For all the awe that magicians manage to conjure up with their tricks, the world of magic could use a makeover. Let’s face it, whenever there are more mullets than women, you know you’ve got an image problem. The 1980s outfits, the sartorial excess, the endless catalog of fashion don’ts. I mean, are all those rhinestones really necessary? Then there are the stock lines, the verbal rim shots, the lame brick-wall wheezes, the shopworn stand-up comedy clichés. And the stale knee-slappers aren’t even the worst offenders. I once saw a balloon magician crack a Holocaust joke in front of two hundred people, many of them children. “I see very little address given to presentation by most of the people that you see in magic,” Wes told me. And he was right.
I’d come a long way in my study of magic. I’d learned at least a hundred different techniques and dozens of new tricks. I talked the talk and walked the walk. When I showed up at the pizzeria now, people asked me for advice. I was no longer a tenderfoot, the new kid at the table. I could hang with the best of them. Wes and I had gotten to know each other well enough to complete each other’s sentences. Whereas he’d once been gruff and antagonistic toward me, he now greeted me as an old friend—a gruff and antagonistic old friend, but an old friend nonetheless.
Technical prowess and grade-A foolers, however, will only get you so far. You can nail every note of a piano concerto, but that doesn’t make you a great musician, while even a three-chord progression can be breathtaking if played with real feeling. The same is true for magic. All the moves and sleights in the world are useless unless you can make an emotional connection with your audience. At the end of the day, magicians are performers. And yet magicians often invest tremendous effort into trying to fool people while forgetting that magic is supposed to be entertaining and beautiful. I was certainly guilty of this. I’d spent a lot of time learning how to trick people and very little time trying to connect with them. I needed to change that. It also occurred to me that it might be a good idea to pay a little more attention to life outside of magic, something I hadn’t done in quite a while. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why I felt disconnected from my audiences.
The routines that triumphed at tournaments and in front of lay audiences, I had noticed, were more than just a series of tricks strung together like Christmas lights. They were tightly scripted, character-driven performances with clear storylines and sharply defined themes. They were often very funny. They engaged the audience on multiple levels. Of course, they packed plenty of Bible-size miracles, too. But the best acts were more than just fool-a-thons. They had emotional depth, something missing from a lot of magic, including mine. I’d built up my chops considerably, but I still had a long way to go toward becoming a better showman. “If there is a reason that explains the success of all the greats,” said the Spanish master Arturo De Ascanio, channeling Polonius, “it is that they have learned to know themselves and have thus been able to exploit and take advantage of their own personality.” His student Juan Tamariz reaffirmed this philosophy at the FLASOMA convention in Peru. “The most important thing in magic is not the secret, the method, or even the emotions produced,” he said. “It’s the person.”
I consulted Wes and the pizza parlor crew, and they urged me to forget about magic and focus on theater. “Magic is a subset of theater, and as such it has all the same responsibilities,” Wes growled, while I scarfed down a heaping plate of pasta primavera. (The food at Rustico II had grown on me; I was now in love with their linguine.) “Magicians’ egos get in the way,” he continued. “We like to think of magic as an art unto itself, not just as a subset of theater. But that’s what it is. If magic is gonna work, the audience has to care about it, same way they have to care about a story in a play or sit-com or whatever. Otherwise it’s just a fucking card trick, and who gives a shit.”
A self-proclaimed dramaturge, Wes advised me to work on stage direction and blocking, choreography and persona. “In some way it’s easier for us because we have something that has the potential to be interesting, because it breaks the rules of the universe. Of course just the fact that it breaks the rules of the universe doesn’t make it interesting in and of itself to most people because it has no relevance. If you can give it relevance, now it’s interesting.” Bob Friedhoffer, who was also at the table, put an even finer point on this line of reasoning: “You’re a fucking move monkey,” he grunted, after I flaunted the spin change I’d seen at the Magic Olympics, and which I could now do in both hands simultaneously. “No one gives a fuck about your moves.”
