Thursday, May 3, 2007

Fooled?

I had the opportunity to sit down with a few magicians from out of town who presented some very interesting material! They were very good! We had a lot of fun and shared a bunch of interesting things. My issue comes in when we consider fooling one another. I understand there are magician foolers but when sitting down with one another what material should one use? Magician foolers that takes advantage of the fact that the audience has a certain knowledge? What about material for laymen? Do we perform our usual? Is there material applying to both laymen and magicians?
These thoughts brought me to one ideal conclusion and therefore a goal. All your material should be commercial so as to please the laiety yet still deceptive and clever enough to fool your fellow magicians. So this brings up the question, what fools both and serves to entertain? In a recent phone discussion with an older magician this question came up and lead to some thoughts on gimmicks and gaffs. Some effects require them, some effects are simply elevated using them. I suppose the Tommy Downs coin work comes to mind and Vernon requesting to see the gimmick. A sleight of hand hand gimmicked version were shown and the gimmicked version was clearly better.
This have become a jumble of incoherence so I will leave end it with the effect. At the end of the day it's the effect that matters. Fooling both groups is great, and doing it by any means necessary is wonderful but be certain that it maintains entertaining.

One last thought, fooling magicians is often very specific in nature. A card being selected and returned, rarely is the trick or revelation the fooler, rather the control or means of maintaining control, fools or doesn't. For a layman, it usually boils down to the revelation or denouement of the effect. In conclusion, one would be wise to break down effects into varying elements, such as selection and controlling procedure and revelations and mixing and matching them so as to fool magicians with the control process while still leaving laymen bedazzled by the end result, the effect.

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