Comedy - It's a funny thing.

It's funny how comedy works.

Below is a photo of our self inflating balloon gag. This was a great gag in my solo show but when I did it in our Two by Two Show it never got much of a response. So I stopped doing it.

Then we needed a gag with the coat worn by a volunteer from the audience. Now it's one of the best jokes in the show getting 6 or 7 laughs in one minute!

The audience laughs when:

   They see a balloon start to inflate out of his pocket.
   They realize he doesn't see the balloon inflating from his pocket.
   They see Muriel notice the balloon inflating from his pocket. (She freezes.)
   They see him finally notice the balloon inflating from his pocket.
   They see Muriel just continuing to stare at the balloon inflating from his pocket.
   They see her telling him to blow at it and immediately it flies away into the audience.

And it only took me (and our machinist) one year to perfect the mechanism to do this. (Thank You, Marinus!!)

Photo Credit: Domenico Conte
Be sure to check out our website for more photos and videos: www.ScottandMuriel.com

Our Palazzo Experience

Overall it was a good experience. We worked our asses off, that's for sure. Starting at 6 pm with our Entree Act at the door and basically on our feet until the show ended at 11pm. And this 6 nights a week.

But we learned a lot, created some new material, got some big laughs, made new friends for life, and hopefully got quite a few new clients. So yeah, it was good.

Would we do it again? Yes, but not for the same money! ; ) Hopefully now they know what we're worth. And if not, maybe they will when the show opens again in Berlin without us in October.

Best thing? Working with Zahir Circo. These guys jumped into every act and animation of ours and gave 200% every show. We had so much fun with them and can't wait to work with them again. Perhaps together in a theater show...

Worst thing? Unfriendly people. Both in the crew and and some of the guests. Luckily they were the minority but it's amazing how a few bad apples can bring you down so fast. Of course we tried to be nice to everyone but at some point you just give up.

Hardest thing? Having acts of ours get cut and yet scenes that didn't really work were left in. We certanly had enough acts in the show, but it's hard when you feel like you could do more to make the audience's experience that much better. Also that the food service took priority over what we were doing in the audience was hard to accept. That the tables had to be served in a certain order prevented us from doing some hilarious bits for some tables. That was a pity.

What did I learn? Video tape yourself early and often. We didn't until the very end and were shocked by some of the obvious mistakes we we're making. Ok, it was new material... but all the more reason to tape it! Feel a but stupid about that and hopefully learned my lesson.

Also, don't play open cards with management. Their interests are not the same as yours and it's much better to keep things on a strictly business, highly professional level.

Make sure your contract says any shows with an audience are paid. They got a free show from us by calling it the dress rehearsal even though they invited an audience to come watch. (It was made worse by the fact that we were totally not ready, having never done the show once...)

Make friends with the cooks! And everyone else you can! They can make your life there much more enjoyable. Plus I now feel like I have several new friends for life and that's a great feeling.

Any last comments? Put everything you can in the contract: backstage space needed, dressing room space needed, dietary needs, stagehands/technical needs, guest passes/free tickets, drinks needed, parking, who pays for damage, what if one partner is sick, what if one part of your act can't be done, what if you're asked to sing or dance or do something you don't normally do? I would also specify better what they get for the money they're paying. One act = €X, two acts = €Y, one animation = €A, two animations = €B. They you won't feel like you're doing more than you're getting paid for.

Illusion Logic?

Can someone explain to me the logic behind these illusions where a girls goes in a box, the magician thrusts several sharp objects through the box, and then he opens the door to reveal she's not in there any more?

Any sense of danger the audience felt for the hapless assistant has now gone and they are left with a feeling of having been tricked. But not tricked in a good way, more in a here's-a-present-for-you-but-when-you-open-the-gift-it's-an-empty-box kind of way...

I have a solution to revamp these illusions and eliminate this feeling but so far none of the illusionists I've talked to are interested. I guess the status quo is good enough for them.

