The greatest trick ever will change your mind about magic

“Do you believe in magic?” the Lovin’ Spoonful asked in 1965.

That’s a pretty broad question. Let’s refine it a little, so it can be answered with a simple yes or no. Do you believe in magic as a form of entertainment?

To that question my answer is an enormous yes. At its best, magic is a thrilling blend of creative ingenuity and consummate technical skill. There’s no show I’d rather go to than a good magic show.

Magicians Penn & Teller perform at Hamer Hall in Melbourne earlier in January.Credit: Mark Gambino

Some people, who otherwise strike me as quite intelligent and decent, tell me they’re not into magic. A friend of mine was recently heard to remark that magic “just isn’t my thing”.

I find this attitude baffling. How can magic not be your thing? Magic is magic, for crying out loud. It’s a byword for delight. If you think you don’t like it, maybe it’s because you’ve never seen a first-rate magician perform.

Consider Penn & Teller, the superlative American magicians who are currently touring Australia. I’ve been lucky enough to see these brilliant men play the Sydney Opera House twice now – first in the winter of 2022, when Australia was still staggering out of its COVID hibernation, and again in January this year.

I would say, without the slightest hesitation, that those two shows were the most exhilarating and mind-expanding nights I’ve ever spent in a theatre. Penn & Teller are supreme masters of their craft, to say the least. But I would go further. I’d say they are creative artists of the highest order.

In the 2022 show, Teller performed his masterpiece, a show-stopping routine called “Shadows”. If you’ve never had the privilege of seeing this sublime creation unfold in a theatre, you can watch Teller perform it on YouTube.

But that is a poor substitute for seeing it live. When Teller executed the trick’s final move at the Opera House, the effect was literally breathtaking. You heard the sound of 1500 people all gasping at once.

When I recall that moment now, I find myself getting a little choked up. The climax of that trick was no less moving than a great line of poetry or a soaring phrase of music.

In Penn & Teller’s current show, there’s a mind-bending number called “Entropy”, which is less a trick than a happening, a genuinely weird incursion into the laws of space and time. It’s a radically original piece of art, as intellectually frisky and audacious as a Stoppard play. Watching it unfold, you feel the world being taken apart and remade in front of your eyes.

Great magic renovates your brain, as all true art does. It takes your mind on a wild ride. It expands your sense of what human beings can do when they put their minds to it.

In the 2022 show, Penn did a hair-raising routine with a nail gun. It looked phenomenally dangerous. But he was at pains to reassure the audience – which contained many children – that he would never be so crass as to endanger his life on stage. There was a secret to what he was doing up there. He wanted us to know that, even if he wasn’t about to tell us what the secret was.

Penn & Teller do things on stage that seem to defy rational explanation. But just because you can’t see the rational explanation doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Like all honest magicians, Penn & Teller don’t claim to possess psychic or supernatural powers. Far from it. These are tricks, Penn repeatedly stresses on stage. Their outcome is carefully controlled. No other result is possible.

That’s what great magic delivers, in a strikingly pure form: the spectacle of skill.

The best magicians don’t just entertain us. They educate us. They’re rationalist warriors, who immunise us against metaphysical charlatans by demonstrating that the physical world is far more rich and strange than we previously thought.

There’s a long tradition of this in magic. In the 1920s, Harry Houdini denounced the spiritualist mediums who were taking the post-war world by storm. These people were just jumped-up magicians, Houdini said. Their work was “a fraud from start to finish.” In the 1970s, the Amazing Randi waged a similar campaign of demystification against the purported psychic Uri Geller.

At the bottom of most magic tricks lies some relatively simple physical mechanism: a sleight of hand, a moment of misdirection. The beauty of great magic – and I use the word beauty in its fullest sense – lies in the artistry with which these mechanisms are concealed.

Robert Hughes, the Australian art critic, once explained the simple philosophy underlying his appreciation of art. “I love the spectacle of skill,” he wrote.

That’s what great magic delivers, in a strikingly pure form: the spectacle of skill. If you ever get a chance to see a master magician perform, take it. You won’t regret it. If you do, you may need to check your pulse.