Hey guys! Look! My very first topic!
LoL
Anyway, I decided to make a discussion about this because (1) I did not find any, (2) a lot of people were are complaining about this in Alex's "What does your social circle think?" topic under Playing Card Plethora, (3) it's off topic if I post it there, and (4) it's a part of a magician's life.
I'm just going to pull my own bench here for a bit and I hope you guys won't mind. It's purely for the purpose of giving some of you guys a tip on how to deal with hecklers.
Now, I myself am very paranoid. Whenever I perform, most of the time I think that I'm going to mess up or someone is bound to catch what I'll do so whenever there's a heckler, I get really nervous. That's just the way I am no matter how much I get better at it. The main reason is because of how I started out with magic.
The very first tricks I learned are David Blaine's Two Card Monte and the Ambitious Card where a bent card "magically" pops up to the top. The reason why I named David Blaine is because I learned it from him. Well not personally but I actually reverse engineered it just by seeing it once on one of the earlier TV Specials he did. It's not his fault. In fact he performed it quite well. It's just that I happen to have a well developed attention to detail that I managed to do so. Due to that, I get scared of people with the similar capabilities.
In order to remedy this fear, magicians I've met advised me the same thing Don suggested in a different topic. Compose a routine with several tricks and work them as close to perfection as you can. And so I did but still the fear remained due to the increasing number of hecklers that tend to pop in at that moment when you are performing a trick to a different group of people you have already did to them(hecklers).
It wasn't until I picked up Robert Giobbi's Card College series when I learned that there are different versions of a double lift. I later found out that modern innovators have also come up with such. I decided to give it a shot. With each ambitious card routine, I perform a different kind of double lift. With each card ditching, I alternate between the palm, the tenkai, and the gambler's cup. Despite performing the same tricks, I found hecklers to be less noisy when I do a different sleight.
And so we come back to the golden rule of magic, never perform a trick twice. Well, maybe not the same way twice.
What about you guys? Any heckler experiences that you would like to share and how you overcame them? C'mon! Fess up!
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