The Problem I am
Talking About Here
We are always worried about making
sure the "kids" get good role models.
It used to be magicians could be good role models but not any more. You can't take off a tattoo or heal the
gaping hole in your nose, cheek, or ear – so it doesn't make any sense for me
to waste my time preaching on the evils of tattooing or piercing. You either have Hepatitis or you don't.
You probably got it from the people
who gave you the tattoo or pierced your skin – they usually have a few extra
virus germs flying around their needles and are always willing to share with
you. You may think the needles they use
are clean but often they just lick them off in between clients to make them
look clean. Spit from anyone is not
clean.
Spit from someone with a lot of
virus germs and no morals is very unclean.
But like I said, I can't help you
heal so if you have piercings or tattoos, you can either read this or not. It's up to you.
I want to address facial hair. Facial hair should be eliminated from
magician's faces the same way smudges of lipstick or food should be wiped away
before performing in public.
You wouldn't do a show with your fly down, right? You would take care of your costume by
righting things and fixing things before you walk out on to the stage.
Same thing goes for facial
hair. Facial hair is supposed to be
removed – that's why God invented shaving.
We wash our faces, brush our teeth, put on deodorant, and shave off the
hair that grew on our face while we were sleeping. You wouldn't leave toe-nail fungus on your
toes just because it grew there overnight, right? It's the same thing for facial hair.
It grew where it shouldn't so it
shouldn't be there. Pull up your zipper, clean your toes, brush your teeth, and
get rid of all the things that can grow on you if you don't groom yourself.
I know you think you look neat and "cool" to wear
a mustache or a beard but you don't. You
look scary and not trustworthy.
Proof My Argument
is True
Do you think I am wrong? Ask any woman who she would want to kiss or
have entertain her kids while she was out shopping – it won't be someone with a
beard or a mustache.
Have you ever noticed there are no
famous Amish magicians? That's because
of the beards they have to wear when they get married. And they all have to get married so they all
have beards. But no one would book a
magician who had a beard like an Amish married man even if you could trust them
and you'd know they would be peaceful and could rebuild your house if it burned
down.
So even though they are good
people, they are held back in show business because their religion says they
have to have a beard. If they were clean-cut like the Mormons then they could
get shows hand-over-fist but they couldn't play in lounges or do
"blue" material so they wouldn't be famous.
Can you name a famous circus clown
who had a mustache or a beard? No. You can't.
It's not just because the
greasepaint would not apply properly to the gristly facial hair, it's because
clowns don't want to scare kids or intimidate people. They want to make people laugh and feel the
opposite of intimidated. Some kids are
scared of clowns anyway but it has nothing to do with facial hair. Some kids have had bad experiences with
clowns and so they stay scared their whole life of clowns.
But what about the famous magicians
of the past or the present that had or have facial hair? How did they get famous if Walter Elias
Disney's theory was so right? Well, I'll
tell you.
First look at the
magicians who were famous but didn't have facial hair:
Houdini
Hardeen
David Copperfield
Criss Angel
Shari Lewis and Lambchop
Mark Wilson
Siegfried & Roy
Bill Bixby
Lance Burton
Mac King
The Davenport
Brothers
The Fox Sisters
Uri Gellar
Howard Thurston
Orson Welles
Tim Ellis
Losander
Tommy Cooper
The Cast of the Broadway Musical Hit, Pippin
Johnny Carson
Frank Sinatra, Jr.
Harry Anderson
Teller
That's a lot of magicians who did
not have facial hair and were famous.
That's not a coincidence. If it
were a coincidence, they wouldn't keep doing it, right?
Would you do something that would hurt your career? No.
You would do things that made people like you and want to book you for a
show.
That's what those magicians above
did and they became famous because they did things that they knew worked well.
So let's look at the magicians you
would point to as "proof" that facial hair can't hurt your career or
that magicians should have facial hair.
Facial Hair
Wearers
Chung Ling Soo
He had
a mustache but it wasn't real and remember he wasn't really who he said he
was. He was a magician who used to have
a real mustache when he worked with Alexander Hermann or Harry Kellar. But he had to wear a costume when he
pretended to be Chinese or Japanese and so he wore the mustache just like you
would wear a mask for Halloween. Plus,
his wife killed him on stage in the bullet catching trick.
David Blaine
Sometimes
he has a mustache but sometimes he doesn't.
When he has a mustache, he doesn't look like a
"magician." He looks like a
vagrant and people look at him with fear.
The spectators just say he named their card correctly because they are
afraid he is going to hit them or try to take their money. What would you do if someone came up to you
with a mustache and started rubbing burning paper on their hairy arms to reveal
a name of a card? Right.
Max Maven
He is
wearing a costume too. I saw him when he
didn't have his costume on and I don't think he had a mustache. But even if
did, it was just because he wanted to be authentic in his character.
Harry Blackstone, Sr.
He wore
a mustache and goatee because he had a very bad blemish on his chin. It was like that stain that Gorbachev had on
his bald head back at the end of the cold war.
His son didn't have the blemish but he still wore the goatee and
mustache but that was out of respect for his dad – so his dad wouldn't feel
strange wearing a mustache and beard (goatee) when his son didn't have to.
