Lately I’ve been doing a lot of magic lectures and one of the things I talk about is how to move magic forward with your choice of material. In the lecture I really talk down on sponge balls, but they are a perfect example of why they are holding magic back.
Most magicians if you ask why the do sponge balls, they will give an answer like, “they get a good reaction“. That’s an answer, but not an honest one. The answer should be “they are easy to get a good reaction with“, which is a lot more honest. There are people that can get a reaction…an amazing reaction with the lamest tricks. The difference is that the people who can get a good reaction with a lame trick worked on getting the good reaction with a subpar trick.
Let’s do a little history lesson. The inventor of the sponge balls was Jesse Lybarger in the mid 1920’s. That makes the trick about 95 years old. The basic routine was there, but the routine that most people do took about 20 years to become a standard routine in the mid 1940’s when Al Cohn started selling his routine. Now fast forward to today, with a few exceptions the routine is basically unchanged 80 years later. Is the routine that good…or are magicians that lazy?
I’m betting on magicians being lazy. Let’s do an analogy, the car was patented in the mid 1880’s and Ford’s Model T came out in 1908. So it took about 20 years from the first patent to the Model T, which is about the same time to hit it’s stride as sponge balls. One is a fairly complex piece of machinery and one is a ball of sponge.
Let’s fast forward to today, sort of. I’m going to “handicap” the car because it’s about 40 years older than the sponge balls trick. Imagine a car in the mid 1980’s, don’t compare it to today’s cars, but to the first automobile patented and to the Model T. There have been a lot of improvements made, like a roof, or air conditioning and aerodynamics.
Now compare your sponge ball routine to the spongeball routines in the 1920’s and 1940’s, has yours changed much? Let’s see there’s the addition of the purse frame and the Eugene Burger‘s ending with the 30 spongeballs, both of which are over 30 years old!
How has your sponge ball routine pushed magic forward?
Spoiler alert, it probably hasn’t. Sure there are people routines like Ball to Jumbo Square (also over 30 years old) or Sponge Rabbits (almost 80 years old), then there’s the outlier which is something like Bizarro’s Color Changing Sponge Ball, which is fantastic, but definitely not as widely used as the standard sponge ball routine.
So, is the standard sponge ball routine the perfect routine…or is it simply an easy routine?
Push that sponge ball forward.
Tag: eugene burger
Solid Background Helps…
The other night I did a corporate gig and before the stage show I did some roving during the cocktail hour. Personally I prefer to do this than not do it at a corporate event, as it basically lets me be my own “opening act”. People start to warm up to me before the show. … Continue reading “Solid Background Helps…”
The other night I did a corporate gig and before the stage show I did some roving during the cocktail hour. Personally I prefer to do this than not do it at a corporate event, as it basically lets me be my own “opening act”. People start to warm up to me before the show.
When doing roving magic, I’m always looking for miracles to make happen. Things that aren’t part of my normal close up set. Typically these use things that are in the performing environment. The round tables in this room had a table cloth with a square cloth napkin in the middle. I’m assuming a center piece was on the napkin at some point. That led to a miracle!
I was performing for a group. I asked a guy to name any card. He said 10 of Diamonds. I handed him the deck, he shuffled them tossed them in the air so they landed on the table, and his named card ended up under the middle of the napkin!
How did I do it? I remember watching Eugene Burger’s video on Matt Schulien’s Fabulous Card Discoveries.
On that VHS tape he did Matt’s Card Under Tablecloth and that’s basically what I did. I did have to adjust it a little bit for the situation. That’s where having a solid background in different tricks and sleight of hand moves comes in very handy! This trick was the talk of my roving set and was totally worth the risk of trying something I’d never done before.
Magic Books…
TI’m a magic book guy, I love magic books. My generation of magic is at the tail end of books, when I was getting serious about magic videos didn’t really exist. The VHS tapes that were around were insanely expensive at $75-$100 bucks! Being a book guy, that means you find a lot of hidden … Continue reading “Magic Books…”
TI’m a magic book guy, I love magic books. My generation of magic is at the tail end of books, when I was getting serious about magic videos didn’t really exist. The VHS tapes that were around were insanely expensive at $75-$100 bucks!
Being a book guy, that means you find a lot of hidden little gems of magic. Things that are cool and buried in a book. Someone once told me that the best things in books are the tricks with no illustrations. They are the things that the author wants in print to assert ownership, but doesn’t want anyone to do.
My book collection is pretty big and I like having a large selection of books to reference, or to read. I’ve also worked through most of the stuff in all of the books I own. Many years ago, Eugene Burger mentioned in an article in a magic magazine that he only had a few magic books. He loved books, read them, however he didn’t keep them. He gave them away after reading them.
I thought it was strange that he didn’t keep books. As I get older, and my performing style is more defined, the books that want to keep are probably less than a couple dozen. Most of these books would be books that had an influence on my, now that I really need to read them again.
This has made me think about the advice that you should “Only learn seven tricks”. This is advice that I don’t agree with. You can’t pick seven trick without learning hundreds of tricks to pick those seven. We no longer live in a time where you can make a career out of a handful of tricks. You need to keep learning and adding to your base knowledge to grow!
TLDR: Keep learning, but you don’t need to be a hoarder!