I want to talk a little bit about something that is very important to your show. I don’t sell it, you can’t buy it, and you don’t even read about it much. It’s something that Ken Brooke taught me when I was his student. He was my mentor during the 60s, and prepared me to make a living performing magic. Ken was a very good teacher, but he always circled back to one little point. He’d say, “Nicky, don’t forget the linkage.”
It’s the linkage that makes it work. It is all about the material that goes between the tricks. And one of the things that you’ll find if you watch someone who isn’t used to performing often is that they tend to do one trick, it finishes, there’s a gap, and then they perform another trick. That little gap between tricks is when the real pros, the guys who work an awful lot, make the whole thing seamless. The performer wants that to happen, and linkage is what makes it happen.
Sometimes it’s a joke, sometimes it’s a bit of business, sometimes it’s a prop, or it might be a piece of gag magic, you know, just something that’s a funny visual item. But whatever it is, it’s designed just to keep that show moving smoothly. And it is the mark between being a fully pro and being a very gifted hobbyist who doesn’t have enough time to work on those details. So, I would suggest that you spend as much time thinking about what goes on between those tricks. When you’re rehearsing, it’s very easy to rehearse the trick.
“I’ve learned it.”
“I’ve got the patter. I finished it.”
“I videotaped it. It looks great!”
Let me try another one now. But then, when you go out in front of the audience, you suddenly discover that your excitement level has built up to this. Then suddenly it begins to go downhill, and you have to start all over again. The goal is to keep that movement going upwards so that at all points in your act, the show is going in an arc, which means that you start off strongly and you end up even stronger with no troughs in the middle. And that’s what linkage is all about.
Ken used to use a watch winder, which was one of his favorite little things to do just in the middle. He’d wind his watch. But Ken, Ken, it was very much. very funny, he would be winding, and you’d hear this big ratcheting of the watch. He would look like he would, you know. It was just a silly little thing. But it was something that got a laugh from what he was doing.
Another thing Ken used to do was run offstage to someone in the back of the room between tricks. He’d run off and shout at somebody. He would leave the stage, and go 15 or 20 feet into the audience, and shout down at somebody, “I’ll do the card trick in a minute,” as if they were hard of hearing, and then rush back on stage, do his next trick. At the end of that one, he’d rush into the audience. I’ll be doing the card trick in a minute. And he would do that maybe five or six times, and each time it got a bigger laugh. That was a perfect definition of using a linkage to strengthen your show.
You might take a trick, for instance, and pretend you are going to perform it and build it up by repeatedly beginning but not actually performing it. An item that I like for that is the classic, the eggs dropping into the glasses when you knock the tray away. It’s an old classic bit. But between each trick you walk over, you get ready to do it, you psych up. No. And then you divert to another trick. Each time it gets funnier.
Do that four or five times, and you’ve got your linkage throughout the show. However, at the end, the eggs drop in the glass, you’ve taken that linkage, and you’ve turned it into a powerful moment in the show. So this is just a few words about something important that is not talked about enough…. linkage.
REMARKABLE MAGIC 