The Fruit Salad Therapy Tapes: Tape 26
Hello! How are you doing? Yeah, keeping on keeping on, y’know? How did that thing go? That’s great! Congratulations! Those rabbits aren’t gonna know what hit them! Right, anyway, welcome back to the Fruit Salad Therapy Tapes, a weekly interactive sketchpad/notebook project from friendly nuisance Joz Norris. If you’re enjoying the newsletter I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or encouraged people to subscribe! Alternatively, if you decide you’ve had enough of it and it’s no longer for you, you’re very welcome to unsubscribe any time you like. If you’re still with me, then read on for this week’s Tape!
When To Reveal Information
Thanks so much for all your replies to last week’s Tape, it’s really helpful to read through a few different takes of what it is people like and appreciate about this newsletter, and start to think about ways of continuing to deliver that for people without it being too big a drain on my time now that things are busier than in the first half of the year. I’m still in the process of working out exactly what sort of approach I’ll take with that, so this week’s Tape is just another rambly-jumbled-thoughts newsletter like usual, and perhaps soon there’ll be a bigger rejig of the newsletter’s format, though I doubt it’ll be a total overhaul. Anyway, this week I’ve been thinking about comedy and magic.
A friend recently recommended me the book Designing Miracles: Creating The Illusion Of Impossibility by Darwen Ortiz, which I’ve not got round to reading yet, but the way she described it really sparked off a lot of thoughts and turbo-charged my own thinking about the show I’m in the early stages of putting together. I’m starting to work on a new show called Blink with Ben Target and some support from Soho Theatre, and currently it’s an idea for a show with absolutely no content. When I first started talking to Ben about it, he said “It sounds like it starts out as a series of, essentially, magic tricks” and I really loved that description. We had put magic tricks into shows before - my Mr Fruit Salad show in 2019 was entirely constructed around a stage illusion I imagined specifically for the room in Edinburgh where it was going to be performed, so we put a couple of other illusions into it as well to make that a more consistent tone across the whole show. Because of this, my friend Elise recommended the Ortiz book to me because she thought I’d be receptive to the ways in which everything Ortiz says is equally as applicable to comedy as it is to magic.
I worked as a magician (of a very junior sort, doing fairly entry-level tricks for children) for about four years, and magic, as apparently Ortiz discusses in his book, is an art form entirely defined by when you choose to reveal information. “Your card is now over here!” is impressive purely because you, the viewer, didn’t know it was already there. If a magician says “You can’t see it at the moment, but there’s a dove hidden in this pan, and in a minute I’ll reveal it” is not an impressive magic trick. A dove being produced from a seemingly empty pan is. The art of putting together a great magic show is about being very, very precise in terms of how much information is revealed at each stage and, crucially, which bits are never revealed. Producing a dove from a pan is impressive, but becomes less so if the magician immediately says “It was actually already in there.” The magician is in control of all the information, which is relatively underwhelming and simple, and decides how much to reveal and when, and the exact combination of those decisions is magic.
The same is true of comedy. The old pull-back-and-reveal model of joke writing - “And that was just the teachers!”; “And then I got off the bus!” etc - is subject to exactly the same rules as magic, and all comedy functions on the same basic principle. If you start by saying “Let me tell you about the teachers in my old school” or “So I was on a bus the other day”, then what you have is no longer a joke, it’s merely some information you’re going to relate. But if you exercise careful control over when that information is revealed, and how much of it, then you have the beginnings of a comedic effect. Elise was excited about the idea of a show that explores the parallels between magic and comedy in terms of controlling what the audience knows at any one time, and what they don’t know - in the same way that explaining the trick destroys the magical effect, following up a particularly well-crafted funny anecdote with “I actually made up these specific elements of that story to make sure it hit the right comedic beats rather than just telling you the truth,” then the comedic impact is lost. But what if a show could somehow take ownership of that and find the comedy, and the magic, in both the correct and incorrect handling and mishandling of information? As it happens, these sorts of ideas - who is thinking what at any one time, who is in control of who knows what in the making of a show - were already central ideas in the show I was discussing with Ben and Soho, and this next step felt like a natural progression for my thinking around that show.
