In case you weren’t aware, I’m not a magician. I enjoy magic. I’d love to have a handful of quality magic tricks up my sleeve, but I don’t have the the motivation to invest the time necessary. So I’ll stick to enjoying the skills of others. (Here’s one of my favourite tricks).

So why would I pick up a 60 year old book aimed specifically at magicians? It is part curiosity, part recognition that there are always interesting things you can learn from other fields of expertise. As a theologian and preacher, I think there are few areas of learning that can’t offer some insightful tidbit. Showmanship is not a term I would ever think to use to describe my own work, but underlying lessons on presentation could always offer something surprising.

The book is written specifically for magicians, and I found it quite incredible how well it has aged. Fitzkee is very critical of the magicians of his day and their lack of showmanship, in contrast to other entertainers of his day. He sees his task as helping magicians to grow their own self-respect and give the people what they want.

So much of what he writes is useful not only for magicians, but for anyone in any form of entertainment, or, wider still, any form of presentation (including those not necessarily aimed at entertaining – this is where I come in). He offers some fascinating and very practical advice. The magician-specific pieces are obviously very targeted. But I didn’t find it too difficult to read between the lines to consider how his thoughts might apply in my own context.

So, what exactly is showmanship?

showmanship is accenting and accentuating the important parts of your act, bringing out the points clearly and deliberately, just as you accent important words in your everyday speech. Showmanship is the portraying of likable characters, and likable human qualities. It is in emphasizing the difficulty of something so that it seems more difficult, thus emphasizing your skill. It is emphasizing the danger in the situation, so as to enhance your daring. It is in emphasizing every quality—comedy, music and all of the others—so that the audience will like you more. Really, showmanship is merely skillful emphasis. It is skillful emphasis combined with good solid bedrock psychology.

That’s not just a good lesson for magicians. That’s a good lesson for any communicator. And this is where I found real value in this book.

Who wrote it

Dariel Fitzkee was a 20th century magician, and author of several books aimed at magicians. From his personal stories retold in this book, it seems he was probably quite a prominent and ahead-of-his-time sort of magician.

Why I read it

I think I came across this book via watching something of comedian Steve Martin talking about the influence of the book on his own career.

What I liked

It’s always interesting to read a well-written book in a field you aren’t very familiar with. It was a pleasant surprise to find out that much of his thoughts apply more broadly that just to magicians.

I really liked the way he mixed personal story and very practical application at every turn. If you were an aspiring magician, this would surely be a gold-standard book to help inform how you go about your craft. But the practical applications are just as relevant to any form of public presentation, making this a very useful book of sorts.

I really appreciated his psychological analysis of an audience, and teasing apart the nature of the presenter-audience relationship throughout the book.

What I didn’t

My only real critiques of the book are all rather unfair. There are sections where he does go heavy into details that only magicians will understand. Some of it was interesting, some of it I just skimmed over. Certainly not a fault of the book. Just harder to engage as someone reading from outside the field.

Major Takeaway

The strongest appeals are invariably to the instincts, not to the mind. When you appeal to the mind, thought is necessary and sometimes reflection. To convince the mind, argument is necessary. And sometimes an argument is lost. But the responses caused by our instincts are subconscious. They are involuntary. These instincts must respond to the appeals to them because we are constructed that way. That is why rhythm, beauty, skill, sex appeal, coordinated effort, physical action, harmony, melody, comedy, movement, youth, personality, romance, sentiment, nostalgia, surprise, situation, character, conflict, music secure reactions almost automatically. The response comes almost before we think. It is a subconscious response, a reaction to an instinct to which we are attuned.

showmanship is accenting and accentuating the important parts of your act, bringing out the points clearly and deliberately, just as you accent important words in your everyday speech. Showmanship is the portraying of likable characters, and likable human qualities. It is in emphasizing the difficulty of something so that it seems more difficult, thus emphasizing your skill. It is emphasizing the danger in the situation, so as to enhance your daring. It is in emphasizing every quality—comedy, music and all of the others—so that the audience will like you more. Really, showmanship is merely skillful emphasis. It is skillful emphasis combined with good solid bedrock psychology.

ultimate success as an entertainer, whether you wish to spend all of your time at it as a professional or whether your appearances are limited to strictly occasional shows, rests upon your ability to sell yourself.

Who should read it

Worth a read for those: curious about magic; those who regularly perform presentations of any kind, and enjoy hearing ideas from slightly left-field sources.