Magician Profile/Review - Derren Brown

What Derren Brown does, is a combination of magic, psychology, suggestion, misdirection and showmanship. He is one of those performers that can read the mind of a spectator while actually looking like he is reading their mind. He doesn’t use a phony, over the top persona in his presentations and the spectators he uses in his demonstrations often buy him as being ‘the real thing’. Brown of course admits to the things he does as being trickery, sometimes even when he’s demonstrating them, yet still is able to amaze people, including me.

Although any description of a trick is a pale imitation of actually seeing it done I will attempt to explain one of Derren’s effects. In his trick ‘Smoke’, he spreads out a deck of cards in front of a spectator who is asked to look at one and remember it (while he turns away). Upon turning back he then reads the spectator’s mind and tells them the card that they have looked at, admittedly sometimes on the second try, but often on the first. While they are reeling from this Derren pulls out a cigarette which he lights up, while commenting that it is interesting that they picked that card as it isn’t even in the deck. The deck of cards which has been sitting on the table in plain sight this entire time is once again spread and they cannot find the card they looked at before. Derren then coughs and takes the burnt ‘cigarette’ out of his mouth and it is shown to be their rolled up card! This description is as accurate as possible as to what you would see it you witnessed this effect. Just think for a second how impossible this would look if someone did this with you. I do know how’s it’s done and with all great magic it’s fairly simple and very deceptive.

To actually see him do a demonstration look here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFGG6zWByhM

One of the TV shows he did in Britain was called ‘Messiah’, where he flew to the US and presented his skills to various so called ‘real’ psychics and various new age kooks. Now, they didn’t know he was a magician, but his ‘rule’ was that if any of them asked him, he would freely admit that it was a trick and that he was using ‘magic’. Strangely enough in the episode that I saw, where he demonstrated the ability to replicate the drawings of someone in another room, the psychics all took it at face value and no one questioned his ‘powers’.

What I like about him is that he is a thinking man’s magician who rather than using brightly colored props makes people question whether what they are seeing is real or not while entertaining them at the same time.