Notes from Penn & Teller’s Masterclass

I quite enjoyed Penn & Teller’s Masterclass (paywall, sorry!). I learned some practical card tricks that came in handy while we sitting in the airport waiting for a connecting fight with restless kids.

I also really enjoyed Pen & Teller’s reflections on the art of their craft. Here are a few points I wanted to write down.

Magic is a Playground For Determining What’s Real

One fundamental question we all have to ask ourselves is: how can I know what is and isn’t real?

Our eyesight is often our primary tool here — “I see it, therefore it is”.

But magic, as Pen & Teller note, makes you realize that what you see with your eyes may not always be true.

Teller notes that how we determine what is and isn’t real has profound implications in our day to day lives. For example, you have to determine whether the bus you see hurtling towards you is actually a bus or not. If you can’t determine that quickly, you’re dead. So: how do you determine what is real?

Magic is the playground for that. Where you can explore that idea without getting hurt. I like how Pen put it:

Magic is the heaviest philosophical ideas you can possibly have, dealt with in the silliest way

He later notes that someone who plays with how we ascertain what’s real might actually be the best person to point us at what is, in fact, real:

The reputation of magician is honest liar. You are someone who experiments with what the truth is. And I believe if you do it right, you can be known as someone more concerned with truth and honesty than the people you’re working for. Someone that’s really explored how we ascertain what’s true and how we lie.

Magic Is Relational

Pen calls magic “anti-solipsistic”, i.e. the opposite of self-centered.

So many art forms can be enjoyed by yourself.

For example, you can write music for yourself. You can write poetry for yourself. You can write software for yourself.

But you cannot do magic for yourself because you are clued in on the deception.

Magic requires you to reach out, beyond yourself, to another human who you can perform for, and in this way it necessitates empathy, storytelling, and other practices from a rich variety of disciplines.

While much art is meant to be made for others, magic requires it.

We Are All Active Participant In Our Own Deception

If you know their show, Teller’s magic is mute. But he elucidates why he likes to try and do a trick without saying anything: it’s a challenge.

The magician enables the audience to tell itself the story that ([the magician]) wants to tell. It’s very hard for them to convince themselves of what they’ve constructed, and that’s much more convincing than when you try to force the meaning on them.

In other words, you expect a magician to tell you a lie while performing a trick. But if they can get you to misperceive something without actually telling you what to think, that’s a whole other level — and it’s way more convincing. (Reminds me of the movie Inception where they plant ideas in people’s subconscious, but in order for those ideas to have real staying power the person must think it was their idea and not planted there by someone else.)

The Joy of Magic

Teller notes that “art gives you the sense of a miracle”. It can be listening to Bach, or looking at Rembrandt, or watching magic. You experience it and you are mystified, because what seemed impossible was materialized as possible by another human being. He says:

(for me) the fundamental quality of a work of art is a sense of the impossible for a moment seeming to be real

Pen says that, “One of the things that makes life worth living is giving other people joy.” Magic is a subset of that.

I can testify to that. After watching this Masterclass on a long flight, then being stuck in an airport terminal on a five hour layover with three kids under 10 years old, I took one of the simple card tricks I learned in the video and performed it for my family and the marvel in their eyes was priceless.