Feature: Modern Magic


I wrote this feature ("For my next trick") about stage magic and scepticism for Prospect magazine. Two of the most interesting magicians I spoke to were Luke Jermay, who read my mind alarmingly specifically in Finsbury Park's Costa Coffee, and "scholarly magician" Todd Landman (of Essex University's political science faculty by day). They follow in a long tradition of magicians, stretching back to Houdini, who make no claim to supernatural gifts. Yet audiences impressed by the shows' artistry find themselves caught between a desire to believe and the will to doubt.

Here's an excerpt:

In his “scholarly magic” shows, Todd Landman uses tricks to make people reconsider the way they think. He says that, for a recent trick he performed at a party, he stopped a woman’s watch. She said, “‘That’s fantastic, you stopped the second hand for five ticks.’ But others were staring at me with their arms crossed over their chests, and said: ‘You didn’t stop her watch; you suspended our belief in time for five seconds.’ So I ask: which is more plausible? I love that grasping for explanation.”

It is nothing new for illusionists to deconstruct and debunk magic that pretends to be supernatural. Landman follows in the footsteps of James Randi, a Canadian-born conjurer and escape artist, who has been the magic world’s arch-debunker since 1972, when he claimed that self-declared psychic Uri Geller’s spoon-bending could be achieved by sleight. In 1996, Randi established a $1m prize for proof of the paranormal. It has yet to be awarded.

Derren Brown makes no psychic claims for his shows. He too is sceptical of the supernatural, and is a vocal supporter of the new atheism that has become a prominent pillar of rationalist thought in recent years. Brown draws parallels between religious or superstitious beliefs and the belief an audience experiences when they are taken in by one of his tricks. Encouraging sceptical thought is something of a personal cause for Brown, who was an evangelical Christian in his teens and twenties. In 2008, he appeared on biologist Richard Dawkins’s Enemies of Reason TV series, telling him: “I wanted to be able to defend my non-belief as strongly as I should have been able to defend [my religion] as a believer.” [...]

Read more at www.prospect-magazine.co.uk