Despite this, Houdini (whose real name was Ehrich Weiss and died in 1926) made more money than any other magician. Of their time: as much as $200,000 a week in today’s money. It wasn’t that the audience liked his escape by defeating death. The point was that he had a habit of selling the surprise business. He used local-newspaper offices and police stations as his escape stage to ensure press coverage. He invited the audience to share his sense of danger by trying to hold his breath while he struggled while wearing handcuffs to escape a sealed milk carton filled with water. (Fortunately, he was able to hold it much longer than they were able to.)
He fiercely defended his actions against critics. In 1899 a newspaper claimed that a hidden key was involved in a handcuffed escape. He invited spies to watch him perform the same feat in the nude, thus busting the debunker and generating buzz at the same time.
He also fought imitators and threatened to sue them for copying acts he claimed he had patented. (This was nonsense; you can’t patent an idea while keeping it a secret. But magicians aren’t lawyers.) He once copyrighted a performance of one of his most popular tricks – being lowered upside down into a “Chinese water torture” tank – as a skit. This allowed them to sue a copycat in Germany and win. For good measure, while the case was pending, he taught the tricks to a rival German magician, and even loaned him equipment, Kenneth Silverman reports in his biography “Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss.”
A century after Houdini’s death, magicians face the same challenges – making money from mystery, protecting secrets – and many new challenges. The scope of attention is shrinking. Competition is increasing: anyone can film an act and publish it on social media. More worryingly for those who rely on hocus-pocus to get their groceries, TikTok makes it easy to show the whole world how to perform a trick. And technology has surprised people, making it harder for them to stop being surprised. Magicians today must attempt the most difficult trick of staying relevant in the age of AI. The Economist went to Las Vegas to ask them how they do it.
At “Magic Live!”, an annual convention, magicians gather in a smoky hotel near the Strip to swap tips, buy hardwood wands for $250, and listen to lectures on “creating your stage persona through costume.” In one corner, a fake elephant’s trunk dangles next to the “jaws of death,” an $8,000 device used by escape artists. The inventor, Mike Michaels, says the weirdest thing he’s ever made is a sex doll named Cindy Sucklenight (“long story short, cards come out of her mouth”). He says he thinks of new ideas, especially while drinking beer in the casino.
Dozens of aspiring magicians and celebrated prestidigitators gather at the bar for a “jam session” – like music, but with magic. Your correspondent was taught beginner card tricks and observed that one attendee claimed he would reveal a human between his hands (he managed the same shoe).
Mingling with the crowd was Justin Flom, a controversial Minnesotan who may represent the future of the Magic. He calls himself “one of the most visible human beings on the planet.” His cleverly promoted illusions are a huge hit on social media.
In Houdini’s day, when the trick of sawing a woman in half was new, magicians would create delicious scares by parking ambulances outside theaters and having assistants dump buckets of red liquid into nearby gutters. Today a similar promotion can be done with a shocking headline. In 2017 Mr. Flom uploaded a video titled, “Seeing Half a Baby!!”. It shows his four-month-old daughter babbling peacefully at the camera while he is seen putting two Dr. Seuss books into her stomach and moving her legs away. It has been viewed approximately 200 million times.
This year Mr. Flom released an even more shocking sequel to his fellow magicians: “Sawting a Baby in Half and I Show the Secret”. “Magicians can make things disappear using smoke and mirrors,” Mr. Flom says in the video. The secret, which he now reveals with his eight-year-old daughter, involves the careful arrangement of a doll’s legs that are equipped with springs to move them, a “magic table” with a hole large enough to hide a small person in – and a strategically placed mirror that faces the audience and hides what is happening underneath.
It is the cardinal sin of magicians to show how it is done. Mr. Flom does this regularly, calling it “an artistic choice.” He says, often “the mystery is more entertaining than the trick.” “In those cases, tell them the secret.” Some of his videos reveal this in the first few seconds. The purpose of the “game,” explains Mr. Flom, is to hook the audience from the opening shot “and then compel them to watch for as long as possible.” He says he makes millions of dollars a year from things like this.
He is not the only one to turn confusion into gold. A TikTok video showing a woman missing her phone case has been viewed 83 million times. His 17-second “tutorial” on how he did it — dropping the case on for just the right second and angle so it’s obscured by the camera — has been viewed 46 million times.
Another video, filmed from a magician’s point of view, reveals some of the secrets of street magic. More than 39 million people have seen it. A pen in a frame that presses a secured dollar note appears as a magnetic device; In another a flute of champagne changes color because of a cloth that hides the quick switch of a cardboard triangle from the inside of the glass. “My world has become a little less magical,” one commenter laments.
Now all my charm is gone
Does highlighting the mechanics make magic less thrilling? Some magicians are afraid of this. But this is not at all new. A television show called “Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed” ran for three seasons in the 1990s. The host is believed to have worn a mask to avoid being blackballed by other magicians, before dramatically revealing his identity at the end of the series. (His name was Val Valentino, and he insisted that he only tell old tricks.)
