Too Cool to Be Cool

This is something I've had on my mind for a while now. A while back when I was auditioning for agents, I received a comment, "You're not like other magicians." I asked how so. Feedback is always appreciated. The answer was disheartening however. I was different in this person's mind not by virtue of anything unique I had done, but by what I wasn't. And while that's certainly not a bad way to approach building a character, it was the fact that this person considered magicians to be cornball, oily windbags with bad puns, stupid pickup lines and a sense of coolness about 50 years out of date.

I started watching more performances from both the old guard and the new guard and realized she was right. Most magicians come across as a stereotypical used car salesman. Most likely because that sort of corny act worked at one point in history. But not anymore. Times have changed. What was fashionable then is nothing more than an embarrassing novelty now.

There is a way for such things to continue existing however. They belong in the realm of ironic camp. People don't like it when magicians in real life tell their stupid jokes, but they still laugh when Gob did it on Arrested Development. Why? Because it was made abundantly clear on the show that Gob is not someone we're supposed to like as a person. The other characters' reactions to his obnoxious behavior mirror our own. Gob becomes cool by being interminably uncool.

Yet despite this very obvious lesson, magicians still persist in hokey, outdated one-liners and personae, totally oblivious to the fact that no one under the age of 60 finds this sort of thing funny anymore. They take themselves seriously. Too seriously in fact. They really do expect us to laugh at puns and pickup lines that are about as funny as prostate cancer. They think their cornball pseudo-Vaudeville antics that wouldn't make the cut in a Looney Tunes cartoon are endearing. They're trying so hard to be cool and command the spotlight that you can practically see the veins popping out of their necks under the strain and no one is fooled. It's the polar opposite of a lovable loser.

If they took themselves less seriously and didn't expect us to like them because of their campy image, they'd get a lot further. But they don't. And so here we are.

If you're going to try to be cool, you have to do it gracefully and with a sense of restraint. Or if you think you can be ironically entertaining, knock yourself out. But for the love of all that is sacred in this world, please stop aping the magicians of yesteryear and expecting people to like it and take you seriously because you're just going to end up looking like a tool.