I recently attended a fairly big magic show at a resort. The magician was pretty good, and though he did some of the standard tricks, for the most part he executed them quite well. I happen to enjoy trying to figure out how illusions are done, so I knew beforehand what the tip offs might be. In one illusion, something happened that I think harmed his performance and maybe he’d like to know.
The illusion was one in which the magician is in a box on a table. Audience members come up and take positions under the table and around the box on all four sides. The idea is that there’s no way he can disappear without one of the audience members seeing it. So he performs the disappearing trick well and I think the guy standing behind the box, where the black stage curtain is, must be in on it. But hey, well done anyway.
So the audience members are leaving the stage, heading back to their seats. As they do so, the magician moves on to his next trick and calls for a volunteer. He selects someone way in the back, so I and a lot of other audience members turn to see. When I look back, I see the suspected stooge “audience member” continuing to walk past all the seating and right out the door to the lobby.
If he had delayed his next trick just a moment or two with a little patter, no one would have been turning back to see the volunteers go back to their seats (and the stooge go out the door).
I’m wondering if he’d appreciate a little heads up about that, or if it would be obnoxious, as if I’m saying “nah, nah, I know how you did it!” Or if he just wouldn’t care.
(Also wondering if it would be the same as writing an author to notify him that he misspelled a word on page 237 or said “east” when you meant “west” on p. 148. I can assure you those notes are not received well.)
It mostly depends on your tone and the personality of the magician. Most would be happy to get suggestions to improve their act.
BTW, writing an author about typos is different. Those are the responsibility of the copyeditor (unless it’s self-published).
Speaking as a frustrated author, yes, please, tell me where the typos are. I’ll try to get 'em fixed.
As a professional, I always am open to constructive criticism. If I’ve been doing something wrong, f’goodness’ sake let me know!
You observed a minor flaw in the guy’s overall performance, and he ought to know of it. So, yeah; shoot him a note. He might ignore it, but you’ll still have done the right thing.
If you start off by telling him how much you enjoyed his performance, and how skilled he is, that would set a good tone (even if you stretch the truth a little). I would think he might want to know about anything that reveals he is using a stooge. The whole idea is that the stooge is just a regular audience member, and should act like it. I think it’s all in the tone of how you present the criticism. Make sure to mention you are more than just a casual fan of professional magic, even if not a pro yourself.
I wrote him yesterday, with just the approach that Orwell suggests. I’ll update if I ever hear back from him.
I was at a presentation by a guy from Google a while ago. While talking about the driverless car project he quoted a figure of over 2.3 million deaths a year in the US from traffic accidents. I realized this was nonsense and that only 30 odd thousand people die each year having read that gun deaths are on about the same level.
Although no one else in the audience seemed to notice the error afterwards I went over, shook hands with him and told him how much I enjoyed his talk. I then mentioned that he was wrong about the number of car accident deaths. He didn’t seem convinced. I explained that the rate he quoted would mean that 1 in every 130 people would die each year in a car crash. Each decade 1 in 13 people you know would die this way. It would be ridiculously common.
Once he accepted that I was right he was grateful because he realized that if he made the mistake again it may be publicly disputed.
Not all authors. Last year I was listening to an author talk about it, and about the responses of other authors. OK, the one I was listening to was comfortable interacting with other people (not true of all authors), but my experience has been that many lesser authors seem to like reading and writing, and will read your letters, and write back! (Not like writing to your friends and relations).
That seems like something so totally obvious that the magician should be informed of it. His stooges should be doing their job pretending to be part of the audience. Maybe he needed a bathroom break?
Have you guys met? :dubious:
A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down!
I wasn’t referring to all correspondence with authors. I encourage my readers to write, and I get emails a couple times a week, sometimes even old fashioned mail. I love hearing from them and I reply to every single one, often at length. I’d never discourage anyone from writing an author with comments, praise, or a question.
I was referring to the folks who think I really want to be reminded (often with a snotty tone) that a word is misspelled in my book or that I said the Colt AR-15 holds 20 rounds when it actually holds 10. Trust me, unless the book came out yesterday I already know and I hate it and I can’t correct the printing that you’re reading since it’s already in your hands. It’s kind of like saying to a person, “Hey, I just wanted to let you know there’s a big red pimple on your forehead. In case you didn’t know.”
One of our resident magicians may be along soon to support me (paging ianzan), but consider the possibility that the “stooge” was in fact a real audience member who just happened to go to the bathroom at that moment. My sense is that magicians use stooges far less often than most people assume. And the explanations civilians come up with to explain magic tricks are almost always wrong.
