Teller Reveals His Secrets
The real trick here is that Teller hasn't revealed anything new about the secrets of magic. One of the dirty secrets is that a magician does her best work with a willing audience.<p>People want to be amazed. All magic requires misdirection, sure, but the audience is usually in a frame of mind that's willing to suspend disbelief for a moment long enough for the magician to exploit it. Think about how a street magician works a group: "Would you like to see a magic trick?"<p>I know one magician who sets the frame of mind of his audience by doing something so ludicrous it attracts a crowd. He sits outside a fast food joint eating lunch and pulls an amazingly large straw out of the bag. It's more clever than "would you like to see a trick," but the effect is the same.<p>I've always been amazed how great magicians can take a relatively simple trick, like a forced card (which always offers an audience member a choice, but the card is always predetermined). Magicians do the sleight of hand right in front of a crowd of people, in plain sight, but nobody notices. Because they don't want to notice. They've allowed their minds to wander for a moment, which is why magicians rarely repeat tricks with the same audience and when they do, its usually a variation of the first that combines another trick (Teller's #5).<p>One of my favorite card tricks is a classic. Select a card and put it back in the middle of the deck. It keeps rising to the top of the deck every time you stick it in the middle. The reality is that you never actually get to put your card in the middle of the deck. You may have selected initially your card, but everything after that is controlled, down to how the magician makes you hold your card when it's handed back to you. My favorite way to start the trick is with a mental magic joke: Tell the subject to think of a card. Then flip over the top card in the deck, which is almost never the card, but would be pretty cool if it was. Then I pull their card out of the deck and begin controlling it through the routine. The whole point is to keep people off balance and to allow them to have what they truly want: entertainment.<p>Teller's story about the Cub Scouts is funny to me because I've found that children of a certain age (around 8-15 or so) are simply unwilling to get into the mindset.<p>Books are filled with advice for how to deal with members of the audience who are unwilling. They usually involve some kind of ridicule of the skeptics for the benefit of the rest of the audience (Teller's #2).