Why I Love Self-Working Magic

So today I'm going to be talking about why I love self-working magic.

And basically, what does self-working magic mean? I'm sure there's like a hundred different kind of interpretations of it by famous magicians.

But for me, self-working magic is magic where you can just concentrate on the performance of and all the heavy lifting is done by the method and that method could just be you know um a gimmick if you wanted to that's also kind of self-working magic but in my case i tend to use a lot of maths so the maths does all the heavy lifting for me And I just kind of do the presentation of it.

That's what I really, really like about self-working magic, magic tricks that kind of work themselves.

And I'm kind of thinking of some other examples as well that you could buy.

And one of the things that's coming to me is the kind of Some of the Tenu range, Tenu range of magic.

And this has been copied about six bazillion times by different companies all over the world.

But Tenu had this trick called Zig Zag Sig, I think it was, released years and years ago.

And basically you put a cigarette back in those days.

Smoking is a kind of a no-no these days.

But in those days it was called zigzag sticking.

You put a cigarette into this little kind of a rectangular box and then you pull the middle part away and it would slice it into three parts and you pull it back again.

There was absolutely no moves to it.

And you just like, the only skill you need to do is be able to kind of push the center piece out and it would look like it had fallen to three pieces.

That's why I think it's self-working.

These days it's been changed into loads of different things and you most often see it done with a pencil, zigzag pencil and it's normally in little kind of magic sets as well.

You can get it.

really good trick to be fair and I've still got the original zigzag sig by Tenyo with a little kind of foam plastic cigarettes that you used to get at that time and it's absolutely fantastic so that's what self-working magic would mean to a lot of people but for me it means maths kind of the maths does a heavy lifting and I've got loads of tricks which involve maths and I really really enjoy them but I think for a lot of people when you say self-working magicians I don't know a lot of magicians tend to look at it negatively like oh it's like kind of a an easy way out it's not real magic I think some people think about it and they couldn't be they couldn't be far more far away from the truth I when I look at something and something's so simple and and performed well and there's just a presentation to it it absolutely baffles me and also Blackpool a few years ago Peter Eggink was doing this trick I can't remember what it's called I think it's called Voodoo Needle and It's 100% self-working.

It's so simple, but it baffled everybody that saw it.

The premise is you put a needle, like a pin, into a piece of paper, and you have a pen or pencil on the opposite side of the paper, and whatever direction you move, the pen or the pencil, the needle would correspond and move as well.

And there was no strings, there was no magnets, there was nothing.

It was 100% self-working and a brilliant effect for so many people.

And it's still a great effect.

And yeah, how can you not get any stronger than that? And there was no moves or anything to it.