It’s one of the big questions: What is entertainment? What does it mean to be entertained? It used to be fairly simple. But today entertainment is more varied than ever. With hits like Jackass (I don’t watch it) and odd reality shows like Big Brother (I don’t watch it either), what does it mean to be entertained in the 21st century?
Why am I asking? Because to get a handle on this will help us become better entertainers.
No matter how varied entertainment becomes I still think there is one central aim of any kind of entertainment: to elicit emotion in your audience. That’s the only thing that Big Brother and Jackass and The Shawshank Redemption and Cold Play all do. They elicit emotion.
We are mammals. We are emotional creatures. And if we are experiencing something emotional, we are not bored. Boredom is the absence of any kind of emotion, or at least any kind of positive emotion. If you can make your audience feel something, you are in one way or another entertaining them.
So to keep people better entertained and more emotionally involved in our magic routines, we will need to follow a fairly simple and scientific process. By scientific I don’t mean that you’re going to need petri dishes and a Bunsen burner. I mean simply that it is a tried and tested formula that you can apply that will get you results every time. And anything that follows a formula is easy to teach.
The Formula Of Great Entertainment
- Get your audience to invest emotionally in what’s going on
- Give Them A Pay Off
- Don’t Be Predictable
- End With A Flutter
How To Help Your Audience Invest Emotionally
One of the most straight forward ways to do this is to use one of their personal possessions to do magic with. If it’s their ring, their money, their grandfather’s pocket watch, they are going to be bothered about what happens to it.
Another way to do this is by giving them a chance to win something. Events matter to people when the outcome could leave them better off than when they started. Every great movie premise is about a character who finds themselves in a situation whereby they stand to lose a lot or gain a lot depending on how they deal with their adversity. Yes, I know most movies are predictable and the character mostly wins at the end, but this is real life, and your spectator might not win. In fact, they probably won’t.
Give them a chance to win money. This works great and it’s easy to work in to virtually any routine.
How To Give Them A Pay Off
Okay, so at this point, they’re watching your act. They’re bothered about what happens. Now they you have their attention you need to show them that giving you their attention is good for them. That’s what giving them a pay off means. Make them laugh. Entertain them. Have fun. And make sure they’re having fun. This is the easy bit, it’s what you’ve practised for years for.
Don’t Be Predictable
When constructing your act, think like the audience. At any point during the act, what are the audience thinking? It’s going to be way more entertaining to them if they don’t know what’s going to happen next. This is a form of misdirection. you can make them think one thing is going to happen next and then something totally different happens instead.
More neuroscience: There’s a part of the brain (I forget its name) that is constantly but subconsciously guessing what’s going to happen next in any given situation. It does this based on your own personal experiences. If it guesses right, that information is discarded and forgotten about. If it guesses wrong – ie. something unexpected happened – it directs your attention to whatever that thing is. So by being unpredictable, your audience will instinctively pay attention.
End With A Flutter
I think that after it’s over, good entertainment is memorable. The best movies are the ones you wake up thinking about the next morning. Memorable in magic means the impossibility concept of the effect wraps itself around the audiences minds somehow and they can’t stop thinking about it.
Now everybody isn’t going to be the kind of person that dwells on it in their minds. But it will linger. They’ll keep thinking about it on and off.
Ending with a flutter is about giving them something to think about but also giving the end of your routine a sense of finality. I’ll talk more about this in an article about creating routines.
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