Tour Thoughts—Part 1

Respect Your Audience

We’re 19 shows through the tour, and we’re finishing up with Jason in DC for the final three shows tonight and tomorrow.

In time, I’m going to recap the entire tour, but I wanted to talk about one particular lesson that emerged from city to city. 

I first noticed this in Los Angeles, then Seattle, then Portland. And it kept going. 

After the shows, a few people typically come up to me and Tess to chat. But after one of our LA shows, someone said how she “hadn’t been that surprised in a long time.” We kept hearing the same thing at successive shows.

True surprise is rare. And true surprise feels very, very good.

Then it got deeper. In San Francisco and Dallas, audience members were candid, telling us how their life wasn’t the best right now, and they really needed a night to laugh, to be amazed. One woman, both literally and metaphorically, told us how badly she needed magic in her life. 

It’s easy to see your audience as a faceless blob. In fact, that’s often literally how you see them, because the lights on stage are blinding. It’s easy to forget that each is an individual person with a story, with struggles of their own that you have no idea about. And that blindness goes both ways:

While we were in Denver for what was by far our biggest audience of the tour (270 people over 3 shows), we had to put my dog down. One afternoon, I said goodbye to Deputy, then got in the car with Jason and Tess to perform two shows, which were not easy to do (but Jason and Tess were terrific friends throughout the whole ordeal). The audience, of course, had no idea. And I had no idea what was going on in their heads. I can pretend to read minds, I can even do it quite convincingly, but I’m never going to know what someone else is going through. 

It is precisely because of this ignorance that you owe them your absolute best work every time. Who knows if someone else in the audience had just lost a dog, and they needed this show as a release? Statistically, that’s happened at more than one of my shows, and I just haven’t known.

At one point last weekend (I legitimately don’t remember when, but I think it was Dallas), I thought “Maybe I won’t memorize people’s names tonight. I’m really tired.” (For context, I memorize the audience’s names in every show. There’s no trick, I just do it for real, and it takes the entire pre-show period). Luckily I only entertained that thought for a few minutes, before realizing that it was completely unfair to the audience to eliminate one of my best tricks just because it would be a little harder for me. 

The hard thing and the right thing are so often the same. 

So if the hard thing was memorizing names, then it was probably the right thing to do. Especially considering that it’s one of the strongest tricks in the show. 

Memorizing names shows them that I am here, for them, right now. 

Likewise, your material in a magic show really matters, because people don’t see magic often. I make a joke about this on stage, but it’s completely true: You can go to a comedy club and see five comedians in one night, you might see five magicians in your entire life. Which is precisely why, as a magician, you need to take your work seriously (which doesn’t mean solemnly, as Derren Brown reminds us, but seriously).

I am always amazed when I see people perform garbage tricks with no meaning, which I consider a supreme waste of the audience’s time. No one wants to see you manipulate a silk (why do you have a silk???) or link rings together for no reason. This might be twenty percent of the audience’s experience of magic EVER. Don’t ruin it for them. 

The world is tough right now. Our show isn’t life-saving medicine or a pay raise. But we do have a legitimate role to play in others’ happiness. We can put good into the world. And that starts by doing genuinely strong material with the audience at the front of your mind. 

Speaking of, it’s essential to treat your audience with respect, especially the ones who choose to sit in the front row. Many of them were truly afraid that they were going to get heckled—I know because they told me. The world has enough difficulty, and picking on audience members who don’t deserve it is, in my opinion, ridiculous and insulting to the very people who spent their hard-earned money and their limited time to see you. 

One gentleman sat by himself in the front row in Austin. He told us afterwards that he’s a very shy person, and that sitting alone in the front was hard for him. It was never something I could’ve known before the show—but the fact that he was shy was a great reason to be kind, to be aware that people are going through things you can’t see, and to give them your absolute best, no matter what, no matter where you are. 

Because your audience deserves it.