Amazing Johnathan
He
actually proves my point. He has that
scraggly facial hair to make you think he is crazy and can't be trusted. He is performing in Las Vegas.
He is not trying to get shows at kids' parties. He also drinks Windex and eats Draino during
his act – would you do that too?
Dante
He
never got the same attention as Thurston or even Laurel and Hardy. He had a show and it did alright but no one
said, "I want to see that magician who is named after Satan and who wears
a striking resemblance to Satan himself."
They would go to see the show if
there was nothing else to see. That's
why you can buy his posters everywhere – no one ever put them up or needed to
use them. He had plenty in stock. When he was in that film with Laurel and
Hardy, he was kind of the bad/mysterious/weird guy playing against the
scared/weirded-out guys who were Laurel and Hardy.
Bob Sheets
He has
a lot of things working against him already and so adding a mustache doesn't
set him back so much. I did a
review of his show last year so you can read all the problems he has
performing magic for the public. Chances
are most parents wouldn't want someone with a blindfold stabbing cards on their
furniture for their little child's birthday party – with or without a
mustache.
Dai Vernon
I don't
know off-hand why he had a mustache. He
didn't need to wear one – he wasn't in character or anything. Maybe he felt he needed it to distract people
from looking too closely at his hands when he was doing sleight of hand.
I saw two pictures of him – he was
in the same pose both times. One was
taken when he was young and he is looking down at his hands and at the
cards he
is holding while cigarette smoke floated upwards. The other was taken
when he was older. He was doing the same exact thing!! Clearly, he
was self-conscious about his
sleight of hand ability or he wouldn't be staring down at his hands
while he
was doing card sleights.
Let that be a lesson to you. Practice your card tricks so well you don't
have to look down at your hands when you do them. But that doesn't mean you should wear a
blindfold and a mustache like Bob Sheets.
There has to be moderation.
The bad
thing about Dai Vernon was he taught so many younger magicians how to look and
act like a magician.
Poor Doug Henning came from Canada just
like Dai Vernon and thought he had to do everything just like Dai Vernon. So he grew his mustache and used it in his
act. He seemed like a very nice man and
it was a shame he had to copy everything Dai Vernon did.
Although, I don't think he ever
smoked cigarettes or stared at his own hands when he did sleights. But
look what the mustache did to him. The hair on his upper-lip acted
like a
slippery slope to take him out of magic and into the Transcontinental
Meditation (the 'insiders' call it TM for short) where mustaches and
beards
were de rigueur.
That doesn't mean if you wear a
mustache you will go into a cult. It
means your more likely to go into a cult, though. You won't get good paying jobs doing magic so
you will think you can never be loved by anyone and that's when cults come
a-knockin'.
They prey on the weak animals who
can't do magic shows for the other animals' kids' parties because they look
weird.
What about the
women?
I was
just joking at the top of this column when I said that Walt Disney didn't let
his women wear facial hair – most women can't grow facial hair unless they can
grow just a little but they can wax it off pretty easily. But if facial hair was the answer, wouldn't
women magicians wear facial hair so they could break into the "boys
club"? Of course they would.
You see
women magicians everyday who wear top hats and tails to look like men so people
will mistake them for male magicians.
Some women can't pull off the ruse though because they are either too
pretty or too female-shaped to hide their womanhood.
They have to make their own way
through the business. Like Melinda – she
could never convince a modern audience that she was a man or a male
magician. So she gave it up and dressed
like a woman dresses and tried to be a success anyway. But for the women magicians who don't have
good figures or aren't pretty, dressing up like a man works pretty well. Audiences will give you points for at least
trying to do what you are supposed to do.
Conclusion
Unless
you have a facial blemish that you need to hide or you want to pay homage to
your dad who had to wear a goatee to hide a "Wine Stain" like Gorbachev,
you shouldn't wear facial hair. You will
do so much better if you do not frighten children or scare women. Clowns don't wear facial hair and a magician
is better than a clown in the order of entertainers so there is no reason for a
magician to wear a mustache or beard.
You may
disagree with me but that's because you don't have the experience I have in
getting and keeping clients. I have a
questionnaire I give to all of my clients and I always ask them to say what
they like or didn't like. Not one of
them ever said they didn't like the fact that I didn't have a mustache or
beard. In fact, for years, they never
even mentioned facial hair so I put a special check box on the form:
Do you think the magic show would be better if I had a
mustache?
Do you think the magic show would be better if I had a
beard?
Do you think the magic show would be better if I had long
sideburns?
Would you pay me more for the show if I had a mustache,
beard or long side-burns?
The answers have been consistent. No one would have paid more for facial hair
and no one thought my show could be improved – even with facial hair.
Do your own research if you don't want to rely on my years
of experience and scientific surveys of the only opinion-holders that matter:
The Customer!
Thank you.
Guy "Bug" Tussle is more than a great magician and friend of Quinlan’s Inside Magic, he is also a tremendous historian on all things Magic. His Henderson, Nevada townhouse is filled with books, magazines, pamphlets, and posters related in any possible manner to Magic. 
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