Have your magic tricks gone wrong?
It doesn’t matter how much you practice your magic tricks, sometimes the unexpected happens and everything goes wrong.• At that moment, how you deal with the situation is the most important factor. It’s easy just to throw your hands up in the air and let everything fall apart. However, with a little preparation beforehand you can make sure you are prepared to turn this situation around.
The instruction guides for magic tricks tends not to spend any time dealing with mistakes that can happen. There is little information for new magicians covering how to best handle mistakes and slipups during performance. These skills tend to be developed through live performance and the school of hard knocks. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Ben Williams has written a book explaining how magicians can deal with situations like this. Here’s some more information:
You will Learn:
- What to say and do when something goes wrong.
- Common reasons why magic tricks fail in live performance
- Why your frame of mind is so important to your success.
- How audiences really react to mistakes
- How to use memory erasing techniques.
- Effective use of ‘outs’ to fix the situation.
- How to follow a failed magic trick.
- Why getting things wrong can be a positive event.
- Much much more
Download the free ebook here
Hi, thanks for your free ebook. As a kid’s entertainer I was intrigued at this perspective. For me, getting the trick wrong is essential, I’m equally keen for tricks to go wrong for adults a lot of the time. In my opinion, paint it red. If something goes wrong, make it such a big deal, that your audience assume it’s just part of the performance, or even better, that you’ve improvised brilliantly, they see that you are unruffled – no matter how badly you’ve screwed up! (The obvious exception is if you’re stupid enough to have caused actual injury to an audience member by shoving their hand onto a big spike.)
The bottom line is, comedy trumps magic every time. But a true magical ending leaves everyone feeling a sense of wonder.
I also watched the vid about wishing audiences were more honest. We should understand that many, many folks in our audiences know exactly what we’re doing a lot of the time. Many of them will have actually performed these tricks themselves. Know how many folks have a secret love of magic? As magic dealers, I’m sure you know there are thousands of “laymen” who learn a great deal about our art.
There is a very simple way to instantly know if you’ve been caught out – you should be watching your spectator’s faces. I used to be a professional photographer. Large group shots require that you scan all the faces in pretty much an instant, just as you press the shutter release. Incredibly, even with 1000 people, I learned to see if someone had shut their eyes during the shot.
At the point when we’re doing the “move”, it’s nearly always preferable to be looking directly at your spectators. That means, you should detect if someone sees the move – for a start, they will be looking at your hands.
So, don’t rely on the audience to tell you verbally that they’ve seen you mess up. If your show is good, they are NEVER going to mention that they spotted a move or sleight. They might even comment on how brilliant the routine was, because they know the secret – and later on, they’ll garner great pleasure from explaining it to their friends.
Learn to read your audiences. Watch their faces. Not only can you learn to spot when you’ve been caught out, but this gives you powerful insights, and provides a basis for some good banter, and believe it or not, mind-reading. With kids, it’s as simple as hearing someone calling them by name, and then (a minute or so later) predicting their name!
It’s great to be talked about, and surely, we want folks to talk about our magic and try to explain it. Of course, many, many times someone (who might not even have been there) will know how the trick was done. Most often (hopefully), they live in wonder and disbelief at the impossible. It doesn’t matter, because magic is in the now, what happens after the show is not the show.
So, it’s all about showmanship. And when you know your show well enough, you will be looking at your audience throughout, reading them, and reassuring them. That is a difference from actors, who generally shouldn’t look directly at the audience.
Excellent ebook. Make sure my thanks get to Ben. Enjoyed it and saw myself in it.
We “forget” what we think we know. I need to start a library of your stuff – so I know where to go.
A couple of points that you can maybe use in a future version;
1. This underlines that you should not show your “killers” first. If you do, then you have nothing to fall back on.
Or, worse, nothing to finish on. It is very tempting to start with a killer, but you now have no ammunition for
when things go wrong. Most of us have less than half-a-dozen killers. Use them wisely.
2. This happened to me during a performance. Venue was a pub, after a meal, amongst friends and one new friend.
He didn’t know me but had heard from mutual fiends that I “do magic”. He asked to see some tricks. OK. No prob.
I’m a card performer, so I pull out my pack (Always carry one!) and do several effects – then relaxed into an effect
that has always worked for me. Whilst introducing the effect with some patter, I casually and genuinely shuffled the
deck. Horror! I dropped several cards on the floor! Couldn’t believe it. Haven’t done that in years. Whilst still sitting,
I bent down to pick up the errant cards. Now, because of my height and the height of the pub table, this brought the side
of my head in contact with the table. He – the “new” punter – said; “What are you doing?”. I said “I’m listening to the wood.”.
“You’re doing what?” – “Uh, the wood. Different woods sing in different ways. You just have to listen to them.”
Honest to God – he put his head on the table and listened to it!
Got the biggest laugh from the others (and me) that you can imagine. I didn’t perform any more tricks. Couldn’t follow that.