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT SAID WE SHOULD do one thing each day that scares us. Today I was doing two. I was facing my stage fright—ever since the Magic Olympics, I’d been terrified of performing in front of large crowds—and my fear of clowns. Let’s just say I read too many Stephen King books growing up. Coulrophobia is no joke, if we are to believe the British media’s take on a 2008 study of young hospital patients in the United Kingdom. According to the press, patients hated clowns and found them terrifying.* Even so, I’d persuaded myself that a class on clowning might help make me funnier and more relaxed onstage.
Wes had convinced me that magicians should study other forms of performance art. “We’re all in the same game,” he said. So I started exploring the interface between magic and the allied arts, things that surround magic and give it its shape. I took dance lessons and learned the rudiments of juggling. I took yoga to improve my posture. “Anything that makes you aware of how you’re moving and gives you control over it is useful,” Wes told me. (Wes, I was surprised to learn, was a practicing Hindu and a trained yogi who gave up meat and took up meditation at the age of sixteen.)
I took a comedy-writing workshop. I took improv classes. I took screenwriting. I took voice lessons. Following the advice of Eugene Burger, whose voice is as deep as the Mariana Trench, I read poetry on tape to improve my tone and my diction. “This teaches you how to pause,” said Burger. “It takes courage to pause. Most magicians are terrified of silence.” I attended a balloon-twisting seminar at Fantasma Magic, taught by a guy who called himself Twistin’ Todd. (The workshop was strictly BYOB—Bring Your Own Balloons.)
And now I was going to clown school.
The class was held on the fourth floor of a gutted Hell’s Kitchen warehouse, two blocks east of the Hudson River. I had a brief existential crisis when I saw the shakily scrawled sign that read CLOWN WORKSHOP, with an arrow pointing to the left. Where had my life gone wrong? The other members of my peer group were busy getting promotions, buying land, and having children. They were professors and doctors and corporate lawyers. Not me. I was in an old warehouse taking clown classes. Honk! Honk!
Our teacher was a handsome man in his early forties named Christopher Bayes. He had high cheekbones and wavy hair to his chin. He looked more like Eddie Vedder than Bozo, and I was relieved to find that he wasn’t togged up in floppy shoes and face paint. Just jeans and a T-shirt.
“The clown is the physical manifestation of the unsocialized self,” he opened. “It’s the essence of the playful spirit before you were defeated by society, by the world. You see the peak of the clown at two or three years old.” He paused, searching. “But the clown is shy to come out, because it’s been betrayed. We betray it, in high school generally. We betray our enthusiasm and, by so doing, betray the clown.”
Wow, I thought to myself, this was one wise clown.
Bayes broke us off into pairs and told us to improvise a scene using only three words: ta-da, aha, and ha-ha. This exercise was supposed to help us coax out our inner clown. My partner was a willowy blonde and recent NYU grad named Rebecca. “I have a background in dance,” she had told the class during a round of introductions. “And I need something to do with my life.” This seemed to be a fairly common theme among the workshop participants, which I found somewhat surprising. It had never occurred to me before that clowning could fulfill this particular need.
We started on opposite ends of the studio. As soon as Bayes yelled go, I sprinted across the room and ran into the wall at full speed. Crashing into the concrete harder than I expected, I crumpled to the floor like an empty coat.
The entire class groaned.
“Why’d you do that?” our teacher asked.
I scratched my head.
“It makes it kind of hard for her if you die in the first five seconds,” he said.
“I didn’t die,” I said. “I was just injured.”
“Play with her! Play together! No death and killing.”
Bayes gave us a fanfare, and we started over. This time I was supposed to engage my scene partner rather than commit seppuku, so I pantomimed pulling a flower from behind her ear. (Hey, it’s what I knew.)
“Ta-da!”
She laughed approvingly. “Ahaha.”
Bayes gestured toward Rebecca. “You do one now!”
“I don’t know any magic tricks,” she said, breaking scene. Her voice was a slide whistle, the “Bankrupt” sound on Wheel of Fortune.
“Invent one!” Bayes shrieked.
She made an object vanish and then reappear.
“Ha-ha-ha!” I bawled, clutching my stomach.
Next, I pretended to cut her in half with a chainsaw while making screeching noises, and Bayes told Rebecca to scream. She let out a high-pitched, maiden-on-the-tracks squeal.
