Idearrhia: Cause and Effect, where the spectator loses

Christ, Derren Brown was really on to something.

Imagine a trick where the spectator always loses, or is incorrect, or misses something. Is this a bad trick?

On first inspection, the answer would seem to be an unequivocable 'Yes', and yet, people still do these tricks, and swear by them. I think the problem has been that magicians, in trying to wrap their brains around it, put too much emphasis on that moment where the spectator discovers their mistake, or their loss, or whatever. Essentially, the moment of the effect.

Derren Brown's brilliant thinking (to me, anyway) was identifying the fact that people in the audience can be just as compelled by the cause of the effect as they are the effect itself. Consider that many mentalism routines involve a revelation of a prediction or a thought or whatnot. Technically, the moment that the sign turns around to show that the word matches (or whatever) is NOT the effect. The effect technically has already happened -- it happened the moment the mentalist apparently wrote something down.

And yet the applause doesn't happen during that particluar moment of the effect, as it might after a magical surprise. It happens on the revelation, when the cause of the effect has been proven, the promise has been delivered despite whatever obstacles were in place.

Anyways, that's just one of a great deal of differences between magicians and mentalists, but that idea, focusing on what's causing the effect rather than just the effects themselves, can have a massive impact upon the way we view our magic as a whole. Meaning, if we go back to the sorts of tricks where the spectator is proven wrong, it's less important what the effect is that shows them to be wrong, and more important to instead understand the cause of that effect, and whether THAT is going to insult them.

So how do we mollify the effects of spectator failure? Some ideas...

Cause-based rationales

1) The performer is just so damned good at what he does, you know you're going to lose. That might sound arrogant at first, but think of this... If you sit down with Kasparov to play chess, you know you're going to lose. It's a foregone conclusion. There is no shame in such a loss. At the moment you resign your king, are you going to be pissed off? Of course not. It would be unreasonable, given the default unlikelihood of you winning anyway. In fact, if you did win, THAT might be cause for upset. I think the major difficulty with adopting this role is that so many magicians come into magic as a means of improving self-esteem, and they're unsure how to handle that "expert" role in a graceful, non-obnoxious manner.

2) The cause of the failure has nothing to do with the spectator. I remember watching a magic store clerk demonstrate the ring and coil. This was a simple Royal Magic or Tenyo dealer item, and he got five good minutes out of it. Besides being an excellent lesson in showmanship, it also had an interesting premise. "If I hypnotize you, you won't be able to get the ring off the coil." He then proceeded to demonstrate how the hypnotism was what made people fail. Despite the fact that the presentation was tongue in cheek, it was very smart, because it removed the jeopardy inherent in failure. A serious presentation (if it's convincing) could be just as effective.

3) The game itself is crooked. Perhaps this really just an extension of #3 and #1 above, but I feel it's another effective way to get the most out of something like con game demonstrations, or perhaps even something with a traditional magic plot. I've been doing this with 3 card monte itself (it plays better for older audiences than the story presentation does, in my hands, anyway), and the fact of the matter is that it's true. The game itself IS crooked. That's why it works.

4) Right about being wrong. This is a common one used in 3 card monte presentations. Instead of asking "Where do you think the ace is?" you ask "Where do you think most people would say where the ace is?" This has the nice advantage of discouraging guessing, and encouraging picking the wrong card, while taking the responsibility of actually being right off the spectator. Instead, they get to be right about their mistake.

There are also plenty of ways to soften the blow, not necessarily through altering the cause of being incorrect or losing, but instead just playing with the format.

Format-Based Solutions

5) The victory does not establish a switch in status between you and the performer. I think this is a key one. Michael Finney has a routine where people need to guess where the spongeball is, and of course they guess wrong a lot. At the end of the day, though, everything about Michael Finney's character is such that most people probably wouldn't want to switch places with him in real life. You're not being beaten by somebody threatening.

6) Change the target of failure. This is a reliable way used by many people to soften the blow in gambling demonstrations... rather than creating a magician vs. spectator scenario, instead you tell a story in which two characters are pitted against each other, and you narrate that story. Interestingly enough (from my experience using this approach, anyway) spectators will still feel a rather potent emotion with each loss, but the loss itself puts no shame upon the spectator.

