3 Signs You Are Seeing A Lousy Magician

In the seven weeks I have been on the boat, I have seen three magicians, and so am now somewhat of an expert as to what constitutes a bad magician. After seeing the new magician last night, I feel compelled to offer some guidelines for people to use when selecting their magic entertainment.

First of all, if they do some kind of psychic act at the beginning where they hold up a sealed envelope and pick a volunteer to send a “psychic message” to guess who the picture is of, run out of the theater as fast as you can. This trick is a hack bit where there is a double-sided picture inside, one side of a black baby and the other side of a white baby. So if the volunteer says George Bush, they show the white baby and everyone laughs, and then the magician will show the other side and say, “But I was prepared in case you said Stevie Wonder” and everyone laughs even harder. All three of the magicians have done this trick and so I now object to it on principle.

Also, if they say they are going to teach you a magic trick that they learned from an ACME Lean Magic CD, demand a refund. The trick the magician is going to show is called “The Vanishing Bandana,” but the joke is that the assistant misheard him and brought a banana instead. Hilarity ensues while the magician is forced to use the banana in the bandana's place, and he is forced to fold the banana in half and then in fourths. He ends up doing the trick successfully, because he is a magician, but I have now seen it twice so it serves as a red flag for me.

The bigger sign is if they end their act by doing a trick where they make mass amounts of “snow” out of a piece of paper and fan the snow up so it all looks like some kind of life size snow globe. Two of the magicians have done this trick, and the magician on board before we got on did it as well. The trick is preceded by a drawn out maudlin story, either involving a kindly grandfather who was a simple man but taught the magician his first trick, or a little girl (later revealed to be the magician's daughter) who wanted snow for Christmas, or a doe-eyed child with cancer who wanted to see snow before he slipped away to the great beyond. These stories are a pack of lies, and if a magician tries to pass it off on you, demand to know what the grandfather did for a living, or what he's paying in child support, or whether the little tot was receiving radiation or chemo. The magician who just left told us that the trick used to be David Copperfield's closer in the 80's, but he had to stop doing it because so many people copied him (and my guess is that they even cribbed the grandfather/daughter/kid with cancer story from him as well).

The last magician also told us that most magic acts can be bought, with the going price about $10,000 a prop. So the savvy audience member should really seek out 100% original shows. I hope this has been helpful for you, and I would be happy to write it up for Consumer Reports if necessary.