Then I yelled, “Ta-da!” And she was restored.
It was her turn again. I climbed inside an invisible box and she put her right hand on her hip. “Does it have to be a magic trick?” she asked, breaking scene a second time.
“Yes!” Bayes snapped.
She waved an invisible wand over the box, and I was transformed into a giant tiger. Chasing what seemed like the obvious joke, I lurched at her—ROOOOOAAAR!—and bit ferociously into her neck and arm. She toppled to the floor, all ninety pounds of her wilting like a hothouse flower. Evidently I’d gone a little too method. The audience gasped, as if legitimately concerned for her safety. And, to be fair, she looked genuinely scared. With a flash of remorse, I loped back to my chair with my tail between my legs. And . . . scene.
THE CLOWN IS A UNIVERSAL figure. From court jester to commedia dell’arte harlequin to Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, Homer Simpson, and Jacques Tati, every culture has clowns. In many ancient civilizations the clown and the magician were one and the same. In some Native American tribes—like the Hopi—the clown was an antenna to the spirit world. Today, when a circus clown is resurrected onstage—after being hit over the head with a sledgehammer or fired out of a cannon—we’re witnessing the cultural vestiges of an ancient necromantic ritual. This archetypal connection to the spirit world may explain why clowns are habitually recast as demonic figures—as in Poltergeist, say, or Stephen King’s It.
In the Western tradition, clowns mediated the link between the pious and the profane in rituals going back to the Roman Saturnalia and extending on through Christian customs like the Feast of Fools, an annual send-up of the local clergy, observed on the first of January for more than a thousand years throughout Christendom, in which the peasant classes danced through the streets in bishop’s miters while harlequins lampooned the pulpit from the shelter of the court. (The Church officially banned the ritual in 1431.) For centuries, comedy and clowning were a standard part of the Easter service. The story of Christ’s martyrdom was told through mock sermons, off-color jokes about the apostles, digs at the saints—a practice known as Fabula Paschalis, or “Easter Tales.” Today we feel the syncretic aftershocks of this custom at Mardi Gras and Carnival. Easter, after all, began as a pagan ritual, an equinoctial celebration of rebirth and renewal tacked on to a dozen different resurrection myths well before post-apostolic Christian proselytizers repurposed it to commemorate Jesus’s last big illusion.
An analogous strain of burlesque gave rise to the magical incantation “hocus-pocus,” a phrase concocted in the seventeenth century to mock the liturgy of the Eucharist, which in Latin contains the words Hoc est corpus meum (“This is my body”). With the words hocus-pocus, the magician parodies the miracle of transubstantiation, the Church’s showstopper. The magician, one might say, is a clown let loose in a church; magic, a satirical reappropriation of religious custom. That hocus sounds like jocus (Latin for “prank” or “jest”) is also telling, as are the linguistic links found in many languages between the words for magic trick and the word for game or amusement. In English, we may call them tricks. But for many magicians that word has a negative connotation. I prefer the Spanish term juegos de mano (games of the hand) or the Italian giochi di prestigio.
These parallels remind us that the experience of magic is essentially a comic one. If you tape a magic show and study the crowd’s reactions you’ll discover that laughter is the most common response, more so even than the oohs and ahhs of wonder. When the card rises to the top of the deck, when the coin vanishes and reappears, we laugh. Why is this? What makes magic so funny?
“The main trigger for laughter is surprise,” Bayes told us, speaking of how the clown gets his laughs. “There’s lots of ways to find that trigger. Some of them are tricks. Some of them are math. And some of them come from building something with integrity and then smashing it. So you smash the expectation of what you think is going to happen.”
The same goes for the magician. Magic transports us to an absurd universe, parodying the laws of physics in a whimsical toying of cause and effect. “Magic creates tension,” says Juan Tamariz, “a logical conflict that it does not resolve. That’s why people often laugh after a trick, even when we haven’t done anything funny.”
