I have an agent that is on record as saying that he wants me to stop performing magic and focus only on comedy.  The truth is, that he has never seen any of my magic shows.  Surprisingly, this is not an uncommon thought/question from people whom I meet.  It has never occured to me that I would ever have to choose.

Both magic and comedy have a seperate draw and enjoyment for me.  The universality of magic and the freedom of comedy (the ability to talk about anything that I choose) both hold great appeal.  Most important is giving each of these performance arts the time that they deserve.  Either style of performing on it’s own constitutes a career to which many have dedicated their lives, so finding the time to work on both is sometimes quite difficult.  After performing and working on comedy for some time I find that my stand-up gets better than my magic, so I switch over to magic and work on it until it gets better than my comedy, and then I repeat the whole procedure.  Fortunately, while working on one I am also improving the other.  They are complimentary in their very nature.

A lot of my competitors call themselves “comedy magicians”, but I am always slightly shocked to find that they only have credits on the magic side of performing.  I think that using that title requires the bearer to have credits in both comedy and magic, and after years of doing both apart and together I confidently use this title and entertain my clients with both performance styles.

So, I am going to avoid choosing either magic or comedy for as long as possible.  Now you don’t have to ask.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 10:14am and is filed under Opinions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.