If it really had been a stooge, he/she would certainly have had instructions to stay in place until after the magician had called up the next volunteer, to avoid exactly the scenario you think you witnessed.
In any case, there’s no point in contacting the magician: if you’re wrong, he’ll deny that he uses stooges. And if you’re right, he’ll deny that he uses stooges.
I like to think that he was misdirection. While the whole audience was turned around and watching this guy leave, the magician was prepping something for his next trick.
Well, except that, according to Dingbang, the audience had already turned around to look at the new person being called up. That should have been enough misdirection. The “stooge” would have been distraction from the misdirection. Mis-misdirection!
Yes, he definitely was going on to his next trick. That’s my point, that he should have taken a beat before moving on.
That’s actually the joke I made when writing him, saying hey, maybe I’m off base here so I didn’t seem too arrogant. But no, that seems very unlikely.
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My sense is that magicians use stooges far less often than most people assume. And the explanations civilians come up with to explain magic tricks are almost always wrong.
[/QUOTE]
C’mon, it’s a very common, obvious trick. How else did he do it? I didn’t mention the other tricks where I clearly saw him (our seats were up front and to the extreme side) slipping through the curtain.
[QUOTE=commasense]
In any case, there’s no point in contacting the magician: if you’re wrong, he’ll deny that he uses stooges. And if you’re right, he’ll deny that he uses stooges.
[/QUOTE]
I’ m not seeking a confession. You miss the entire point of my wanting to write him.
I think the East-West thing was a reference to an error Larry Niven made in the first edition of Ringworld. The book opens with a wealthy individual throwing a birthday party that lasts nearly two full days, by virtue of rapid travel around the world from city to city so it’s always the appropriate date in the local time zone. Except that in the first edition, he has the party traveling in the wrong direction.
Science fiction fans being what they are, of course a great many fans wrote in to point out the mistake. But whenever Niven talked about it later, I got the impression that he was more annoyed with himself for making the mistake, than with the fans for pointing it out.
Really? Maybe…
-He left because he was an incompetent stooge.
-He left because he’d had to pee before the trick started, and now he really really had to pee.
-He left because he was embarrassed at being on stage and has an anxiety disorder.
-He left because during the trick his husband motioned to him, and he went to the lobby to see what was up.
-He left because he was so excited by his participation in a trick that he wanted to call his mom and tell her.
The idea that the stooge was so incompetent that he’d leave–something that people sitting in the back at least would be sure to notice–seems like one of the less likely explanations to me.
Well, it’s nice that you have so much faith in the professionalism of the stooge. I don’t know if Occam’s Razor really applies here, but I still see “stooge making a few bucks per show doesn’t really care enough to be discreet once the trick is over” as the simpler explanation.
If he had an anxiety disorder and was embarrassed to be on stage, he wouldn’t have volunteered. And if he had to pee so bad, I doubt he would volunteer to be on stage. And it seems unlikely that someone would walk past whoever he came to the show with and go outside to call his mother, rather than sitting down with his companion and saying, “Wow, that was awesome. I didn’t see a thing!”
But the husband frantically waving for him to come out to the lobby for some reason that popped up in the few minutes he was on stage and was so urgent that he needed to head straight to the lobby? Guess that could happen.
Perhaps the magician will read my email and laugh maniacally about how he fooled another know-it-all magic fan into thinking he saw something amiss.
Because you’re also a “big” magician who knows how all these things work?
Cite that use of plants by magicians is “very common”? Not having seen the show, I obviously have no idea how it was done, but if you read any of the threads here asking how a magician did a certain trick, the guesses non-magicians make are almost always wrong. And because the first explanation civilians usually come up with to explain a trick is a stooge, magicians rarely use them. A good magician doesn’t need plants, and uses techniques that civilians rarely can figure out.
Also, when magicians hire assistants to appear on stage (not plants, but the costumed girl who is “cut in half,” for example), they are always very well trained and perform their tasks with split-second precision. There is little reason to believe that any decent magician who was using a plant wouldn’t insist on similar professionalism. I agree with LHoD that your suggestion of it being a “stooge making a few bucks per show doesn’t really care enough to be discreet once the trick is over” is the unlikeliest possibility.
BTW, why don’t you just tell us the name of the magician and where you saw him? That might help us decide whether he is as incompetent as you seem to think he was.
No, you’ve missed my point. You weren’t being as helpful as you thought.
Wait, now you’re saying that the stooge leaving was part of his plan?!? I think he’ll be laughing for another reason entirely.