Tamariz is also fond of saying that magic holds a mirror up to our impossible desires. We all would like to fly, see the future, know another’s thoughts, mend what has been broken. Great magic is anchored to a symbolic logic that transcends its status as an illusion. “Magic is an art that has two defining characteristics,” according to Tamariz. “It must be impossible and it must be fascinating. It must be impossible, because otherwise it’s not magic. And it must be fascinating, otherwise it’s not art.”
The physical absurdity of a card rising to the top of the deck after being placed in the middle, for instance, is only part of what makes a trick like the Ambitious Card so memorable. It also tells a story. At its core, the Ambitious Card is metaphor for liberation, a tale of triumph told in miniature. Imprisoned in the deck, the card breaks free, defying our every attempt to pin it down. It’s the close-up equivalent of a Houdini escape. How fitting, then, that this was the one puzzle the great self-liberator couldn’t solve.
Like clowning, magic is also an art primarily geared toward children, actual and inner. “For kids, the game never stops,” Bayes mused at the end of our workshop. “The game is just transformed. That’s why it’s so hard for kids to sleep. Because they refuse to admit there’s no more possibility for fun.”
I WAS DRAGGING MY HEELS up the stairs to the second day of clown class when I poked my head down a long hallway on the third floor. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, except maybe a way to kill time. At first I thought the hallway was empty, just another bombed-out wing of the warehouse, and I turned to leave.
It was then that I spotted an attractive woman in tight gray jeans and cowboy boots sitting cross-legged in a chair against the wall. She was tall and slender, in her mid-twenties, with pale cheeks and straight brown hair and wide-set eyes, beautiful but not in that overly manicured, Manolo’d way you often find in New York. She looked up from a clipboard resting in her lap. “Are you here for the audition?” she asked. Apparently there were non-clown-related activities going on in the building.
“Oh . . . um . . . no,” I stammered.
She looked puzzled. I wanted to talk to her, but my mind was pinwheeling. C’mon Alex, say something smooth! Something that’ll make her like you!
“I go to clown school,” I said, pointing at the ceiling. “One floor up.”
Yikes.
It was a rough beginning, to say the least, but I managed to strike up a conversation. Her name was Kate. She was an actress. Lived in the city. I rambled on in my usual obnoxious way, panting in double time. Later she would confess that she had found me annoying at first, but that gradually I grew on her. At the time, though, I felt certain she was going to red-light me at any moment. Sweat beaded on my brow as I angled for a laugh. I asked if she wanted to see a card trick. Sadly, this was my A-game.
She slanted a dubious look my way. “Okay,” she said icily. “Sure.”
I showed her Paul Harris’s Bizarre Twist, a minimalist miracle in which an ace flips over despite being trapped between two other cards, then changes color in front of the spectator’s eyes. Everything is examinable, and only three cards are used—a real gem of a trick. (Paul Harris is a true visionary.)
Surprise flickered across her face. “Wait. What?” she said, brightening. “Show me another.”
I followed up with John Guastaferro’s Tailspin. Four face-up aces turn facedown one at a time, then instantly transform into another four of a kind named by the spectator. It doesn’t get much prettier than this. I fumbled through the Elmsley counts, which were still giving me trouble—Wes had been coaching me on this move—but managed an able rendition in spite of my nervousness.
Kate let out a warm laugh. “Wait,” she said. “Are you kidding me? Show me how you did that.” Here was my chance, I thought. It was a long shot, but I had to go for it. “I’ll tell you what,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Meet me for a drink later, and I’ll show you.” The few seconds of silence that followed were like an hour-long wait for test results at the doctor’s office after spring break. Her lips puckered, and she raised an eyebrow. Then she smiled and said yes.
After the drink came pizza in the Village. Cherry blossoms in Brooklyn. Indie films and Italian dinners. We got matching temporary tattoos. Not only did she love card tricks, but she thought physics was cool—sexy, even. I felt like I had the first time I walked into my therapist’s office and saw a copy of Ulysses on the bookshelf: she was a keeper.
