Last week has been a HUGE week for me creatively. I’ve come up with three ideas for stage routines. One of them I actually had what I needed to try out and got to do about eight times onstage!
All three of them are comedy mentalism. Two of the three of them focus on the process of what the audience perceives is happening and the other is fairly generic mentalism.
You can read a little bit about one of them here:
https://www.magicshow.tips/magic-show-tips/showing-process-for-mentalism/
The second one is a lock trick where someone picks a key and that’s the only one out of six keys that opens the lock. Fairly standard, but and some process to it and it’s more of a stand out trick.
The premise of the trick is luck.
I get someone who says they’re lucky onstage. The try out all of the keys and confirm that only one will unlock a lock. What’s cool about the lock I’m using is that I don’t need to touch any of this!
They are now locked by their beltloop to a folding chair with short piece of chain.
Now to test their luck, I’ll flip a coin and for every correct flip they get a key to try to free themself. For each flip, they get it wrong…However on the last flip, when the call it and it’s wrong, I openly flip the coin to what they called to so that the get one key.
They select the key, it opens the lock and it frees them!
I’m going to try this out later this week to see how it plays. When I am trying new things, I want to get them onstage as quick as possible. I want to get a sense for how it actually plays with my personality. If it feels right, I’ll start working on writing up a more complete script for it. If it doesn’t, I need to reevaluate whether I should try a different angle, or stop doing it.
Louie
Category: magic show tips
Visiting the P3 Theater!
Last week when I was in Columbus, OH my bubby Chris Hanowell visited the fair and caught my show!
The next day Chris and David gave me and Billy Kidd (who was also working at the fair) a tour of the P3 Magic Theater / Magic Shop.
The p3 Magic Theater is a really cool space and looks like a great venue for magic! I mean, it should be since it was designed for that!
-Louie
Final Summer Library Show of 2025!
Well, I’m now done with my summer reading shows at libraries for the season. Here’s my case before the final packing of it.
I really liked my show this year and it was a ton of fun to do it. My show was themed around the colors of the rainbow and the show worked for libraries and summer camps. I think this is a show that I may keep around and for kids events. The rainbow themes is a great segue between tricks and a good frame for the show.
The show also got me to use iQpro for visual elements on a screen in the show. The show was mostly images on the screen, but it also had some video elements. I’m really liking this program for the video projection, however I’m struggling with it for audio. Ideally using one program to run the show would be best, however I’m thinking there may be some advantages to using two. Primarily if something happens to one, like the app freezes, I still have the other running. That means I might not have music, but I’ll still have video or vice versa. Having one is better than none!
The other routine that has come out of this that’s a keeper is my expanding card trick warm up. This is a multiphase card trick for kids. It’s probably doubled in time and effects from how I used to do it!
-Louie
Using Fire in Your Show?
The amount of magicians that give other magicians bad advice about using fire in their shows. The big thing is about getting permission or correct permitting to use fire. Many magicians repeat the old saying: “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission”.
That is totally wrong!
There are many gigs where you absolutely cannot use fire. I worked a gig at a museum where an act got fired (no pun intended) for using a flaming wallet. The gig I was at last week had this sign in all the dressing rooms:
If you showed up to this gig and fire was a part of your show, like burning a dollar bill, you wouldn’t be able to do that routine. If you did fire at this gig, which is two weeks, you wouldn’t last long!
This is why doing fire correctly by asking for permission is KEY! You’d come into this gig knowing you couldn’t use it OR getting the correct permits, etc to be able to do it.
-Louie
Sign Language Interpreter For Magic Shows
All of my shows at the Ohio State Fair had a sign language interpreter. It’s a really cool thing to have and there were a lot of deaf people in my audience because of this. It was great to have my show, which is very verbal to reach people who probably wouldn’t normally watch it.
There were 4 or 5 interpreters who cycled through the 24 shows that I did over 12 days and they got to know my show pretty well. At one point my show got off track and I was trying to bring the routine back so we could wrap up and I totally forgot where I was in the show. I asked the interpreter and she told me what the next part of the routine was!
Everyone from the Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities did a great job, and I even learned to tell a joke in sign language, and I have the sign language interpreter verbally tell it on the mic while I signed it. Not only that, but I learned a lot about sign language!
I really wish more events would offer this, and it does open the show up to more people!
