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In his 1985 booklet, Fynys, T.A. Waters writes:

I have a vivid memory of seeing Torchy Towner perform at the Magic Castle. He did, among other things, a classical levitation performed as ritual magic. There was no hoop pass (“If I were really doing it I wouldn’t have to prove it, would I?” he said to me) and there was no obvious playing to the audience as see-how-great-I-am. Quite the contrary: in doing the preliminary trance induction of the assistant, usually done as a throwaway, he took several minutes; in fact the routine itself took about eight minutes. What was the audience reaction?

They loved it. They loved it because they believed it; for those moments they were experiencing wonder, and they sat open-mouthed at the edges of their chairs. When the act was over many of them seemed to awaken as from a dream.

While Waters was actually in the process of making a larger point about magic and mentalism being more than just entertainment, I love this quote because it dovetails nicely into a discussion about an infraction of magical law that is, when one considers it, the antithesis of what great magic attempts to accomplish.

In short, what do you have to prove?

A magician takes his stage — whether that’s really the boards or the smaller stage of a close-up table — and should command his surroundings (generally speaking, at least) simply by being. He’s the magician, he’s supposed to be special, on a plane separate from normal people. Proving, and it’s bastard twin brother, Overproving, do nothing to support what should be implicit. In fact, proving and overproving can get in the way of the real magic.

One of my favorite motion pictures of all time is “Smokey and the Bandit” (Okay, just wondering if you’re actually paying attention. Although I can nearly recite the dialog from beginning to end.) Actually, “Somewhere in Time“ is what I’m referring to. In that film, Christopher Reeve plays the part of Richard Collier, a playwright who falls for a woman he sees in an old portrait hanging on the wall of the hotel in which he’s staying to overcome a frustrating bout of writer’s block.

His obsession over the woman leads him to learn the woman in the portrait is an actress named Elise McKenna (played beautifully by Jane Seymour) who stayed and performed at the hotel many, many years before, and has since passed away. Collier uses self-hypnosis in an effort to travel back in time to be with her.

In his ostensibly successful attempt at time travel, he arranges his hotel room to the period to which he wishes to travel. He wears period clothing. He disassociates himself from his contemporary environment and convinces himself he is back in time.

In the film, it all goes remarkably well for Richard. He travels back in time to the year 1912, meets Elise, and they fall in love. Everything is just lovely. Elise offers to buy Richard a new suit to replace the outdated one he wears. In an effort to prove his is just fine, he demonstrates the many pockets of his suit and, in the process, pulls a handful of change from one of them. Looking down he sees a 1979 penny staring back at him.

This penny, clearly out of place in his magical 1912 suroundings, is an instant and obscene reminder that breaks the spell, and he’s propelled back to his own time.

It’s a heartbreaking and capriciously evil moment brought about by an otherwise needless action.

Are you creating the same sort of evil moment for your audiences by attempting to prove something that your audience is otherwise perfectly willing to accept as a given within the safe framework provided by a theatrical production?

As an aside, “Somewhere in Time” was filmed on Mackinac Island, where cars were not permitted. Travel was on foot, bicycle or horsedrawn carriage. Reeve noted in his 1998 biography, “Still Me,” that “the location quickly cast a spell on our entire company. The real world fell away as the story and the setting took hold of us.”

When your audience is before you, it’s probably not a blind date. They know you’re there to perform magic or mentalism (or — horrors! — both in the same performance.) The expectation is implicit that you are going to do some things that happily fly in the face of good and decent rules and laws of nature. If we do our job correctly, we take our audience by the hand and surround them with words and objects that work together to cast a spell they accept willingly. Something — anything — out of place breaks that spell.

Here’s another point of view, this by Juan Tamariz in the introduction to his book, “The Magic Way”:

When a trick or a routine is well worked out, well studied, well presented, and really surprises the audience, is it already perfect? Can we honestly feel that our job is done? Are we already doing Magic?

My answer is: I don’t think so. Something is missing: knowing what the spectators are thinking during and after the trick is finished, finding out what impression we have made in their minds, finding out if they suspect any method that might have been used to do the trick (even if it wasn’t). We have to reach the point where they not only don’t know how the trick was done, they can’t even analyze it, or imagine how it might have been done.

What is more, we must make them feel totally incapable of discovering the real method, or any other possible method.

And going a step further, we must make the spectator suspend his disbelief during and after the trick: He shouldn’t even want to analyze it. He shouldn’t only feel fooled, he should feel bewitched, bewildered, and fascinated by the MYSTERY he has just witnessed. We must try and make the IMPACT of the MYSTERY they have seen so strong that the audience feels incapable of unveiling it. They should be so surprised that they don’t even want to try.

Carefully crafted, our presentation subtly erases any path to a solution. It becomes implicit, without overtly provoking any thought towards somehow reconciling the laws of nature with what the brain thinks it just witnessed. This is in contrast to proving and overproving, which serves to tell the audience at least two things: you’re lying to them and you don’t think they’re smart enough to know this. I’m not sure those concepts are explicitly covered in Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” but I assure you, the sentiment is in there.

Harlan Tarbell in his required Tarbell Course in Magic writes in Volume 1:

In line with the power of suggestion is the credulity of people, their willingness to believe.

Always remember that the first impulse of people is to believe. Doubting is secondary.

…

So it is in magic. People want to believe that you make that coin disappear, that you vanish that burning cigarette.

So remember, you are betting on the safe side when you play your stakes on this impulse of people to believe.

No magical discussion about the pathological condition that forces some performers to prove things are “perfectly ordinary” would be complete without mentioning Al Baker. Baker is credited with the line which says essentially:

Don’t run if you aren’t being chased.

From his 1941 book,“Magical Ways and Means” here’s what Al Baker has to say on the subject:

Another thing: some magicians always want to prove something that the audience doesn’t question. They tell the story about the little repertory company with a special between acts, a magician with no appeal, not much experience. They tell him he has to play a bit in the show, put this cloak on, this hat on and use this rubber dagger. He comes out at the proper cue and stabs the villain. The poor villain comes back at him, “Gad, what the hell did you use?” “I used my own dagger.” “Why didn’t you use the rubber dagger that I gave you?” “You cant pass that out for examination,” the magician replied.

Finally, Sam Sharpe, in his book, “Conjurers’ Psychological Secrets,” states:

Assertion is the most ingenious method of convincing anyone that something is other than it actually is. The conjurer who boldly states: “I have here an ordinary pack of cards,” knowing that they are really anything but ordinary, may succeed in convincing the uncritical, but more subtle methods, such as casually shuffling, fanning, and otherwise naturally handling them, which leave the spectators to draw their own conclusions, are called for when entertaining less naive audiences, or in support of definite assertions.

It’s one thing to jump through hoops to create the perfect illusion, and quite another to use one and destroy the illusion completely.