bits – MagicShow.Tips

A Tight, Loose Comedy Magic Show

When watching Phil Cass’s show the other night, and I’m such a magic nerd, I saw the early and late show on the same night, I was amazed at how tight the show felt, while still feeling loose and unscripted.

Phil has a ton of verbal and physical jokes and bits to use when the occasion presents itself, but he doesn’t always use. These gags are what fill the dead spots in the show and give it a sense of happening now, versus him just saying the same lines every night over and over again.

This tightness is something that takes years to develop and you need a mental toolbox full of jokes, bits and gags that you can pull from whenever a situation happens. It also makes you stay present is your show, as sometimes you’ll use a joke from later in the show because it fits something that just happened.

If you get a chance to see Phil Cass, I recommend it, there’s a lot to learn from watching his show!

-Louie

Being A Good Guest…

A while ago I was doing a video hangout with some friends and somehow the idea of having my daughter as a guest on one of their livestream shows. Well, we made it happen a bit ago and it was a lot of fun.

Here’s the thing, it wasn’t easy and that’s the problem, so many people think they are interesting and that’s enough. Here’s the truth, you aren’t interesting, you need to make yourself interesting.

How do you do that?

Simple, write out a few stories and have them ready to tell. Watch some of the previous shows and try to anticipate what the host will ask you and then write some jokes or stories as answers. You may never need them, but the act of preparing puts you a step ahead.

Then something unplanned happens, like on the show last week, there was no audio for the first 10 minutes. The first thing we did was look at what we had prepared that was visual that we could do. We had a few things, and we also played with it.

Having the mindset of having to work to be interesting and fun, instead of thinking we were interesting definitely gave us an advantage!

Here’s the whole interview (keep in mind there’s no audio for the first about 10 minutes): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/704662019

Today is my first day of the two week fair that I’m performing at. In the next two weeks I’ll be doing 58 shows! I’ll be doing four shows a day, plus a couple of volunteer things. That’s going to give me a lot of chances to work on new material. If I set a goal of coming up with one new joke or bit a day for my show, that will give me 14 new bits, that’s a lot.

Hopefully this goal isn’t too ambitious. That’s a lot of writing that will have to happen in a day that’s already pretty full. I think I’m going to do my best to record (either audio or video) every show. Unfortunately the stage I’m on isn’t the best set up for video recording my shows. Video is the best way to learn and critique your show.

There’s a lot to be learned through audio recording. One thing you’ll really notice are dead spots. These can be harder to spot when you watch your show on video as there may be an action happening that makes the dead spot less obvious. So there is a lot of different information that can be learned from just audio.

Let’s see how today goes…