Tag: Meta Magic

Establishing Meta Magic (2)

There is another form of meta magic that comes to mind, and it is more about discrepancies which are not always spotted easily:

  • Magic tricks on television that are achieved rather by TV tricks than by magic methods
  • When forum threads about magic books are sooo much better than the books themselves
  • Genii editor Richard Kaufman telling you in the digital video supplement of the magazine what you will find in the very same issue that you are already reading
  • When the performance and the explanation are essentially and inadvertently one and the same video on YouBurp
  • Magicians performing a bad trick badly and then telling you why it’s a good trick and how successful they are with it (not as uncommon as you might think, you inveterate optimist!)
  • Along similar lines: When, according to their own reviews, performer, critic and audience have obviously attended very different shows simultaneously.

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Establishing Meta Magic

I’m sure you have already come across some of the following phenomena in your magic life. But I’m not sure though whether there is a name for these. For the lack of a better term, I will call this thing meta magic.

In a nutshell, meta magic is magic about itself, within itself or out of itself (if there is a difference). A deception within the deception. Tricks of meta magic quality are utterly self-referential. For that, they may constitute bad magic from a layman’s point-of-view, but they may be inherently funny and stimulating for majishuns.

Here are some striking examples of meta magic I could think of:

  • Doing a “torn and restored” trick with an instruction sheet that explains a “torn and restored” trick
  • Showing a card trick in which a magician drawn on a blank card finds the chosen card
  • Letting a burning cigarette disappear in a cloud of cigarette smoke
  • Floating a Zombie ball or Losander table while floating yourself
  • Sawing a woman in half while she is performing Disecto on you
  • Pulling a small square circle illusion out of a bigger square circle that was pulled out of a huge square circle
  • Changing a change bag into another change bag by using, umm, a square circle illusion.

I guess there is a lot more meta magic out there!

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