The key to keeping a modern audience mystified is to stay one step ahead. Sometimes this means destroying the act of exposure. In an episode of “Fool Us”, a talent show hosted by Penn & Teller, two industry giants, Asi Wind asks a person in the audience to choose a card; He chooses the king of clubs. Mr. Wind takes a deck of red cards from a wooden box placed on a circular table. Before the show, he says, he pulled a card from the deck and turned it over. He reminds the man that they both could have chosen anything – and then reveals the inverted king of clubs. He adds, Mr. Wind was so confident about that choice that he took this card from a separate deck of blue cards. And sure enough, he turns over all the red cards, revealing that they were all blank.
Mr. Wind then asks his audience if they would like to know how the trick is performed. As the camera pans toward the crowd, most people cheer. (A disappointed woman shakes her head and covers her ears.) He replaces the wooden box with a plastic one, and explains that it also has a hidden hole and magnets to activate the “trap door” in the table. Below the table, he shows from above, is a wheel of 52 decks of cards, each with 51 spaces and a separate inverted card. Using a mug equipped with magnets, he demonstrates how he can spin the wheel and guide the correct deck toward the trap door. He jokes: “Do you see how it can help you with this trick?”
In the sudden finale he peels off the table skirt. Where viewers expect to see equipment, they see nothing. The “wheel” of cards is revealed as a flat photo. The secret has been kept safe. “Nothing is as it seems,” he says, tearing up the piece of paper to applause.
Despite his talent, Mr. Wind is worried about the future. “Sometimes I look at the kids and say I’m losing them,” he says. Young audience members want “more immediate” payoffs, “more attractiveness.” Criss Angel, whose television show “Mindfreak” ran for six seasons from 2005–2010, says that nowadays “people won’t sit there for three and a half minutes to watch one thing.” His live show in Las Vegas mimics the extreme excitement of a TikTok scroll: within minutes he is suspended from the ceiling in a straitjacket while debris flies towards the audience.
Technology may have blown the minds of audiences, but it has also expanded the tools available to magicians. At the convention market, a stall refuses to speak to a journalist, but a careful browsing of its catalog reveals that it sells microchips that can be secretly embedded in cards to help the performer guess which one the spectator has chosen. Improved technology allows magicians to present shows more cheaply. Motion-sensitive tags can be used to indicate sound. Cameras and screens let card-trick performers take control of large stages once reserved for grand illusions.
And the power that is in me is my own
As the veterans age and are replaced by digitally native youth, some fear there will be a shortage of magicians who can deliver long, intense shows. YouTube magicians believe that “performing on the internet is what determines your performance”, sighs a venue owner. Simon Marone of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, an industry group, says half of them are “doing magic down the face rather than up”.
However, several magicians told The Economist that the complexities of the modern world have increased the demand for live magic. The use of phones is prohibited at the Magic Castle, a club in Los Angeles. A young, glamorous crowd flocks to the maze to meet a variety of magicians. In the basement, a bartender turns cards into glasses. The entrance requires you to say “open mole” to an owl on a bookshelf, which then moves away to reveal a secret passage. It’s an experience that’s impossible to replicate online.
David Blaine, a magician known for spectacular tricks, invites The Economist to his office in New York. He has an original poster advertising Houdini’s escape: bury yourself alive. Inspired by the great man, in 1999 Mr. Blaine buried himself alive for a week in a clear coffin in Manhattan. An estimated 75,000 people stopped to watch. Some irritably said, “Thought…it was a hologram”.
Mr. Blaine realizes that the entertainment landscape has changed. In 2023, Mr. Beast, a popular YouTuber, copied his burial stunt and filmed it. The resulting video has been viewed over 285 million times. “His magic is studying algorithms,” Mr. Blaine shrugs.
The best live performances can be simple. “I’ve done a crane escape 100 feet in the air, and I got a standing ovation for doing it, like giving someone a sponge ball,” says Los Angeles-based magician Gabriella Lester. Even the clichéd adage of pulling a rabbit out of a hat can still surprise people in the right setting. Jason Ledington, a professor of philosophy at Bucknell University, believes that an effective demonstration creates “a kind of hiccup in the fabric of everyday life.” People still yearn for him. As Houdini once said without any surprise, “We should hardly consider life worth living.”
Phones won’t work magic. Good magicians include these in their acts. Mr. Blaine shuffles the cards and fans them in an upward, one downward pattern. He takes a photo of your correspondent holding it, which he sends for inspection. It looks just like that. Next, instructions are given to select a face-up card from the physical pile. “Would you be impressed if every single card except yours turned face up?” he asks. In fact. “When I said every card except yours would be turned face down, that’s not what I meant here.” He points the phone at your correspondent, and the photo is taken once again.
This time—hey, presto!—only the Queen of Hearts is facing the camera.
