How To Do Magic Badly
By Ian Rowland
As you would expect, people often write to me with their magic problems. (This isn’t true, but it’s a nice way to kick-start the article, so I suggest we all just play nice, pretend it’s true, and not get hung up on stuff like ‘facts’, ‘accuracy’ or ‘realism’, okay?)
It seems the commonest problem people have these days is that their magic act is just too darned successful. They are caught in the living hell of having too much work, doing too many well-paid gigs and making too much money. It may sound like a peachy situation, but the hectic, dizzying pace of whirlwind success is bound to take its toll, and they just can’t face the pressure anymore. ‘Please, please Dr. Ian’, they write, ‘Can anything be done to escape this waking nightmare?’.
When people write to me with this problem, I always suggest the same advice: make sure your magic act sucks. This means no-one in their right mind will want to hire you, thus easing the pressure and taking away all the stress. But how to do this? How to ensure your magic act stinks like a cheese expert’s fingers? Well, here are my four top tips for doing magic really very badly.
One: think of magic as something you buy. In every other performing art, from dance to stand-up comedy, the performers accept that developing some skill and talent is part of the deal, and it takes time. They figure on working hard for a number of years, slowly improving as they go, in order to build up experience, learn their craft, and perform to a decent standard. Only in the magic world do many performers think it’s all about buying stuff – tricks, DVDs, shiny boxes – and nothing else, not realising that you can buy every trick in the world and still be as magical and entertaining as a ceiling tile. Without performance, there is nothing, and learning how to perform well takes a lifetime. So, the first way to guarantee your act is really bad, and could suck the pattern off a carpet, is to confuse ‘buying a trick’ with ‘investing the necessary time and effort over many years to develop some performance skills’.
Two: do the same stuff as everyone else. Copy other performers, copy whatever you saw a magician do on TV last night, copy anyone who is getting plenty of coverage, and make your act a ‘No go’ zone for creativity and originality of expression. Never innovate, never invent, never strive to be you or learn what you can bring to the table. Just be a human Xerox machine and copy what other, more creative people, are doing on stage. This will make sure that no-one can tell your act from anyone else’s, so of course there’s no reason at all to actually book you.
Three: totally ignore the notion of presentation. Take the view that ‘presentation’ means facing forwards and reciting whatever patter was supplied with the trick (see #1) in a monotonous drone similar to a cement mixer full of accountants.
Four: never, ever develop any actual skills. Never work on your sleights or moves (because they’re hard and practise is really boring). Never bother to get the hang of timing and misdirection, never learn about voice, movement and posture, and be extra special careful to never realise that skills acquisition is supposed to be part of any performing art. When it comes to tricks, refuse to buy anything that doesn’t say ‘Entirely self-working!’ and ‘Easy to do – no skill required!’ right there on the box. After all, why waste hours of your life learning skilled sleight of hand when you can just watch TV, play video games or look at kitten pictures on the internet?
So there you have it! Just follow those four simple tips, and I promise your so-called ‘magic act’ will be devoid of merit, value or, indeed, anything worth the name ‘magic’. The demand for your services will flatten out to zero, and you can swap your life of stressed out success and popularity for one of idle, relax navel-gazing.
More popular magic problems from my bulging sack of letters next time!