Kate turned out to be more helpful than any drama workshop or chapter on Stanislavsky. She showed me how to block out an act, find my light, and project onstage. She became my acting coach, my Fosse. She was a talented actress and she had good taste. Whenever I’d start flourishing my fingers or revert to stock gags and magical clichés, she’d put her foot down and say, “Just be yourself.” Or if I made an off-color joke, she’d frown and let me know that “magic is creepy enough as it is. It really doesn’t need your help.”
When we first met, I was about to shell out a thousand dollars to study the sleeving methods that won Rocco Silano, an Armani-sheathed spellbinder from New Jersey, the Most Original Act award at the Magic Olympics in Stockholm. With Dean Martin playing, Rocco converted gas into water, water into ice, a corncob into popcorn, a kiss into lipstick, and distilled fruit, juice, cigarettes, pipes, ice cream, and Campari-filled highballs out of thin air. (I remember thinking that it’d be cool to have Rocco at a party, in spite of the mess he’d make on the floor.) After chatting with him over dinner at a Monday Night Magic after-party, I was ready to enlist in his boot camp. But Kate knew better. “That’s not you,” she said. She also found it kind of gross the way he played with his food. When I briefly considered a course in the art of needle swallowing—after spending a bunch of money on the instructional DVDs and beginner kits—Kate nixed those plans as well. “You’re a goofy physics geek,” she said. “Your magic should reflect that.”
Magicians like to pretend that they’re cool and mysterious, cultivating the image of the smooth operator, the suave seducer. Their stage names are always things like the Great Tomsoni or the Amazing Randi or the International Man of Mystery—never Alex the Magical Superdoofus or the Incredible Nerdini. But does all this posturing really make them look cooler? Or just more ridiculous for trying to hide their true stripes? Why couldn’t more magicians own up to their own nerdiness? Magic was geeky. And that was okay.
A lot of it just came down to acknowledging who I was not. There were a great many magicians I admired but would be hard pressed to emulate. I could never play the guido-fabulous lothario who pulls flowers and Campari from thin air. I would never manipulate cards the way Jeff McBride did. I wasn’t a con man or a cardsharp or a psychic seer.
There comes a point in your life when you realize it’s easier to accept who you are than it is to change it. For the longest time, I’d tried to shoehorn myself into different identities by imitating other magicians. I would buy magic tricks indiscriminately. At every lecture, I’d scoop up the package deal. I’d order books and DVDs and props as if ordering takeout. I thought I had to learn everything.
Now I began to realize that the vast majority of tricks just weren’t for me. That’s not to say that they didn’t look amazing in the hands of other performers, just that they didn’t suit my personality. I was reminded yet again of renowned English magician David Devant, who once boasted that he only knew six tricks. Because that was all he needed.
“Try to proceed with a kind of playful integrity,” Chris Bayes told us. “Because in that integrity we actually find more possibility of surprise than we do in an idea of how to trick us into laughing. You bring it from yourself. And we see this little gift that you brought for us, which is the gift of your truth. Not an idea of your truth, but the gift of your real truth. And you can play forever with that, because it’s infinite.”
These words set my mind in motion. Rather than hopscotching across the globe searching for secrets in distant corners of the world, what if I returned to the subjects that were nearest and dearest to me? What if I went back to what interested me as a math and physics buff? On reflection, I realized that I’d been doing tricks that relied in some way on the connections between magic and physics at least as far back as my disastrous appearance at the Magic Olympics. I now began to see those tentative first steps toward developing an act that combined magic and science as exactly the path I needed to follow. This time, however, instead of being a shtick, math and physics would be the heart and soul of my routine.
I realized right away that this approach might not win me a tournament or land me on television, but it would at least be truthful. “The problem with magic,” Eugene Burger told us at the Mystery School, “is that it’s often not sincere enough.” Magic will always be about deception, but within that framework perhaps one can still find a kernel of authenticity. And while I wasn’t exactly sure how math or physics was going to help me craft my routine, with the contest fast approaching, I decided it was worth a shot.
I knew, at least, that the connection between mathematics and conjuring went way back, to some of the oldest magic texts. I also knew that the relationship had always been somewhat strained. In his book Mathematics, Magic, and Mystery, Martin Gardner observed that math-based tricks were generally regarded with double disdain: magicians found them nerdy and tedious, while mathematicians dismissed them as trivial. This branch of magic was a bit like a child of divorce being shuttled back and forth between two parents, with neither parent wanting custody.
