If you follow me on TikTok, you know I’m into vintage magic tricks and really into old packet tricks. I’ve wanted to come up with an original Emerson and West style packet trick with full story patter. I didn’t want to come up with a variation of something that already existed.
The other day I threw some cards into my backpack and with my time between gigs I came up with this:
This is actually the second version of the story. The first version is more personal to me and my story, where the one above is more generic. I think this is fairly close to the Emerson and West style, it’s got all the mini effects and the pun/kicker ending.
The handling sequence just worked itself out. It was too easy, so I’m assuming someone has to have come up with it before, but it’s original to me.
I love finding old magic, and recently I found something really cool (I”ll post about it another day), but inside of that there was a folded up piece of paper. This is from the mid 1940’s and it had the typed routine for Elmer Applegate’s The Story of One Card Pete!
This is a routine for a six card repeat style where you have five cards, take away one and still have five. It’s an interesting routine, and the patter is rhyming. Jeff McBride has a really cool version of it and worth trying to track down the video of.
This morning I was doing my daily writing and came up with a little routine for a number prediction. Here’s the rough routine:
“My third grade report card said my handwriting was bad, and only suitable if a grew up to be a doctor or serial killer. One time I turned in an essay and Ms. Smarr said it was illegible…It was typed, double spaced.”
“The only good thing about having bad handwriting is when I find a note a wrote a long time ago I feel like Indiana Jones trying read a document written by a lost civilization of serial killers. My handwriting looks like the handwriting that on the Magna Carta, if it got wet and put in a blender!”
You then show you elementary school signature, which looks like the bottom line below:
“It’s not that bad. I guess that’s why I preferred math, numbers are easy.”
You then do a calculator force and in my case I’m forcing the number 311707. I then flip over the LOUIE to show it’s actually 311707 (see the top line above).
There you go, it’s a routine, it’s not a great one, but it’s a routine that gets the prediction into play with a personal story. I may revisit this later, but it was a fun surprise that came out of my morning writing!
Recently I was in a show with sideshow performer who did glass eating, and that inspired me to write a routine for glass (lightbulb) eating. I should say that I’ve seen this act many times, so I may have accidentally written a line that’s existed before and a couple of the lines are pretty obvious, so might be used by other performers. With that in mind, as far as I know this is an original script for someone eating a light bulb.
To set the scene, let’s the the performer just did a dangerous stunt before this.
That was intense! Let’s do something lighter. Bring out lightbulb I’m going to eat this lightbulb and poop out a chandelier! This is a 40 watt bulb, I used to do 100 watt, but I’m on a diet! Take out spray bottle of glass cleaner and give it a spray and wipe it off with a paper towel. If anyone wants some after the show, I brought a doggie bag. Take out paper bag and put the lightbulb into it. Ladies and gentlepeople, it’s hammer time! Take out hammer, and break the bulb through the bag. Mozel Tov! I remember the first time I did this, I was a kid in my friends basement, listening to ACDC. What were you expecting me to say…the Electric Light Orchestra? Take out piece of glass and show it to the audience. Put it into your mouth and dramatically eat it. Squirt the glass cleaner into your mouth, pause and look at the bottle. Open the bottle of glass cleaner and chug it! Show your mouth to show it empty!
**DO NOT DRINK REAL GLASS CLEANER** use a safe blue liquid in the spray bottle. ***DO NOT DO THIS ROUTINE, IT’S DANGEROUS*** This was written as a writing exercise for me.
So that’s the routine, it should have a few laughs. It was fun to write and something I’ll never do. I don’t know why, but things like these that aren’t my show are way easier to write for than my actual show.
This summer teenagers have been saying, “That’s soo sigma” or just “Sigma” when I perform close up magic for them. I had a feeling that “sigma” meant cool, based on the context it was used in. However, to be sure, I did a Google search to figure it out.
Nothing in life has made me feel older than researching slang on the Today Show’s website!
That confirmed what I thought, and now I can use it correctly. While I think that when a older magician uses kid slang it feels like they are trying to pander to the kids and never seems cool.
In my close up I now say, “that’s soo sigma” but I do it in a way where I’m almost making fun of saying it. Very tongue in cheek, and not using it like it’s something I would normally say.
