Hey...That's New....
By: J. Thompson

It seems to me that too many magicians are all doing the same tricks. They fall all over each other in a mad dash to buy the hot new DVD, the just released greatest gimmick, etc. All this means is that there are thousands of magicians who all do the same tricks. A mass of clones. How is that helping the art?

It would appear that a craze which isn't yet anywhere near dying off is to slam David Blaine. Sure, he took a bunch of seemingly (to magicians, anyway) simple tricks and got rediculously huge responses from them. There is a lesson there. Magicians should have been running to their bookshelves to pore through material searching for things that have been overlooked and underperformed. What actually happened? Everyone ran out and bought folding quaters and ravens. Wrong lesson learned.

About a decade before the first Blaine special, I knew a guy who worked in a magic store. From time to time he would bring little things he was toying with into a cafe that we all hung out at. I remember he brought a folding quarter once. We all realized that the quarter in the bottle trick was visually cool, yet required having access to a bottle. So we screwed around with it and somebody realized that "biting" it in half looked funny as hell. So we played with that for awhile, got bored, and put the quarter away. Flash forward ten years and an unknown magician on television does this trick that years earlier we thought was way too stupid to actually attempt to an audience and end up with an enormous response. Whoops. The delivery made it work...not the trick.

Running out and buying the same hot new tricks that your magic idol is performing will not make you a great magician. It will make you a clone of someone else.

Some may argue that people ask for certain tricks and it is nice to give the people what they want. Sure, if you are a salesman. Would a film director retool his romantic comedy because the hottest new film has action and explosions? No. He would stay true to his vision. Do you want to be an artist or a salesman?

There are many tricks which haven't been popularly performed in ages. They are classics for a reason. They work. The fact that the audience has probably never seen them just give syou an edge. They have all seen someone bite a quarter in half. They have all seen levitations. Just because it isn't "new" doesn't mean it isn't new to someone who has never seen it. If you truly respect the audience, you will give them something they haven't seen.