This disdain was not wholly unwarranted. Mathematical magic tends to be dry and procedural, a consequence of the fact that the underlying principles must be concealed somehow. This is usually accomplished by burying the secret beneath a slag heap of arbitrary moves—cutting, dealing, counting, and whatnot. As a result, the methods are frequently more interesting than the effects. But there are exceptions.
One name that kept popping up was Persi Diaconis, an eccentric silver-haired math Professor and one of the world’s top statisticians. Magic, however, was his first love, and he’d always remained true to it, even as he climbed through the upper stratospheres of academia—Harvard, MIT, Stanford. In fact, it was in service to this love that he made the climb. At age fourteen, Diaconis dropped out of high school and left his home on Long Island to study with Dai Vernon. For the next decade, he shadowed Vernon, training alongside hustlers and cardsharps in gambling dens across the country. A naturally gifted magician, Diaconis soon became an underground legend.
He also showed an early gift for math—his lightning-fast ability to calculate gambling odds was crucial to his success at the table. So, ten years after he left home Diaconis returned to New York at Vernon’s behest and enrolled in night school. A few years later, he earned a full scholarship to study math at Harvard. Today, he’s a professor at Stanford and a two-time MacArthur Fellow, not to mention close friends with some of the world’s top magicians. He’s also rumored to have one of the most extensive private magic libraries on the planet.
It’s rare for a person to become a legend in two fields, let alone two so seemingly distant as math and magic. But from what little he’s written on magic, it’s clear that Diaconis views tricks through the eyes of a math professor. “Erdnase’s methods are not only novel for the time,” he wrote in the introduction to Vernon’s 1984 classic Revelations. “They are the right solutions to important problems.” Years later, speaking to a fellow math scholar, he likened the process of designing magic tricks to that of solving math problems. “The way I do magic is very similar to mathematics,” he said. “Inventing a magic trick and inventing a theorem are very, very similar activities in the following sense. In both subjects you have a problem you’re trying to solve with constraints.”
Diaconis has solved a number of famous math problems, many of which were inspired by his love of magic. In 2007, for instance, he proved that a typical coin toss isn’t perfectly fair; rather, it’s slightly biased in favor of whichever side the coin starts on. If it starts out heads, in other words, then heads is a marginally better bet. But Diaconis is perhaps best known for a 1992 paper he published on card shuffling—“Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to Its Lair”—which unraveled two long-standing mysteries in both mathematics and magic and turned out to have implications that went far beyond either discipline.
With the date of the IBM competition closing in on me, I decided I had to meet this man, if only to find out whether any of his mathematical insights might illuminate my own path. But when I asked people in the know about the possibility of arranging a meeting with Diaconis, I was quickly discouraged.
“He’s way underground,” said one well-connected source. “He’s super secretive. Hangs out with Ricky Jay. Guys you can’t even talk to.”
Really?
“Not about secrets at least.”
Apparently my meeting with Diaconis was not to be. But even on a road littered with obstacles, you’re bound to catch the occasional lucky break. As it happened, Diaconis’s coauthor on the card-shuffling paper was a professor in the math department at Columbia, a stone’s throw from the physics building. I e-mailed him to request a meeting and received a response the following day. Turns out he was giving a lecture that night on card shuffling. Gripped by a sudden sense of urgency, I canceled my plans, armed my fire wallet, stuffed my backpack with cards, and—with a reluctant Kate in tow—raced toward campus.
* I dug a little deeper, and it turned out that this study was not what the media had made it out to be. The study had nothing to do with clowns and mentioned them only in passing. In fact, there are mountains of evidence showing that clowns (as well as comedians and magicians) have helped hundreds of thousands of hospital patients. And that’s only the beginning. There are clown ministries and clowning troupes that engage in social protest on behalf of the disenfranchised. Clowns and jugglers and magicians have ventured into war zones and refugee camps to provide at-risk children with much-needed psychological relief. In short: Clowns good, British tabloids bad.