Growing up

An old magic book shows we've come further than we think.

I recently pulled a beginner’s magic book off my shelf to review its contents, something I find myself doing more these days as I seek to expand the list of worthy tricks I can teach my magic students. It’s one of the better books out there for neophytes, despite its age (1998) and the off-putting title, Magic for Dummies. Written by the well-respected author David Pogue, the book had the help of an advisory panel of professional magicians, a who’s who of the magic world, some of whom I have learned from personally. Dummies happens to offer some very good tricks that are well-taught, practical tips for easing into magic, and excellent advice on showmanship, so I continue to recommend it to students.

Smart stuff. The original edition circa 1998.

For the first time in ages, however, I scoured every page of the book—and found myself groaning at some of the content. First, interspersed with the excellent tricks are a number of juvenile “gross” tricks, tricks with names like “Pencil up the Nose,” “Straw through the Jaw,” or—I shudder as I write this—”Beans through the Orifices.”

Words fail me on that last one. Here is the author’s description:

“The effect: You insert four beans into various skull orifices—your tear ducts, nose, and ears, for example. After considerable contorting, blinking, and snorting, you manage to suck all four beans through your interconnected sinus cavities and spit them out your mouth. Yummy!”

Wow. I’ve no doubt that in the right time and place and for the right crowd, and in the hands of a performer who could pull this off, this is a highly entertaining routine that brings tears of laughter. It was a reputation-maker for at least one professional (and brilliant) magician, the late Tom Mullica. And just recently a magician who offered a master class at my magic club taught the bean trick. “This is killer!” he gushed. Maybe. But for an introduction to magic?

The other concern I discovered with the Dummies book is its advice on how to answer the question every magician must learn to address: “How’d you do that?” Here are some of the book’s suggestions:

“Quite well, don’t you think?”

“If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

“I’m a genetic freak.”

“What are you, from 60 Minutes?”

“Can you keep a secret? Well, so can I.”

Smarmy, insulting and not really funny—and certainly not conducive to a positive experience of magic for the spectator or the budding magician, who likely will not be greeted with peals of laughter at any of these lines. No, gross tricks and snarky one-liners only perpetuate the unfortunate perception that magicians are show-offs or jerks and that magic is a hobby for nerds—when in fact, when elevated to the graceful expression that it can be, magic is delightful, life-affirming and even life-changing—for both audience and performer—and those who approach our art with thoughtfulness and theatricality are visual and psychological performing artists of the highest order.

I don’t mean to pick on one book. As I noted, Magic for Dummies is an excellent guide for beginners, just with a note of caution. Alongside those tricks I would skip are many well worth learning, such as having the spectator magically cut to the four aces from a shuffled deck, or causing a borrowed wedding ring to eerily climb up a rubber band of its own accord, something one of my middle school magic students taught the rest of the class one time on Zoom. And I cut the book and its author some slack because it was written in another time, another age, pre-2000, when wackiness and smarminess could still roam freely.

Then came 9/11 and the world changed. We changed. When the comedian Gilbert Gottfried told a 9/11-related joke just three weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the audience hissed and someone cried out, “Too soon!” Nearly 22 years later, it still feels too soon; were Mr. Gottfried still with us, I don’t think he could tell the joke even now.

In some ways, magic has become more serious, too. That magician-lecturer who taught the bean trick notwithstanding, most magicians today are weaving more meaning into their presentations and focusing on connecting with their audiences, sometimes in deeply moving ways. A current example is magician Asi Wind’s off-Broadway “Inner Circle,” a 70-minute magic show based entirely on a deck of cards created by audience members writing their names on blank playing cards at the beginning of the show. The audience does not merely witness the magic; they become the magic itself. Jeff McBride and Dr. Larry Hass of the McBride Magic & Mystery School in Las Vegas have been proponents of creating deeper meaning and connection in magic for years beginning in the early 1990s, and have spearheaded the decades-long movement toward more meaningful magic. More recent beginner’s magic books steer the reader away from corny one-liners and emphasize respect for the audience, a principle I teach in my MagicLab classes.

You might say that although it still has a long way to go, magic has grown up. Since the late 1990s, when Magic for Dummies was written, magicians in general have become more culturally competent, more aware of and eager to celebrate the diversity within our ranks (women and people of color are more likely to grace the covers of our magazines—finally), more attentive to the art of magic—and more aware that while comedy has its place in magic, and that in fact magic has plenty of built-in funny business, many of us are not comedians nor should we try to be. Magicians have become more mature, you might say.

So has society in general, or so I believe. For as goes magic, so goes the world. This past week I received two emails that capture a kind of tension many of us may be grappling with: the feeling that the world looks pretty bleak right now coupled with the suspicion—or maybe just a well-placed hope—that things aren’t as bad as they seem. It’s not unlike the friendly tension one encounters when watching a magic show: What is illusion, and what is reality?

The first email came from Zoom, inviting me to a webinar later this week titled, “Finding Joy and Balance in Overwhelming Times.” The webinar addresses overworking: “Research has shown that our obsession with work is leading to burnout, stress, sickness, and disengagement,” the email reads. “However, there is hope for a more healthy and sustainable balance.” Suggested here is that working oneself to death is a response, and an unhealthy one, to a world that seems to be working overtime to drive us crazy.

The second email was a weekly Q & A published by ProgressiveChristianity.org, a group my minister side appreciates for its openness in airing what is broken in modern Christianity and how to reclaim wisdom and compassion from the original teachings in support of social justice and healthy spirituality. A reader had posed the question, “How do you keep your spirits and attitude positive amidst the political turmoil and social unrest affecting our country today?”

The response, from the Rev. Brandan Robertson, included the acknowledgement of a world gone awry—our nation divided, an uptick in xenophobia, and existential threats to our very existence, such as climate change. “Is it any wonder that we are more depressed and anxious than ever?” he writes. “But in reality, our world is not much worse [emphasis his] than it has always been—there have always been crimes, hate, fear, and existential threats—the difference is that now we are inundated with them in real-time, and so everything seems so dire.”

Then Robertson adds another thought that is reminiscent of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s oft-quoted remark that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice:

“The truth is that humanity is making progress—things are objectively better, by almost all standards, in 2023 than they were 100 years ago. The values of justice, equity, democracy, and collective flourishing are growing around the world, and even when we face moments of regression, the general trajectory remains toward progress. Keeping a perspective of hope and measured optimism is essential if we’re going to keep up the momentum we need to continue realizing our vision for the common good.”

When I read Magic for Dummies and appreciate how far magic has come in 25 years, it makes me hopeful for our world in general. Magic and mystery have kept humanity company since the dawn of time. There have been magicians fooling minds as long as there have been minds to fool. Our capacity for wonder, then, may serve as a good indicator for our ability to navigate all that the world throws at us, since much of it is a mystery. Maybe magic makes for a fairly accurate barometer of the human condition and our maturation as human beings. If that’s the case, we may be further along than we thought. We may, regressions notwithstanding, be moving forward in spite of our dummy-ness. We, the children of the earth, magicians all, may be growing up. And that’s no joke.