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Ever made a serious mess of a trick whilst performing it.

Either to the public, or just friends, & family.

Is there any punch line that one can use to hide the embarrassment.



CArl...

CArlight1958 wrote:Ever made a serious mess of a trick whilst performing it.

Either to the public, or just friends, & family.

Is there any punch line that one can use to hide the embarrassment.



CArl...

Take a look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC2EAnTA-Gc

Paul Daniels on Carpool. Se how he handled a big box illusion going completely wrong in front of a theatre audience...

CArlight1958 wrote:Ever made a serious mess of a trick whilst performing it.

Either to the public, or just friends, & family.

Is there any punch line that one can use to hide the embarrassment.



CArl...

The main thing to do is shrug it off. People make mistakes every now and again. It happens. If you follow up with a cracking trick, then hopefully they will forget about it and it will be no big deal.

Yes, yesterday in fact.

I think it depends on the situation, mine I managed to turn around to be very successful.

The mistake I made was keeping the move at eye level as I was using it while uncharacteristically sitting, so the misdirection was ineffective. With some carefully worded cover, dumping of the gimmick and emphasis put on the pencil behind my ear, suspicion became incredulity. They then called another colleague over which kind of put me on the spot. After a spectacular miss I managed to pull a strong hit followed by a miracle.

Today my colleague cannot remember the miss or the suspicion, just her amazement. Importantly she does not want to know how it is done because I have already "explained" this and "proved" it, effectively stopping her from trying to work it out.

Keep calm and carry on!

I'm fairly new to magic, and I had the same experience when I first performed a trick in front of my family. Try not to dwell on it, and just think about what went wrong and what you need to improve on. It might help if you start a routine with a self working trick that you know you can perform, and then move on to the sleight-of-hand stuff when you've gained some confidence.

A useful one that I sometimes use is if I am performing a psedo-mindreading feat with cards, I'll say that they don't always work and some people are more suggestible than others, etc.

Good luck, keep practising and don't give up.

t be honest i cant' see anyone having NOT messed up big time at some point or other

in my minimal experience i've found it best to just do what everyone else has said thus far..... just shrug it off and don't let it ruin your routine, it's easy to acquire a pile of nerves when you mess up a trick but that's just where experience will help you.

Whenever I mess up a trick I find that the participant will feel guilty and say it was their fault, so I always assure them that it was entirely MY fault (I think it would be bad practice to blame your audience), and apologise, before moving on as normal.

The majority of my tricks have some kind of action right before the reveal, either a snap of the fingers, shake of the deck, something, what I tend to do if a trick goes wrong is blame the action before, "Oops, I must have clicked the wrong fingers" or something like that turn it into a bit of a joke with them, then ill repeat the trick but change the action from a snap to a shake and vice versa, hopefully I dont screw it up twice in a row.

I think personality and wit get you out of the spot when you've messed up the trick.If you make them laugh then they wont care.If you say sorry with your head down in shame then they will think you're lame.Never EVER EVER apologise to an audience if you make a mistake.They're there to see magic not to accept apologies.Above all it will make you look inferior and then you are wide open to heckers.

The thing I do is quickly move on.Normally when I make a mistake it's not noticed but it more gives the audience a moment of confusion.Therefore I quickly move on.They wont remember the fumble if you floor them with something else afterwards.They tend to remember the good in this case in my experience.

I also try to have an out with every single routine I have just incase.Cards tend to be the easiest for outs aswell

CArlight1958 wrote:Ever made a serious mess of a trick whilst performing it.

Nope

I'm perfect, me

We've all done this, the best thing to do is to just laugh it off and move onto something else. If you make a mess of an effect, it really doesn't matter.

Beardy wrote:Nope
I'm perfect, me

The women say that to me too Beardy...

Thanks guys.
This magic stuff is a little more nerve racking than I imagined.

Be Well.

CArl...

most of my ambitious card routine is on the fly ... if something goes wrong (you know how it can go wrong without me revealing methods / routine ideas - MAINLY a drunken false shuffle in front of mates NEVER at a gig hahahahaha) I can just ad-lib round it, and follow up with a WHAM moment I(as has been stated before).

The key is not to stress about it - if something goes wrong then build it into the trick; people LOVE the "magician has got it wrong" routine ... play on that

Dan