I wonder when someone will do a study of what people are actually thinking while watching a magic trick, moment by moment. Would be very interesting and I think very educational for magicians. (But I'm not sure they really want to know...)

Please have a look at our website: www.ScottandMuriel.com Thanks!!

Password Danger

If you're like me, you tend to use one password for a lot of different sites.

So it follows that a lot of people who register to buy something might enter the same password they use to access their PayPal account.

Thus they've just given out all the information necessary for the people operating that site to access their PayPal accounts.

Dangerous!

Russia

People have been asking "How was Russia?"

So I decided to post a letter I wrote to my Mom.

Dear Mom,

Damn. I wrote you a long email and it took like 3 hours to tap it in on my iPhone and then the stupid iPhone email program lost it. I hate that! Stupid email program...

We don’t have any internet access for the computer so that was the only way I could get it to you. Now I’m typing it on the computer, will sync it with the iPhone, and use the cellular network to email it too you.

Hope the roaming charges don’t break us...

We fine if exhausted. They’ve been working us with two shows a day since we got here.

Took us a whole day to get everything built up. But also because a man from the Russian Customs Office had to go through every flightcase and compare the contents to what we had listed on the Carnet. He took a photo of every item and wrote a number on it as well. It took more than 3 hours! Except the Russians only allow you to list 35 items on a Carnet so that list didn’t match the 100 items we had in the cases. Consequently they fined the circus $20,000 US. However they’re pretty confident they can get it back as long as we take out exactly what we brought in. So the customs will send a man to watch us pack the cases again.

Unfortunately that will be during the final night’s banquet as we have to fly out of here at 5:00 a.m. So we’ll probably be packing all night… : (

It’s been an interesting experience so far. Everyone has been very nice (even the customs man.) But almost no one speaks any English. And we’re talking about words like “Hello, Goodbye, Good Morning, Internet, Omelet, Orange Juice, etc..) Apparently this city was pretty much closed to foreigners until the Soviet Union fell so there wasn’t much reason to learn anything besides Russian.

The conditions for our act are the worst we’ve ever had. I asked the agent 5 times what it was like and he assured me the the surface between the backstage and the ring was flat and hard with no carpet. In actuality it’s incredibly bumpy and covered with separate carpets so it’s a complete nightmare.

Add to that the the interpreter doesn’t know ANY theater terms and you can imagine how long it took to tech our show. We were supposed to start at 8:00 in the evening, we didn’t start until after 11:00 p.m. and we didn’t get back to the hotel until 2:00 a.m.

Our hotel is right across the parking lot form the circus building so it’s very convenient. Our contract says we should get a three star hotel but this one I’d give 1 or 2 stars at the most. It’s pretty funny though. All the fixtures in the bathroom, like towel hangers, etc., have all been installed upside down so the bolts to hold them to the wall are on top and very visible. Then there’s a towel rack that’s connected to the central heating so that in theory you should be able to hang your towel on it and have a warm towel when you get out of the shower. But they put the mounts right in the middle of the cross pipes! So now there’s no way to hang a towel on it.

In our friend Vincent’s room the hot and cold taps are reversed. Took him a while to figure that out...

Tonight I got my first full night of sleep. We’re 4 hours ahead here and that’s just enough to mess me up completely. We go to sleep after the show (or party!) at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. but that’s like 9:00 or 10:00 o’clock p.m. for us. So we sleep 2 hours and then wake up and can’t get back to sleep until 7:00 or 8:00 o’clock in the morning. And most days we’ve had to be at work at 10:00 a.m. so I’ve been getting like 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night. Yesterday I slept between shows which helped a little but I was so glad I could sleep through last night. Muriel got 3 hours again so she’s hurting today. She even took a pill last night but it didn’t seem to help.

The response has been very good. They’re a very appreciative audience and seem to get all the humor. It’s a strange program however with way too many clowns. Even stranger still is the playing order. Muriel and I are alternating with the best clown in the show in a block near the end of the first half. The other famous clown, Peter, who we worked with in Vienna and Hamburg last summer, does three spots in the second half. Why they didn’t spread us all out throughout the show beats me.

