Blake Vogt Welcome Josh Jay to “Inventing Magic, Episode 6.” We are live. I am on the water, on a ship, and you are where?
Joshua Jay Las Vegas.
BV I’m going to start a one-hour timer. We’re on the clock, jam starts now. I saw that you have cards on you. I love cards. I haven’t jammed cards with anybody yet, and I would love to with you.
JJ We can jam anything you want. I’m not stuck on cards. And I know that, lately, we both have a love for parlor stuff.
BV Parlor is great. You said that you’ve got a room in your house [with supplies], so you’re a few rooms away from almost anything we’d need, I would imagine.
JJ Yeah. I don’t know if this will start anything, but I tried something on a ship recently. I don’t know about you, but when I’m trying new material it kind of has three lanes, and my favorite two are “Oh my god, this works great, this is worth pursuing,” or, “That really sucks and did not resonate, we don’t ever have to try that again.” Those are both useful. That middle lane is the tough part, when it’s, “I’m not sure if the presentation was there,” or “I liked the presentation, but I’m not sure if the trick was there.”
And here’s the trick: I give them a blue deck and I take a red deck. And we are standing on opposite sides of the stage and we shuffle the cards. We each take half, and we ask each other a question. In response to that question, the other person says “left” or “right,” and you throw the cards in that hand to the floor, and now you take a step forward, towards each other. You shuffle again and you take half and you throw some down, and you keep walking toward each other, so now you’re very close. You’re down to [about] three cards each, and you throw cards away until you have one. And then I take theirs, and they take mine and we show them and they match.
BV That is amazing. That’s done. That sounds so cool. You did this?
JJ I didn’t have a great method. I just had a good effect and cobbled together a method.
BV One thing that’s nice about working on cards for stage is it always feels like you can workshop a close-up version and work out the beats. It takes a lot of the pressure off for when you do get on stage with it. Of course, [with] some tricks, there’s no close-up version. You’ve got to just do it on stage.
JJ Yeah. And another thing I have found is there’s a huge difference between close-up magic and stage magic. Nobody talks about it. In close-up, I feel like the goal is [to be] as linear as possible. In other words, a great close-up trick is to take a $1 bill and change it into a $100, or take a coin and it floats and then it comes down. But every time I’ve tried to put a super-linear trick on stage, it’s perpetually ended up being a six out of 10. It’s kind of OK, but it’s not great.
For the stage, I feel like a plot has to have detours, it has to have elements of surprise. It’s got to have meat on the bone. There’s something about being on stage and going through tricks, one after the other, that means you’d go through 100 tricks in an hour if you did only linear plots. Do you feel that, too?
BV Totally agree. There’s much more of a feeling that a story needs to be involved. Whereas, you’re totally right, for close-up, especially with attention spans, if you’re live and with a small group, you‘ve got to do something quick and fast and easy to digest…. I love this trick you just threw out.
JJ I liked the presentation I was using much better than the trick itself. That idea was, “I’m going to quote a movie, one of my favorite movies, and I want [to see if anybody knows it].”
Then I’d say, “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like. Books, records, films... these things matter. Call me shallow, but it’s the fucking truth. And by this measure, I was having one of the best dates of my life. Anybody...? Anybody...? That’s right. High Fidelity.” I found, in my limited testing, [about] six people got it right.
So now I’m not saying, “I need a helper for this. Who would like to volunteer?” Now I’m [saying], “You got it right. You love that movie. I love that movie, too. Come on stage.” And now all the questions have to do with movies and music and stuff that we both like, as we get closer to each other.
BV Oh, it had nothing to do with cards?
JJ Nothing to do with cards…. I’ll tell you what I was doing.
BV Can I throw something dumb at you—before you tell me what you were doing? Because, I don’t want to be influenced by what you’re already doing….
As you’re coming together and you’re narrowing it down to one card, there’s a pro and the con of the build-up. This is completely subjective, but you’re going to have a lot of people thinking, “Oh my god, if those cards match this is gonna be nuts.” So the positive part of this is the anticipation in the build-up.
The negative part is people might see it coming. I’m trying to think if there’s a way to get somebody up on stage and… at the end, you show each other the cards and they’re wrong.
For example, they’re the Five of Hearts and the Seven of Clubs. And you say, “Well this was just a social experiment.” It’s a comedic beat and you say, “What we just learned in this whole process is we have a lot in common, but we’re not the same. Here’s what’s crazy. There’s one card left in your box. There’s one card left in my box. Will you go over to my box?”
So if there was some sort of twist at the end, that could be cool, but if they also could just match that would be insane.
JJ I think you’re right and my instincts are telling me the same thing. Given the choice, I would rather not do magic where they figure out where it’s going. Even if it feels like, “There’s no way!”
BV The other [place] where my head goes, because I’m obsessed with card tricks, is sometimes I’ll ask, “Does this work with anything besides cards?” Just out of curiosity.
JJ I don’t like the visual of defacing a book, but what if they were ripping pages out of a book and they end up on the same page? So it’s different books, but you both get 293 and then there’s some further thing. I just don’t love the idea of tearing up books. Maybe it’s paper and you tear it up.
BV It could be a coloring book or something that you are supposed to tear pages out of. Newspapers are great. Tearing it is a great visual. And then you each take a half and you end up on the same little clipping.
JJ Right. What about maps of the world? What if you each get a map of the world, tear it into pieces, throw, throw, throw.
And then, you each end up with a place, but it’s not the same place. It’s two different places. And then maybe the prediction is a ticket from Rio de Janeiro to Tokyo.
BV Oh, that’s so good. Especially the concept of being in two places and coming together. That’s my favorite so far.