Making Your Magic Performance Mysterious and Humorous

All human knowledge take the form of interpretation. - Walter Benjamin

As both a seasoned magician and stand-up comic, I have a relatively unique, first-hand experience of the perplexing relationship between the mysterious and the humorous.

Sometimes, the apparently impossible can be very funny because a performance of strong magic can create the tension required for a big laugh. My favorite example of this is the audience member who bursts into laughter the moment you open your hand to show that a coin has disappeared. Due to the individual's mood and personality, and the magician's demeanor, the tension is released in laughter rather than frustration or even anger.

Tension release is one of the underlying dynamics of all performance art, but depending upon how you frame a particular performance (as a mystery, a comedy, a romance, etc.) the presentation will inspire various kinds of tension and release.

With this in mind, you would do well to structure your performance as a mindfully orchestrated series of tensions followed by moments of release. But how does one distinguish between the moments you want the audience to laugh and the moments you want them to feel awe? Of course, many comic magician's attempt to marry the two, but this can be extremely difficult. While a magic show requires the audience to believe, many gags and jokes actually require the audience to disbelieve.

Consider how audiences might react if they believed that the absurd stories comics often tell were actually true. People would be offended, annoyed and even alarmed. However, audiences know they are just stories. Of course, audiences also often maintain a certain amount of disbelief during a magic show, but when a signed playing card appears inside a sealed envelope inside a wallet, that is not just a story. It actually happened. (Imagine saying, Just joking! after making three coins vanish into thin air. Or telling a joke about strangling a local politician with your bare hands and then insisting that you were completely serious.

For a few years I tried to introduce powerful magic moments into my stand-up act while performing in comedy clubs, but it almost always seemed to result in a kind of theatrical confusion. As long as I was telling jokes, the audience would be comfortable, laughing and having a good time. (Well, most of the time!)

Then when I would perform a feat of magic and completely mystify everyone in the room, it was as if the connection between myself and the audience would suddenly break. I would lose their focus, people would turn to each other to swap comments on the magic, and I would have to spend four or five minutes slowly regaining a rhythm and the audience's trust.

It seems to me that to inspire awe and wonder (as opposed to That's a neat trick!) you have to appear to take what you do seriously. Not overly seriously, but with some degree of seriousness, if only during the key magic moments. In contrast, to inspire laughter it is generally more effective to act in an altogether lighter fashion.

Comedy and magic seem to be strangely at odds with each other, though of course you could say, It all comes down to the individual performer and how he or she presents their magic and comedy. As undoubtedly true as this generalization is, the vast majority of the magicians I have seen who effectively combine magic with comedy do so by watering down the magic, often even reducing it to the butt of jokes. I hate that. I love magic and have the greatest respect for it, though I do understand that because many people find magic and magicians threatening, they are the perfect grist for the comedy mill. I still loathe seeing it belittled and made fun of.

Seed Newsvine

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