Liars and Cheaters!

“Marry, sir, they have committed false report, moreover they have spoken untruths, secondarily they are slanders, sixth and lastly they have belied a lady, thirdly they have verified unjust things, and to conclude, they are lying knaves.”
– Much Ado About Nothing

Mentalists nowadays have trouble lying. Which is problematic given that most of mentalism consists of lying about what you can do.

They try to work around it: never saying a technically false statement (lying by omission and letting the audience infer the lie “let me look at your face twitches… hum… you are lying”), or often reducing their claim to the point where their work is boiled down to a mere demonstration of skill (“observe how I can deduce whether you are lying by your non-verbal communication”, a lie so small and boring that a lot of mentalists think there is some truth to it).

I would argue that those lies are ethically murky because they are small. To build a small lie, we lean on the audience’s existing beliefs and biases, reinforcing them with trickery, because we feel too guilty to lie boldly to their face. What mentalists do not do anymore is lying by commission, making a claim most audience members believe to be untrue then proceeding to demonstrate it (“I have visions of the dead and they tell me that you are a liar!”). Making theatrically interesting lies.

If you make a small believable claim, then your demonstration is a demonstration of pure skill as far as the audience is concerned. But if your claim is big or unbelievable, then the lie is elevated to having an aesthetic value because the audience becomes conscious that they might be lied to. Because they start doubting you as a narrator, while seeing you act in accordance (or not) with your unlikely claim. This is a healthy dynamic, but also one that has depth and theatricality.

Lying, boldly and to the face of the audience, encapsulates a lot of the theater and beauty I see in mentalism. Channeling your inner trickster god and constructing a world where what the audience thought impossible is now happening. Where mind readers and psychics abound, where objects retain a trace of their previous owners, and where one can feel the world by the tip of their fingers.

Now, do you lie to your audience?