MagicShow.Tips – A daily blog about magic by Louie Foxx

Evolution of a Joke

I had an idea for a joke about Houdini. The line I thought of was:
“Once it took Houdini 8 hours to escape a jail cell, a could lawyer could have done it in two.“
I wanted to make it as a cartoon, so I put some basic prompts into AI to make the basic picture:

Then I had AI add the caption:

For some reason it had a cropping issue at the top. Once I saw it, I didn’t like the lawyer, he didn’t need to be in the picture, so I had him taken out.

Looking at the picture above, I decided it didn’t need the word “once,” so I had it removed. Now it’s a nice, tight joke with a setup and a punchline, and the image doesn’t distract or give away the punchline.

I also rewrote the punchline, so there are two versions:

I’m not sure which I like better. I think the one on the right, as it’s tighter. The one on the left really takes the audience to the punchline, while the one on the right makes them think a little.

That’s a little insight of what goes into writing a joke.

-Louie

Venmo Prediction

There’s not much to this idea; it’s a confabulation routine where you predict a Venmo transaction. The three things predicted are a name, an amount, and an emoji.

Method wise, my first idea was to use a no force mental epic. There are a couple of things I don’t like about that. The main one is that you don’t have much room to write. Also, the prop doesn’t look like something that I would use in my show.

When you think about it, you just need to force the three things. Ideally this would be a routine that could be done onstage, alone, without a spectator. That leads to a simple method, the Three Section SvenPad Picasso. This is a forcing pad that’s cut into three sections.

For the routine, I’m thinking it starts by tossing a paper ball into the audience. That person selects a name. It’s tossed to a second person who chooses an amount, and finally, a third person who picks an emoji. All of those selections are them saying stop as you riffle through a section of the pad. The paper ball is tossed back to the stage, and it’s opened to reveal all of the information

This is a packs small, plays big routine!

-Louie

Vanishing Bottle Routines

Yesterday, I posted a little routine for the latex vanishing bottle prop. If you haven’t read it, you can read it here and do that before you read this as what follows will make more sense. Here are some ideas for yesterday’s routine:

Use two bags instead of one so that the item travels across the stage.
Say they’ll change places, the spin the bag 180 degrees.
If using two bags, one could be labelled “full” and the other “empty”. You then turn the bags around, and they have the other word on the back.
To add a layer, to make the method harder to back track, you could start with a variety of drinks that are different colors and force the latex bottle.

There you go, a few ideas to expand the routine.

-Louie

Vanishing Beer Bottle Routine Idea

This morning, I was thinking about uses for the latex vanishing bottles. Here’s one of the routines that I thought of:

Effect: You put a full beer bottle and an empty glass into a paper bag. A snap of the fingers and you remove an empty beer bottle and then a full glass of beer!

Method: You need a bag, a latex beer bottle, a matching real beer bottle, a glass full of beer, and a fake bottomless glass. This fake bottomless glass is basically a thin plastic tube. In the old days of magic, they would call it something like a “celluloid fake”.

Set Up: Place the empty beer bottle and the full glass inside the bag on your table.

Working: Show the empty glass (plastic tube) and put it into the full glass that’s inside the bag. Next, you show the full bottle (latex) and put it into the bag.

Snap your fingers, then remove the full glass (with the plastic tube inside), and then remove the empty beer bottle. Crumple up the bag (with the latex bottle inside) and toss it offstage.

That’s it, there’s really not much to it, but a bit more simply vanishing the bottle or making an empty one become full.

-Louie

Coin Matrix Layout

One of the things that I’m playing with is a Coin Matrix. One thing I thought about is why the coins are in the corners of the performance area rather than in some other shape. I get that there’s a lot of tradition, as the modern coin matrix is based on Yank Hoe’s Sympathetic Coins. Then, when Al Schneider created the modern version, he called it Matrix, and I think in math, those are traditionally a square or rectangular shape.

I was playing with some other shapes and layouts for the coin matrix. A straight horizontal line, a diagonal line, however I think I’ve settled on the classic Ace Assembly layout. With a leader coin in front and the three follower coins in the back.

I really like this layout, as in my routine, there’s some other stuff that needs to happen, and it moves all of the empty spaces once the coins travel to my edge of the table, which makes the next part for me a lot easier to do!

I want to say there’s nothing wrong with the standard coin matrix layout; however, there’s also nothing wrong with changing it!

-Louie

Christmas Mindreading

Here’s a quick little mindreading trick that I came up with a few years ago.