Very weird.

We’re happy though since our applause in the finale is as much as Peter’s. He stole the show in Vienna and Hamburg so this is a nice turn of events for us. He’s also had a lot more experience in circus having performed for 6 years in one of the top circuses in Germany. For us 3 of our numbers we’ve never done in circus except one performance in Amsterdam before they cut them to make the show shorter.

There’s also a lot of interest in us from other circus directors from around the world. We met a guy today from China who’s putting on a festival in a city near Hong Kong in February. So who knows, maybe we’ll get to Asia next year after all.

We’ve seen the backstage area of the circus building, the parking lot, and inside our hotel room - and that’s it. And a little bit of the city at night driving from the airport to the hotel… No time to do anything else than get ready and perform. But tomorrow they have a sightseeing excursion planned for us so that will be good I hope.

Generally you can sense that it’s a bit depressed here. You see a lot of old Ladas and other old cars. But also a lot of new cars, Chevy’s and Land Cruisers. So some people are doing well.

We sat with the director of the circus at breakfast. He’s an ex-circus clown himself and speaks a little English. Apparently there are 42 circus buildings in Russia but this is the first and the biggest at 2600 seats. I asked him if in the time of the Soviet Union the circuses got money from the state. He said on the contrary they had to pay money to the state! And the state used that money to subsidize the other arts: ballet, symphonies, etc.. Now the circuses need money from the state since it’s harder to get people to go to shows but they don’t get any.

It was a nightmare packing. We had 600 kg to send by cargo. 5 flightcases. Cost €2800, one way. But we didn’t have any excess baggage when we flew. Which was good since in Europe you pay per kilo, something like €14 per kilo. So a 50lb suitcase extra would be like $467! Of course our carry ons were very heavy ( ±40lbs each)

The other clowns arrived with a suitcase. Bastards.

I’ve been making a list of things we forgot. I’m up to about 50 items so far. Nothing critical (yet) and they’ve been very helpful at the circus. Some stuff though they’ve never heard of! Like black gaffers tape. It’s everywhere in the world - except here. They had to go out and buy some but all they could get was grey duct tape. So we’re cannibalizing black gaffers off our illusions when we need to repair something visible.

We lost one bolt somehow but they were able to cut another one down to size. I followed the workers into their shop and it was like stepping back in time. All these old safety posters from the Soviet era. Pretty cool. There’s also a lot of old circus bins around the backstage area with C C C P stamped in them.

The show is pretty good. The animal acts are terrible though. They mistreat them, even on stage. There’s one with hedgehogs and the guy throws the poor little things 3 or 4 meters in the air and then pops a big balloon on its spines. I can’t watch. Poor thing must be deaf.

They have a circus school in the circus building as well. So there’s all these kids between 8 and 10 years old running around. They dress a bunch of the girls up as little Charlie Chaplins and they’re in the opening of the show. Their so cute! Then in the second half they come running through the audience, full speed, 15 on each side, up and down the steps screaming their little lungs out with a couple of keystone cops chasing them. Then the tables get turned when their in the ring and they start beating up the cops (played by adults) with these big inflatable hammers. And they wail on these guys! It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen!

We took some photos in the intermission today and we had them sit all over us. Then Peter had them chase him around the ring. Hilarious! Then he lay on the ground and had them point their little fingers at him. Great shot. I hope someone got it on film/chips.

Just back from the ring. We got a great response tonight, probably our best ever here. That was nice.

There’s a clown teacher here, a Russian man who lives in the States and he really wants to work with us. He really likes what we do but thinks the response from the audience should be better. Apparently he’s quite famous in Russia so it’s a real honor he wants to help us.

