Magicians seem to be perpetually stuck behind the times, which is why I’m never surprised to see one in the wild sporting a fedora or waxed mustache.
It’s also why, years after the surge of comedians uploading crowd-work clips to social media, I’m only just now starting to see a deluge online of magicians attempting crowd-work as well.
Unsurprisingly, nearly all of it is terrible. You see a lot of clips that go like this:
Magician: What do you do for a living?
Audience member: I’m a librarian.
Magician: Well, you must know a lot about books!
[End of clip.]
That’s not comedy so much as an awkward first date. That interaction has no jokes in it. As I explain in my book (You Are All Terrible! I’m gonna keep plugging it!), jokes contain a twist (surprise!), something unexpected—saying a librarian works with books is just a fact. These kinds of interactions are not crowd-work; they’re forced job interviews.
And no one likes job interviews.
But before we get into how to make your crowd-work better, I should probably explain what it is and how we got here.
What is Crowd-Work?
Crowd-work is, at its most basic, improvised banter with the audience, in which the performer turns answers to his/her/their questions into real-time comedy in the moment.