6 Things Magicians Can Learn from Pro Wrestling
No steel chairs or body slams needed
Recently I got a 360 camera (Insta360 x3), in an attempt to get footage of my close up performances for posting content and reviewing my material. It may be a few weeks before I have some good content to post though as I work out the kinks with using the camera plus getting the opportunities to film during my residency.
But if you have any experience with filming 360 indoors, please give me some tips!
Otherwise I’ve been focusing on more mentalism effects lately that fit my style and trying to incorporate them more into my sets. It’s fun learning magic instead of dealing with drama!
When I was in high school, I was introduced to the world of Pro Wrestling, thrilled by the theatrics of these grown men and women fighting for championships and then seeing peeks behind the curtain got me more invested on a different level.
During my time in university I started learning magic and was thrilled by the theatrics of these grown men and women performing miracles on stage and close up, and then seeing a peek behind the curtain sent me on a rabbit hole that I’m still travelling down now.
You might not think it right now, but pro wrestling and magic have a lot in common than first thought and there are things we magicians can learn from pro wrestlers, which I’ll point out as we look at 6 similarities between both performance arts!
You Are Playing a Character or Extension of Yourself
Pro Wrestlers aren’t naturally loud and looking to smash other people’s faces in, behind all that is a person who has thought about how to approach his character thoughtfully.
The way a wrestler conducts themselves is often an extension of themselves, just turned up to 11 when they step in the ring or deliver a promo. Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock are prime examples of wrestlers who are extensions of themselves. On the flip side there are wrestlers who are playing a character, such as the Undertaker, who is a supernatural deadman, but obviously not one in real life. But the best wrestlers often blur the line between a character and themselves, AEW wrestler Maxwell Jacob Friedman (MJF)1 is a recent example of someone who excels at this, playing a scumbag who hates everyone, and you’re not sure if he’s like that in real life or not.
Magicians should think about their character the same way wrestlers do.
In wrestling there’s a term called Kayfabe, which loosely explained is the act of never breaking character, especially when you’re out in public in order to maintain the story you’re selling in the ring, essentially keeping secrets. The late, great Max Maven was a big wrestling fan, who obviously took kayfabe seriously, playing this mentalist who very much looked like a mentalist and if you as a non-magician were the meet him, believed that he could delve into your mind and pluck thoughts out like nothing.
Another example is Jason Ladayne2, a magician who specialises in gambling and cheating and whose character could be described as the James Bond of card magic, and he knows it. Social media has allowed Jason to showcase this character, taking on gambling challenges from trolls with an air of smug confidence that would either make you hate him or love him, but you can’t stop watching him.
Who are you when you’re performing magic, and how do you continue to conduct yourself when you’re not performing, and someone recognises you as a magician?
You’re Putting on a Show
Each time a wrestler steps through the curtain and walks down the ramp towards the ring, they are there to put on a show.
A wrestling show consists of matches where two or more wrestlers fight in order to win and also promo segments or vignettes. Promos and vignettes are opportunities for wrestlers to talk up their upcoming matches, move a story forward or showcase their character to build interest. The promos and vignettes are usually short, ranging from 30 seconds to a few minutes’ maximum, but a match itself can be anything from 5 minutes to over an hour.
Wrestling is all about maximising your minutes in order to get yourself “over”, which is a term to say that the audience enjoys you and wants to keep seeing you, whether you’re a good guy and they want to see you win or a bad guy who they want to see get their comeuppance.
Magic is the same, you have an allotted amount of time to win the audience over and then entertain them so that they’ll want to tell others about you. Think about how best you can put on a show whether it’s a few minutes with a group while table hopping, a 10-minute spot on stage or a full hour show. Different spots will have varying restrictions, and it’s up to you to create those moments that make you memorable. In my case, I’ve been doing a lot of table hopping at my restaurant residency, so in those few short minutes I have at each table, I want to entertain the group with hard hitting magic and then point them to my socials for extra opportunities down the track, whether it’s a potential gig or just a simple follow.
Think of how you can put on the best show for your audience, whether it’s one person or a thousand!
You Thrive With a Real Audience
During the pandemic, any in-person entertainment stopped and lots of people no longer had work, but wrestling (WWE and AEW) continued to put out shows on television, without a real audience.
WWE employed virtual audiences, having the wrestlers perform in a “Thunderdome”, where the ring was surrounded by virtual video of fans streaming in and cheering from home. AEW used wrestlers who weren’t wrestling to sit ringside and cheer as their colleagues wrestled, just so they could hear some noise and have some feedback for the work they were putting in. These methods, while better than nothing showed how much an audience is needed for these shows. Wrestlers feed off the audience and their reactions, when they boo, the bad guy eggs them on, when there’s a lull, the good guy makes a comeback to get the crowd going again. The same could also be said of comedy and the need for an audience to know when material is working or not, but that’s a whole different and future post.
