Rule 10: Be Realistic

Rule 10: Cut your coat according to your cloth, but spare no pains in the cutting, or your procedure cannot be justified.

We all hope for an audience, every member of which is one hundred percent engaged throughout our presentation, and who are deeply invested in and knowledgeable of whatever it is we are talking about.

The reality is there will be limitations. We’ve already identified things that are outside of your control and shouldn’t be seen as an excuse, but in Our Magic, with this rule Maskelyne talks extensively about the audience’s capacity to appreciate what you are doing. There is a snobbishness in his language that grates somewhat, but the trouble is he’s probably not wrong. 

One of my favourite magicians to watch is Brendan Rodrigues. The level of skill and thought he displays during a performance is astonishing. However, the most impressive reaction he gets is at the end of a routine, when he performs one of a few tricks that are very low skill, but very high impact. The audience can’t believe what they’ve just seen. I remember travelling back from a dinner where he had performed with a non-magician. Talk turned to Brendan’s performance. “Well, obviously I could work out how he did that coin stuff, but at the end when he turned the receipts into money? That was amazing.” Someone who is unable to fully understand what they are seeing is also unable to fully appreciate it.

Let me give a non-magic example from one of my favourite TV shows: The West Wing. Toby and Josh are part of a negotiation between some pharmaceutical companies and the leaders of AIDS-ravaged African nations. The aim is to try to bring down the high price and availability of life saving drugs. To Josh, the issue is getting the companies to drop their prices as low as possible, making them available to the poorest people. This seems like a rational perspective. This was until it was pointed out that the treatment relied on a strict regime of two separate drugs taken at very specific intervals, and the poor people with AIDS don’t have watches. Josh’s lack of rounded knowledge of the situation led him to underappreciate the scale of what needed to be done. There is a very good chance that your audience will be the same. There is no point in trying to have them appreciate something if they have no knowledge of the difficulties faced in achieving it. Sometimes you will be able to educate your audience, but other times you won’t. In this situation you need to ask yourself if what you’re trying to say is going to have the impact you want.

TFT
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