"You remember to make a joke out of your own mistakes and you'll have people on your side - laughing with you. That way they won't be embarrassed for you." -- Joan Davis
Something I learned from Doc Charles Boas, owner of Circus Kirk, is if the audience likes your character they want to see you succeed. If they like your character enough to start to empathize with you when you make a mistake they remember how it feels when they make a mistake. They feel sorry for you. They may be embarrassed because they don't know how to react. They are afraid if they laugh they might hurt your feelings.
I was the emcee for the Puget Sound Boy Scout Award Banquet last spring. I performed a magic effect related to each award. In 1986 Jimmy "Happy" Williams taught me to perform a card effect where you magically locate the four Aces in a poker deck. I created a routine based on that using a deck of alphabet flash cards to produce a four letter word. (Directions are included in my book Creativity for Entertainers Volume 3: Creative Routines.) At the banquet the word I wanted to spell was not produced. There was a stunned silence. Then I said, "It's a good thing the Cub Scout Motto is Do Your Best." There was a great deal of laughter and everyone relaxed. I have used that line many times in scouting events. (Later I discovered the effect didn't work because when I pulled the deck out of the box some of the cards got left behind.)
I normally perform silently, but will sometimes break character to put the audience at ease. Their needs are more important than my need to maintain my fantasy. I was doing a sleight of hand coin routine recently when a boy about nine-years old suddenly announced, "I know where it is. It's in your other hand." His parents looked mortified that he was ruining my performance. I said, "Of course it is. What do you think I am a real magician?" Everybody laughed and his parents relaxed. That also removed the adversarial element of our interaction. Since I apparently didn't care if he knew how I did something, he wasn't challenged to try to figure it out.
Your response to a mistake can be improvised or it can be a planned ad lib. I improvised the line about not being a real magician many years ago. It got a great initial response so I remembered it and used it the next time the situation came up. Now it is part of my normal repertoire. I have figured out potential responses to many mistakes and actually practiced them so I am ready to use them when necessary.
Here is an example of an improvised response that I have used once. While doing strolling entertainment I dropped a coin I was secretly holding. Everyone heard it hit the ground and I knew I had to react to it. I picked it up and looked up into the air as if trying to figure out where it came from. I used a sleight called a French Drop to vanish the coin as I apparently threw it back up into the air. After I successfully completed the rest of the routine a man came up behind me and whispered, "You're good."
If you are part of an ensemble, you can make a joke out of someone else's mistakes. Mary Livingston, Jack Benny's wife and a member of his radio program cast, was prone to spoonerisms, switching sounds between words. In one episode she was supposed to say she saw a car up on the grease rack. Instead she said, "grass reek." When the laughter started to die down Jack responded, "Grass reek! What is that? I challenge you to use that in a sentence."
Jack's writers built on that in the script for the next week's program. Mary was reading out loud a letter from her mother. Her mother wrote, "A skunk ran across the lawn last night and boy did that grass reek." That brought a lot of laughter from the studio audience because they knew it was a response to Jack's challenge following Mary's mistake the previous week.
How can you turn a mistake into a joke? What potential mistakes might occur during your performances? What jokes can you prepare for them? How can you develop the ability to improvise a response to mistakes?