It’s important to keep an eye or ear out for these trends that kids do and figure out how you can use them to your advantage. For example, there’s the trend of kids asking you to “do a backflip”. I came up with two version of this trick to do when they ask:
Nick Trost’s Geo-Metrick interesting trick, it’s essentially a packet version of Paul Curry’s Out of This World, using ESP cards. The packet is only 20 cards, ten are of one ESP symbol and the other 10 are of another ESP symbol. You and the spectator each get five of each symbol, they are mixed and you deal out ten of them face down in a row. The spectator then deals their ten cards face up on top each of your face down cards. When you flip over the pairs of cards they all match!
For me, this trick isn’t strong enough to justify carrying around a packet of 20 cards just for that trick. However this method would work with just red and black playing cards, so that would make it something you could do with any deck of cards. It’s a good thing to have in my head for an impromptu situation, but I’ll never do it with the ESP cards. I should say that if I came up with a great way to theme the trick for a gig, it’s something I would do.
For example, if I was performing at a pet adoption event, instead of wavy lines and as square, I used pictures of families and pets. Each family was matched to a pet! That makes sense and it’d be an easy way to add a custom trick for the event.
One of the things that Charlie Frye mentions in his book Sleightly Absurd is that you should have no descriptive patter. Since reading it I’ve been looking for places to replace or remove patter that is simply descriptive.
There are reasons to leave in descriptive patter, like if you’re doing cards across and the audience has to know there are 10 cards in each packet.
In my kids show I do a blendo with three silks. In an attempt to remove descriptive patter, I changed to calling them tissues. I give them one at a time to the kid and say, “The yellow tissue if for you to blow you nose. The red tissue I used to blow my nose. The green tissue my dog used to blow her nose.”
All of those get a laugh from the kids, so that’s three reactions I didn’t have before when I simply told the kid to hold the “red, yellow and green handkerchiefs.“. HOWEVER the new laughs weren’t good laughs. I noticed what while the kids laugh, the adults pulled back and for them it was almost a cringy moment. I tried it at several shows and each time I got the same reaction from the adults. That led me to removing the line.
This is a good example of why you should remove a line that gets a reaction from the audience, but isn’t necessarily a line that moves your show forward.
Here’s a trick from the book Ginosko. It’s called Blackjack for Brother John and it’s a packet trick that has a story that has a very 1980’s packet trick feel to it. That’s not a bad thing, but it feels like something Nick Trost or Emerson and West would have put out with novelty cards.
It’s a great story packet trick, and you only need four cards to do it with. That makes it impromptu, just pull the cards from the pack and you’re good to go. I would probably palm them out and remove the cards from my pocket, as you start by showing four of the same jack.
Last month I was at an AirBnB. I was sharing the house with a bunch of the other performers at the Ohio State Fair. Behind the painting on the walls we found strange “Alien Postcards” from October of 2016
The first one was behind the paint of an apple, then we started searching the AirBnb and found the second one inside of a picture of Groucho!
OK, so that’s what happened in real life, now how do I turn it into a bit for my show?
I started by telling the story.
I’m staying at an AirBnB with some amazing performing, acrobats, jugglers…and a mime. He’s not even performing here. But that guy never shuts up.
One night I was looking behind the paintings and found some “alien postcards”. When I mentioned it to my wife on the phone she said, “why were you looking behind the paintings”, not “what’s an alien postcard.
I was looking for my keys.
Here are the postcards. On the front they say, “Materials deployed for reflective and connective purposes”. On the back this one says, “Thank you for signaling that you are anticipating my transmission”.
The other says, “Thank you for sending the signal that you are invested in receiving this signal…You’re going to die…JK, LOL LOL…but seriously, we’re watching…no parties!”
So now I’m searching the AirBnB for cameras, and you know what I found? My KEYS!
That’s the story. I’ve embellished it a little bit added some punchlines. The nice thing about being in a house with other performers is that we could workshop the story a little bit.
The next step is going to be figuring out what to do with this. Is it a little stand alone bit, or is it a segue to something else. Like a trick with a key and/or postcards?
One idea is to have borrow a key, cover it up with a handkerchief and have that held by someone in the audience. Then 5 postcards are shown, each has a place where I’ve found my keys. These could be funny places, like in pie, or whatever. One is selected, and the key disappears and ends up inside of the postcard.
