, he might use a classic sleight of hand trick to do a "force" while finding a way to frame and present it as if he were using suggestion. But stage hypnotism and suggestion .. .that's not magic tricks. So if Derren Brown is employing a psychological force, or doing a demonstration of suggestion that will work for the majority of the audience but not all ... that's not a magic trick. By definition, it is not a trick. What magicians mean when they talk about "forces" are ways to make it look like the spectator, ANY spectator, had a free choice but it was engineered. A card force, for example, where you think you have a free choice of any playing card but the magician "forced" a specific card on you. Those are 100% guaranteed. They don't use suggestion, they use sleight of hand, and there is no person in the world that those don't work 100% of the time on unless the magician makes a mistake. Back to Derren Brown, although him and Teller are close personal friends and they don't hate each other by any means... P&T have been very outspoken about the fact that they consider some of what Derren does to be unethical, because he presents magic tricks as if they are displays of stage hypnotism or suggestion. Like most "mentalists" he has flirted with a line that many magicians will not cross. Where he claims that by reading body language, or using applied suggestion etc. that he can do or know certain things ... when the reality is those things are executed via traditional parlour trick methods are often just classic magic tricks that most magicians know and can do but are presented with a new/different layer of lies. So why doesn't magic work on TV ... well, you gave the answer by invoking Derren Brown. If he is doing these "forces" (which to clarify I think you mean psychological "forces") and they work 10 out of 10 times on television but they don't work on 100% of live audience members .. well then you know why magic is weak (at best) on TV ... because all we need to do is go ask 52 people to think of a playing card, and guess that they're thinking of the 7 of Hearts (for example), and then just only air the one take where the guess was right. There is a YouTube creator named James Hoffman who is a coffee barista. And he was on an episode of Derren Brown's Trick or Treat (if I remember those details correctly). His story of being on that show is very illuminating. He talks about how he was shown 2 different tricks, the first one fried his brain, the second one was "meh." For whatever reason they aired the 2nd one that was "meh", but cut in the reaction to the first one where he was like "OMG OMG that was so amazing." Why would you trust what magicians tell you, when they say they don't do shit like that on television? This is why, as a huge fan of magic, I kind of hate televised / pre-recorded magic. I have no idea what they did during the editing process. Whereas live, there are so many more restrictions and the audience has a much clearer understanding and impression of what those restrictions are. But on tv... anything is possible through editing and vfx.

tialaramex 2y ago

You're correct about the TV special with the truck. I don't agree that magic doesn't work on TV. Regardless of whether it's a TV show or performed in front of me the nature of magic† (as a performance) is that the performer gets to decide what to show and obviously they aren't going to leave only a single possibility open to explain what I saw, that's something Penn has talked about - there's only one way to do that trick in The Prestige so you would never do that trick. I've never seen Penn & Teller live, but I have seen Derren Brown both on TV and in person. Now, on TV one of the things which most impresses me is Derren's use of forces. There are a handful that even an amateur who knows what they're looking for can see in some of the TV shows and there are more places where it's obviously a force but I can't figure out how it's done. In person though, that experience is actually less fun, because of course the force doesn't work on me. So he's forced a theatre full of other people to do what he wanted, and they don't know how. It didn't work on me in the TV audience but that's fine, I'm not the target - when it doesn't work in a theatre full of people it's a bit disappointing. When I listened to a recording of "Thou shalt always kill" I knew from the outset what the last two lines would be but that still kinda works, again in person it wouldn't land the same. † If you claim not to be a magician, that this is real, then it's not up to you what is shown or not shown, if Millikan's drop experiment only worked with this custom made box and a specified oil recipe then it's just a trick. We do the experiment in whatever circumstances are available and it works because it's measuring a fact about our universe, it's not a trick.

gspencley 2y ago
I think what you mean by "force" is what magicians call a "psychological force." This is when, through suggestion, the spectator will name or do something that the magician was trying to get them to name/do, while having it look like the spectator had a free choice, through no other means than applied suggestion. These do "work", but as you pointed out they are not sure fire. You get the best results when you can do it on a large group of people and you're upfront about the fact that it won't work for everyone. Although in Derren Brown's case, one of the things that makes him a genius in the world of magic is that he reversed that dynamic. One of the brilliant things about Derren Brown's "brand" of magic is that by blending stage hypnotism and parlour tricks, he does a lot of things where when you think you're watching a demonstration of stage hypnotism, it's actually a parlour trick that is dressed up to look like stage hypnotism. In other words, he might use a classic sleight of hand trick to do a "force" while finding a way to frame and present it as if he were using suggestion. But stage hypnotism and suggestion .. .that's not magic tricks. So if Derren Brown is employing a psychological force, or doing a demonstration of suggestion that will work for the majority of the audience but not all ... that's not a magic trick. By definition, it is not a trick. What magicians mean when they talk about "forces" are ways to make it look like the spectator, ANY spectator, had a free choice but it was engineered. A card force, for example, where you think you have a free choice of any playing card but the magician "forced" a specific card on you. Those are 100% guaranteed. They don't use suggestion, they use sleight of hand, and there is no person in the world that those don't work 100% of the time on unless the magician makes a mistake. Back to Derren Brown, although him and Teller are close personal friends and they don't hate each other by any means... P&T have been very outspoken about the fact that they consider some of what Derren does to be unethical, because he presents magic tricks as if they are displays of stage hypnotism or suggestion. Like most "mentalists" he has flirted with a line that many magicians will not cross. Where he claims that by reading body language, or using applied suggestion etc. that he can do or know certain things ... when the reality is those things are executed via traditional parlour trick methods are often just classic magic tricks that most magicians know and can do but are presented with a new/different layer of lies. So why doesn't magic work on TV ... well, you gave the answer by invoking Derren Brown. If he is doing these "forces" (which to clarify I think you mean psychological "forces") and they work 10 out of 10 times on television but they don't work on 100% of live audience members .. well then you know why magic is weak (at best) on TV ... because all we need to do is go ask 52 people to think of a playing card, and guess that they're thinking of the 7 of Hearts (for example), and then just only air the one take where the guess was right. There is a YouTube creator named James Hoffman who is a coffee barista. And he was on an episode of Derren Brown's Trick or Treat (if I remember those details correctly). His story of being on that show is very illuminating. He talks about how he was shown 2 different tricks, the first one fried his brain, the second one was "meh." For whatever reason they aired the 2nd one that was "meh", but cut in the reaction to the first one where he was like "OMG OMG that was so amazing." Why would you trust what magicians tell you, when they say they don't do shit like that on television? This is why, as a huge fan of magic, I kind of hate televised / pre-recorded magic. I have no idea what they did during the editing process. Whereas live, there are so many more restrictions and the audience has a much clearer understanding and impression of what those restrictions are. But on tv... anything is possible through editing and vfx.