7) Punishing the bad spectator. I don't care who says that this is a bad approach to dealing with spectators, there are those who can do it and do it well. Like it or not, one of the viable performance models for a magician is the maker of mischief, and many people like to see that in action. A performer who can take on a daunting challenge from somebody outside his control and survive by his wits is offering great theater. This won't work for everybody, but stand-up comics know that you can't let a heckler take over your show, and watching a heckler get shut down is very entertaining for an audience (go do a Youtube search on "Rogan" and "heckler" if you need a quick example). Many magicians fall into a strange sweet spot between comedy and magic, and for these performers in particular, being able to maintain control is vital. Such an interaction is so good, in fact, that for some it's almost worth stooging.

8) If the contrast between the winner and the loser is inherently funny in the effect. A big football player is brought on stage with a little girl. The performer places a steel ball onto the center of the stage. The football player is repeatedly unable to lift the thing, while the little girl has no trouble. Who is the football player going to get mad at? The magician? How can he? He's letting the little girl win! Darwin Ortiz talks about this in Strong Magic.

9) Where the loss serves as an object lesson. This is a tricky one as it almost seems to cross the line from art to propaganda, but many people still do this. Some card performers will open their show by saying, "Hi, I'm Somebody McRandom, and I'm here today to show you why you shouldn't play cards with strangers." All of a sudden, the perspective upon the loss changes. This is probably an extension of some of the ideas already talked about, but by switching the format over to a definite lesson, then failures are acceptable and even expected, since education is frequently about the demonstration of mistakes, and either learning how to overcome them, or else learning how to avoid future mistakes.

10) With the loss (or losses) as a precursor to ultimate victory. Imagine this situation (if it seems commercially unviable, imagine it's a casual impromptu thing). The spectator is given a deck of cards, and told that they must cut to an Ace. Not just any Ace, but the Ace of Spades, and that they have five chances to do it. If they get it, they get a standing ovation. If they lose, they get booed. Arguably, each loss in the first four chances at cutting is vital in order to truly maximize the payoff of the victory on the last cut. If they don't get to feel that sense of loss, how can they truly enjoy the sense of victory? Obviously, certain things would need to be in place to ensure that this works, the main one being that if the magician can be given any tangible credit for the victory (ie: a method somehow insinuates itself), the risk will be there that the spectator was being toyed with all along for the magician's amusement. Obviously, the magician will end up getting credit for making the experience happen somehow, but even in that case, the cause of it must remain a true mystery.

11) The consolation prize. Osterlind had a great idea with his presentation of Bank Night to soften the blow of not being able to guess which envelope has the $100. Look it up. My own approach was slightly different, and I found this worked with some of the older kid audiences I had in Korea. Four envelopes, one of them contains a special prize. Three envelopes are selected and swapped around etc. and finally, each person opens up their envelope to see what they got. The three kids would end up with a folded paper that said "Free Piece of Candy", which is what they got. I'd open up my own to show the 10,000 Won bill (less impressive than it sounds -- it's the largest bill they have in Korea, but it works out to about $10 Canadian). In any case, the blow of losing is softened, but there's still a fun moment where the kids raz each other for not having switched the envelope one more time. Assuming you're not doing this with every trick you do in that show, I think that properly handled it can add some nice texture to the show as a hole. (For instance, I had plenty of other routines where all credit goes to the kid for winning)

12) Systematically disproving counter-claims. If I make a claim to power and do an effect to show it, then it makes sense that if somebody disbelieves the claim, they would have a counter-claim to how it could have happened. In its purest form what we're talking about is overtly cancelling methods and eliminating false solutions (for this, go straight to Tamariz's The Magic Way), although it doesn't have to be so rigidly structured as that (refer to Dai Vernon's discussion on the Ambitious Card, the "Jack of Hearts Trick", in the Revelations DVD series). I think being humble or even eccentric about the claim is a great way to diffuse the challenge, and almost downplaying the significance of the feat to keep it from seeming like you're trying to establish superiority through the feat. The thing here is that, unlike games of chance or whatnot where there's a key moment of loss or being shown incorrect, the whole structure of the routine is that it's meant to withstand scrutiny, much like defending a thesis statement (only more fun).

13) Being wrong results in a better outcome. One big difference between the standard Two In The Hands, One In The Pocket routine (ie: "How many are there here?"), and Eugene Burger's approach to the Sponge Balls, is that, even though the spectator is consistently guessing incorrectly about how many balls are in the hand, there is more potential for an exciting surprise when the spectator opens their own hand to see the change. Also, assuming you were the generous sort, you could play some sort of game with a young spectator, in which a "bad" prize magically changes into a "good" prize.

I realize some of those overlap a fair bit. I'll try to write more as I can think of them. If anybody else has any ideas and wants to share them, I'd be all ears. (Updated twice so far...)