-Louie
Magic Show Review
It’s always great to see what other magicians think of my show. A magician (who I had never met before) was at one of my shows last week. He texted about my show to another performer who I did know and that performer shared a screen of of the text.
It’s always great when magicians like my show. While they’re not my target audience, they are a group that I try to have something in the show for. My show is fairly non-standard, or at least if something is sorta standard, it has a twist on it. I don’t do this specifically for magician audiences, it’s for me. I honestly couldn’t do an “off the shelf” magic show. It’s the difference between a cover band and a band that does originals. A cover band will have much easier early success, but there’s a limit to the level of success they will have. However a band that does originals will have a harder time at first, but the potential level of success is much higher.
Doing standards IS a part of the learning process. You do need to know standard techniques. I did linking rings for a long time, and if you handed me a set I bet I could still flawlessly do my old routine.
-Louie
Developing a Unique Show
Right now I’m performing at the Ohio State Fair and there are three magicians AND a hypnotist that does a mentalism show. Technically that make four magicians all working at the same fair on the same dates! This is a large fair, so two of us are on one stage and two are on another stage.
None of the magicians working here do standard acts. None of us are “stick to the classics” sort of people. We all have unique shows that don’t use common material. That’s an important thing, sure an act of standard tricks can get booked, however having an act full of unique tricks definitely makes you more bookable.
Yes, bookers do know what a generic magic show looks like. A birthday party parent may not, but someone that their job is to book acts can tell the difference. This is one of the secrets to my success, being able to work with other magicians at the same event.
One of the things that I did to build a unique show was to write down the tricks I did in the show. I labelled them as: common, uncommon or unique.
The goal was to get rid of all of the common tricks, then eventually get rid of all of the uncommon tricks.
-Louie
The Moisture Festival Podcast – Matt Baker
On this episode of the Moisture Festival Podcast Louie interviews his co-host Matt Baker. They discuss a wide range of topics including Matt’s time living in Western Samoa as a teenager and how he became a vegetarian. We also learn how Matt got into performing at a young age through hackysack (footbag) and how that skill took him across Europe and all over the US doing school assemblies.
Matt discusses his time in the award winning juggling duo the Brothers from Different Mothers and the challenges that duo’s face. We learn all about the crazy places his solo show the Matt Baker Comedy + Stunt Show has taken him and where he will be going next. A fun interview with your second favorite Moisture Festival Podcast host.
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Showing Process for Mentalism
When I went to a Gerry McCambridge workshop a few years ago, he talked about how it was important for a mentalist to show the process of how they’re reading a mind. A common process shown by mentalists is reading someone’s body language. In the mentalism I do that’s not presented as a coincidence, I try to show a process that’s believable.
I’ve been playing with unbelievable processes. One idea I had was for someone who it thinking of a work, they whisper it into their fist, then the need to get that idea into my head…so they slap me in the face!
That was just an idea, but it lead to a couple other ideas that were more workable. The idea I think I’m going to go with is to have someone think of a word. Then I hand them a paper roll and they are going to swing it like a baseball bat at my belly in a way that feels like their word.
I think there’s a ton of comedy potential that can happen around how the hit me. They can’t hurt me with the paper roll as it just collapses if they swing it hard.
Then after I verbally reveal the word, I can unroll the paper tube and it says the word they are thinking of!
I think this routine has potential.
-Louie
Recording My Show
When Ray Ban first put out their Ray Ban Stories glasses with a video camera in it, I thought about getting them. The current version is the Ray Ban Meta, which does more than just record. They’re also voice assistants, and does a few other things.
I had been on the fence about getting them for years and I finally picked up a pair.
The current version of them when the record, there’s a LED that flashes. Obviously I don’t like that it’s distracting. It’s purpose is so that you can’t secretly record people, and that makes sense. However to use them to record another angle of my show that’s already being recorded by a camera or two I personally have no issue using them without the LED flashing.
The challenge is disabling the LED. You can’t simply cover it, if you do, you’ll get an error. What I did was read a bunch on Reddit and found a few solutions and picked the one that I thought was best and fit my level of how much I wanted to alter the glasses.
If you’re thinking of getting a pair of these, read up on what they do and don’t do to decide if they’re right for you. Also if you want to disable the LED, be sure to read up on different ways to do it to make sure you are comfortable with the level of risk of damage to the glasses that can happen.
-Louie