CAMELOT Theatrical Special Effects

There is a principle of logic and philosophy called "Occam's Razor" named after its first proponent, William of Ockham, a 14th-Century Franciscan friar. It is usually stated: "The simplest explanation is usually the best" or, sometimes: "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras."

So we were watching Keith Barry's magic special on CBS, "This is Extraordinary!", last week and came to his finale: a sort of Russian Roulette played with hangman's nooses. Barry pulled six nooses out of a box and passed five out to the audience for examination. The sixth, he demonstrated, was gimmicked: it separated in the middle when he simply pulled it apart. The audience, having no clue what they were looking for, pulled on the other five nooses which didn't come apart. "Aha!" I said to my wife. "The old Occam's Razor gag!" In the case of a stage magician or a theatre special effects designer, however, Occam's Razor is used in reverse: Let the audience buy the simple explanation or even imagine it but the truth is complex beyond their imaginations. I won't tell you how Barry's trick was done, as obvious as it was, but after collecting all the nooses and having them mixed up in the box, then going through some random selection monkey-business that ate up air time and finally, having himself hanged by a randomly-selected noose which, duh, turned out to be gimmicked, the show was over. Notice I said "a noose" and not "the noose"... and therin lies the deception.

You've all seen bad stage magic: the magus brings out some goofy-looking piece of apparatus and starts in with his "This cabinet was discovered in the tomb of Pharoah Hoop-De-Doop in the Valley of the Kings blah blah blah" and you just think "Oh, shut up!" and head for the bar. Keith Barry at least started off with a great premise: "Here's a piece of rope. Examine this piece of rope." Hint hint: It's a piece of rope. You all know how to look at a piece of rope. Even I would never be such a jerk as to ask: "When you say examine, do you mean I can unbraid this rope into its individual fibers?" The answer would be "Of course not!" So we all "examine" the rope. How long does it take to look at a piece of rope? You'll see exactly what we want you to see. That's a great premise.

The audience doesn't have to be led into the Occam's Razor Trap; the human mind instinctively thinks horses when it hears hoofbeats. The really imaginative might think zebras but what even they don't know is that it's a guy with a pan of Silly Slime and two coconut shell halves backstage. Simpler yet: the audience sees A and expects B. Our job is to show them A then B. What they'll never know is that the sequence was A, Q, L, W-X-R simultaneously, then B. Just because it's a piece of rope doesn't mean there isn't a lot of mechanics, some electronics, a little bit of magnetics and some chemistry involved. They wouldn't believe you if you told them.

posted by C. J. # 10:36 AM