Truth/Lie

Over the last few months, I feel I have seen and heard about an abundance of performers making use of the truth/lie plot. I have seen the plot used by performers playing the largest theatres down to the smallest venues, from top-end professionals to people at the beginning of their careers. It has come up in conversation that numerous performers at several conventions have made use of the plot to a slightly embarrassing point of watching almost identical performances played out. Again and again, we are seeing Which Hand or Kurotsuke effects played out in the same way, which has piqued my interest in why it has become so popular.

The premise is certainly not new. Tommy Dowd had a routine, Liars! in The Phoenix (issue 90, 1945). In this routine, three poker chips were used. Two spectators told the truth while one lied. I mention this just to demonstrate that the plot has been around for long enough to be old hat, but it is certainly at a peak of performing popularity. The subject has raised two questions in my mind:

• Why do performers like this trick so much?
• Do audiences like it as much as the performers?

Why do we care?

I think in part it has become an easy, sometimes lazy, option for performers to base routines around the premise of truth and lies. Audiences have been fed the idea of body-reading experts through TV and movies with various versions of Sherlock Holmes at the helm. They are primed to accept the idea of tells as a real explanation for how performers can find the liar. It is an easy sell for audiences in terms of believability.

Within magic and mentalism, there is a growing number of magicians (and when I say magicians here, I refer to mentalists as well) who are afraid of magic—performers who are afraid of actually creating a genuine sense of wonder and mystery in their audiences. They feel it is unethical to perform as a real mind reader or magician. They want to put out so many disclaimers in the opening of their acts that the audience are robbed of any sense of amazement rather than allowing the audience to enter into the suspension of disbelief that theatre and movies do. The truth/lie plot, I think, fits within this magician guilt. Magicians feel it is an acceptable lie of theirs to pretend they can read body language, as it is a pseudo-scientific lie. But they are then deeply uncomfortable with pretending they have actual psychic ability, even though they are both still a lie with no great evidence. The truth/lie plot has this low-stakes advantage to the performer that they aren’t claiming anything too outrageous.

In terms of performing the truth/lie plot, it is a fun one to do as the performer. They can be quick and pacey. You have easy opportunities for humour and to involve multiple spectators. It has lots of positive points from the performer’s perspective. If the performer actually listens to the spectators’ responses (a rarity), there can be some nice crowd work, with those interactions often being the most enjoyable part of the routine. One of the elements in its favour is that it can be quite interactive, with audiences playing along. They can join in the game and make a guess at who is telling the truth and who is not. Performers can ask the audience to make a guess or do a show of hands. It has the potential to engage the audience effectively.

But I’m not sure how much the audience actually enjoys these routines.

Does the audience care?

I have seen the full spectrum of the good, the bad, and the ugly performances of this plot. I have seen audiences laughing along, having a whale of a time, and I’ve seen people completely nonplussed by the premise. The majority, I would say, probably fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum.

One of my favourite parts of seeing other people perform is listening in on the conversations of audiences after the show. It is often where I find the most useful insights from watching other performers. Having watched one well-known comedy magician use this plot recently, I was earwigging on the way out. A couple in front of me were talking about the performer’s truth/lie routine. They were talking through what they believed to be genuine tells for this sort of test. For some performers, this will be seen as the great strength of the routine. The fact that the audience walked out having believed the premise would seem like a good point. But it depends on what you are aiming for. For me, I’d like to leave people questioning whether what I did was real or not. People very readily accept the truth/lie plot, which I feel can make it a bit forgettable. They accept you have demonstrated an actual skill, one anyone could do, and move on with their lives. Whereas doubt leads to discussion, even if they totally disbelieve your premise for a routine, this makes it memorable.

Having spent the time observing and performing truth/lie routines, I think they have become somewhat formulaic:

• For credibility, the best performers make the spectators do something to form a baseline of them telling the truth. This normally takes the form of the participant telling the rest of the audience a fun fact.
• It is more engaging if the participants lie about something interesting. If you genuinely had the ability to sense lies, how would you use it? To find criminals? To help friends find better partners? Audiences aren’t that bothered if the participant lies about which hand a coin is in, unless the performer is particularly engaging. But for most, it’s an insignificant lie. Whereas lies about personal information add something more engaging into the mix.
• The better performers listen to the participants' responses and comment. The ability to improvise here and ad-lib marks out the more experienced performers.
• When you ask a participant to answer a question where they are required to lie or tell the truth, enforce a five-second thinking time before answering. Often people answer straight away and make a mistake—either telling a lie or telling the truth and then apologising, giving away what they were doing. People find it harder to think of lies than just tell the truth. So, by making all participants take a moment to think of their answer, it stops this issue of them stumbling for words.
• The routine benefits, in some ways, from being performed as a spectator-as-mind-reader routine. By bringing up a spectator and pretending to teach them some tells before they guess, it can make for an entertaining routine and avoids the other pitfall of the truth/lie routine—the overly smug, all-knowing performer. Truth/lie routines can very easily become a combative situation where it is the audience vs. the performer. I’ve observed it is a routine where hecklers can emerge, so it’s something to try and avoid. But I’m aware many performers don’t like participants getting credit for special abilities, so this won’t be for everyone.

Ruminations

Having ruminated on the popularity of the truth/lie premise over the last few months, I decided to go out and perform several truth/lie routines, but from a psychic angle rather than the usual body language or psychological routine route. The premise being that I can sense the emotional distaste with telling lies. I get a sense of your discomfort with telling a lie and the happier state of mind speaking the truth. Nothing groundbreaking, but it was fun seeing how it played out, presented in a different way to the norm. The interesting thing was that even though I made no reference to any tells, body language, or the psychology of lies, people still credited my abilities to them rather than any psychic angle or trickery—that I had peeked a billet. I think that shows how readily primed people are to accept that others genuinely have the ability to read people's body language and so on.

Ultimately, this premise being used so widely doesn’t really matter to audiences. Most audiences haven’t seen lots of magicians performing, so it will be fresh for them. But it has become a safe routine—one palatable to the modern psychological mind-reader's ethics and one performers know normally entertains. The magical equivalent of a music band playing their big hits rather than creating something new. Playing it safe rarely leads to great art or anything that stands out. It would be nice to see a sense of adventure in performances.

My aim in writing this hasn’t been to discourage people from performing the premise. I do think it can make a fabulous routine, but it can also make a mediocre one. So, if you are using this premise, the two questions I am going to end with are:

What will make your version memorable?
Why should anyone care about your performance of this premise?