Effect: You ask someone to think of one of the following Christmas things:
Gift – Stocking – Candy Cane – Santa – Snowman
You then tell them letters in the word they are thinking of, then finally the word!

This is a simple progressive anagram. There’s really not much to it, you follow the card below:

I remember the word NASM for the flow of the letters named. Then, for the order of the items, think of a “Gift left in a stocking, which is a candy cane from Santa.” Then if it’s none of those, it’s a snowman.

There you go, some propless mentalism for your family gathering.

-Louie

Five Minute Magic Spot

While I was on the cruise ship I was asked to do a 5-7 minute spot in the farewell shows. I don’t do short spots as often as I used to do them a couple decades ago. They stress me out because you don’t really have time to establish a character or vibe and you don’t have time to win back the audience if you lose them.

Here’s my props for the 5-7 min spot:

Here’s what I did: My stand up chop cup routine (see my lecture notes) which ends with the production of a tennis ball. Then I did a card to pocket routine with a signed card. The routine ends with the signed card coming out of the tennis ball.

One thing to note is that aside from these props, where everything happens in my hands, the only other thing I used (but not necessary) is a stool to set the tennis ball on after it’s produced, so that it’s visible the whole set. The stool was already on stage from the act before me and the one after me, so there was zero moving of props for my spot.

Oh, the black string thing is one of Nick Lewin’s Ultimate Microphone Holders. That allows me to use a handheld mic, so I don’t need to get mic’d up with a head set.

It’s an action packed 5ish mins, with a nice little surprise at the end.

-Louie

Everything Has Already Been Invented

I always hate it when people say, “Everything has already been invented.” I think it’s a way for the person who said that to:
1: Justify them not trying to be creative.
2: Used as a way to trivialize someone else’s creativity.

That said, there are a lot of ideas that are reinvented, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Many tricks from a long time ago weren’t complete because they couldn’t find the final piece of the puzzle. Sometimes a technique or material didn’t exist that would take the trick from just “meh” to amazing.

I was reading The Bat magic magazine from the 1940s on the plane home from Florida and read the Bowman’s Bullseye. Read the circled effect:

Does this sound like a modern trick? If you said The Stranger, then you’re correct! The effect is the same, but the method is quite different and wouldn’t work today. In fact, I’m not sure Bowman’s Bullseye was practical in the 1940s.

What the stranger did was create the same effect, but using techniques that would have been impossible 15 years ago, and made it practical! The two tricks are light years apart (OK, actually like 90 years) and can’t be compared, other than they are both based on the telephone tricks that were invented pretty much where the telephone was.

Keep creating!

-Louie

Radio Mind Reading

In my reading of The Bat magic magazine, I found an interesting trick from July 1945. In the magazine, this is called Radio Mind Reading by Professor Elkan M Lipka. Despite the name, I’m not sure how this would work over the radio, but the magazine says it’s a good phone trick that makes much more sense.

The effect is you show the layout below. Someone thinks of a any card and they tell you if it’s in row A or B. Then they also tell the which of the numbered rows it’s in. You then tell them the card they are thinking of.

I posted this on my Facebook and had people do it. I did make one change: instead of them telling me which rows it appears in, I had them tell me the sum of the rows. I think that buries the method a little bit by adding a variable where you could get to a number multiple ways.

A change I would make is to adjust the method to match a memorized deck stack rather than the ace-to-king order. That would make it a trick that the average person couldn’t backtrack. That said, in either form, all the person has to do is say it’s math or an algorithm, and they’d be right, and there’s really nothing you can do to dispel that.

I think that if you used this with a physical prediction, like an invisible deck, you might have something. If you put the layout image on a projection screen and talked about how magic used to be done, and how it’s done now. Here’s how this trick would look in 1945, and here’s how it looks now.

-Louie

Back on Land!

Today I wrapped up my contracts on the cruise ship, and I’m heading back home for the holidays.

It’s always great to perform in nice theaters, but even better when I get to perform with stage/tech crews that are amazing! The stage/tech crews on cruise ships work with magicians and variety acts a lot, so they already kinda know what to do with an act like mine.

We’re entering the slower time for performing (for me). One of the things that I want to do is work on the transition from using ShowCues to GoButton for my audio. There’s a bit of a learning curve in the way you interact with GoButton. I’ve been using ShowCues for over a decade, so it’ll take some work to unlearn the muscle memory.

-Louie