Magic is a performance art that thrives with an audience, but the advent of social media has warped how magic is perceived and presented.
A popular piece of wisdom in performance is to “slow down”, as you often are going too fast for your own good, but with shorts, reels and shorter attention spans, we are trained to get our material done in less than 60 seconds, something I’m guilty of myself if you look at the content posted on my YouTube channel and Instagram. Magic content on social media is a whole different beast, but if you truly want to be a magician, you need to perform for real people and not a camera. The immediate reaction you get from a joke or effect lets you know if it was funny or blew their minds, which then allows you to refine and improve for the next performance.
Find ways to get your material in front of an audience that isn’t virtual.
So many people have not seen magic in real life, but you can change that!
You’re Gonna Get Hecklers
Wrestling encourages audience interaction in the form of cheers, boos and collective chanting, whether it’s the wrestlers name or “This is awesome”, “Fight forever” or “You suck!”.
This can also have adverse effects, predominantly for the bad guys, also known as heels. The heel will always have people who hate them, and they’ll often get hecklers making random comments at them during a match. The best heels can deal with them by shutting them down in a way an experienced heel only knows how and roll with the punches so the speak that come from the audience. 3
This one is probably more of a difference in how each art approaches hecklers.
In magic, we don’t want them, because we want to put on a show and get through out material as best as possible. But magic inherently creates curiosity, whether it’s to work out the trick or mess up a magician to show off to your friends, so sooner or later you’re gonna get heckled. It’s how you deal with it that matters, and you may have to look at your character, effects, scripting or approach to figure out why you’re getting heckled, or it could just be the audience member themselves who has an agenda no matter who you were.
In my case, most of my hecklers just want to be funny to their friends as they attempt to mess up a trick or throw a line at me, my character likes to joke back with them or let them mess it up before moving onto something else, and in most cases I’ll win them over and they and their group end up enjoying the set, but this took a while for me to develop before I was comfortable with hecklers.
Hecklers are everywhere, whether you want them to be or not, so learn to deal with them and win them over if it’s a possibility.
They’re Both Fake!
Okay, this one could be better worded, but I couldn’t help pass up the chance to call wrestling and magic fake, a word both professions hate.
Yes, in case you didn’t know, pro wrestling is scripted, and winners are pre-determined and, in most cases, the two wrestlers you’re seeing take each other on don’t actually hate and want to kill each other! But it doesn’t reduce our enjoyment of the spectacle and story any less. A chair shot to the back and powerbomb onto a table still hurts, and if any of those submission holds were put onto me, I’d be tapping out just as fast because I wouldn’t be able to handle that pain!
I watch wrestling because these characters have created stories that have me invested to see what happens next and the idea of seeing two particular characters clash is very intriguing. A recent example of this was at Wrestledream where Bryan Danielson took on Zack Sabre Jr to find out who was the best technical wrestler ever. These two have never wrestled but both had a reputation as great technical wrestlers, so the opportunity to see them pit their skills against each other had me interested enough to put money down and order the PPV (pay-per-view) and all throughout the match I had the biggest smile on my face because they delivered and put on an amazing match. I never thought about how the match was predetermined nor did I care, I was invested and entertained.
In the same way, we know the magic we perform isn’t real in one sense, but to our audience it’s presented as real, and they experience it as real as possible too. There’s a suspension of disbelief that leads to the enjoyment of our art, so it’s our job to present it in a way to leads the audience down that path.
Magic is real, we’ve seen it on the faces of those we share this art with, so don’t dilute it with jokes that demean what you do.
Always Work on Your Craft
If you have never watched wrestling before then I would recommend trying it out, if only to see how these men and women portray their characters on screen.
There’s an air of confidence around them that I want to emulate, even if I look nothing like them. Wrestlers never stop working on their craft, drilling moves with one another, refining their promo skills and working out to keep themselves presentable.
In the same way magicians will often spend hours each day working to perfect a sleight or routine, rewriting their script and making sure they’re presentable, although we should probably get to the gym more often.
I find it amusing that the two main interests I have in Magic and Pro Wrestling are incredibly niche, out of the box and seemingly unrelatable to the average human who enjoys regular sports and entertainment. I enjoy those two, but much prefer to be different, out of this world so to speak.
What niche interests do you have that helps you in your magic?