There’s also a great arial act that’s sort of comedy in that there’s a lot of great gags as they fly around in this balloon 9 meters up the air. Scary! It’s a brother and sister that perform it, she dressed as Chaplin, him as a lady. She told us she used to work with her husband but that he was killed 3 years ago during a show when the thing fell on top of him and broke his neck. She thinks they were sabotaged by some other artists who were jealous of them. Spaniards apparently. Horrible! Can you imagine? She doesn’t have proof but her father, who created the act with his wife 20 years ago, said not to do anything. God will punish them he says.

Bizarre...

And now her brother wants to stop since he wants to be a cook. Her father doesn’t want to train anyone new after what happened to her husband. So she doesn’t know what she’s going to do. It’s a great act so it will be a real pity.

The last act is with elephants, which they say are the most dangerous animals in the circus. It’s sort of weird to end a clown show with an animal act but the trainer dresses like a clown so I guess it works. They (the elephants) also come into the ring with us in the finale. We go hide behind the dancing girls in the middle of the ring!

The director, who plays the ringmaster, rides around on a Segway in the finale. That must look like magic to the people here.

Time to get ready for the finale. Muriel made me some sparkly red armbands so I’m all happy to show them off.

More later!

Love,

Scott

Welcome. Now hear me rant.

Welcome to my new blog.

Here's my first post:

Roland Henning of WeeklyMagicFailure fame had a blog about Gandalf from Lord of the Rings not doing very much magic in the films (http://weeklymagicfailure.blogspot.com/2009/11/wmf-gandalf-grey-white.html)

I commented that if you imagine that Gandalf was a sort of lesser God, what he does/does not do makes a bit of sense. What would Frodo, Sam, or any of them have learned if Gandalf had simply teleported them to the spot where they could throw the ring in?

Or if he had just done it himself?

What if doing magic is harder, more physically tolling, than simply pointing a wand and saying a word? What if each spell costs you years off your life?

What if learning to do one trick takes years of study and practice (like a good magic routine?) Most magic pros have a repertoire of less than a dozen effects. Why would professional wizards be any different?

The problem as moviegoers is, we’re spoiled. We expect Harry Potters in all our films, with magic going on everywhere, every few seconds.

I agree some more magic would have been better. But I also prefer the wizards in Stephen R Donaldson's brilliant series of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever.

Personally I didn't like the Lord of the Rings Books very much. The Hobbit was good. But the other books are so full of names and places that never appeared before, nor ever will again, that reading them is like a slog through waist high wet snow.

The movies are better story telling IMHO.

But this topic also relates to my critique of most magic acts in general. (And manipulation acts in particular...) They're so chock full of tricks that there's not much magic. Little trick after little trick after little trick, some good, some not so good. Filler. Maybe one big good trick at the end.

It’s like a smorgasbord of 'just ok' dishes.

I’d rather have one dish, prepared for me, to my liking, that’s perfectly cooked, perfectly conceived, perfectly served.

If our goal is to create a real experience of magic, is this the way? Show them 50 tricks and hope a couple hit the target?

However it’s not that they do too many tricks. It’s that there’s no focus. There’s too many other things going on. Too many themes. Too much confusion.

Take Losander’s Floating Table. It’s got great focus. Simple, direct. It seems impossible. Now if the magician made himself float, then the spectator, then the audience, that would be a lot of tricks. But they would all fit together.

However the typical magician would pull feather flowers out of the cloth, have cards shoot out the table, and produce doves - lots of doves!

I remember watching Topas (the greatest living German magician) do his manipulation act on TV years ago. I was watching with my (then) non-magician girlfriend. Throughout the whole act she would say, “Saw it.” Or “Missed it.” To her it was a game to see if she could catch the steals or see the moves. Is that the reaction - the thought process - we magicians want our spectators to experience??

My goal is to make them laugh. But having one or two really good effects that blow their minds is important to me as well.

Check out the Donaldson series (and in fact everything he ever wrote) if you like fantasy/sf. He's the best. Together with Orson Scott Card...

Our website can be found at: www.ScottandMuriel.com