A recent headliner of Hollywood’s famed Magic Castle, magician and mentalist Andy Deemer brings his entertaining (and edgy) live virtual show. Interacting with the audience via Zoom, Deemer performs card tricks, makes objects appear and disappear, and even mails predictions that supposedly come true to audience participants. How is it? Well, a magician never reveals his secrets.
Corn Andy’s Super Fun Magic Show is more than a typical parlor magic show.
“I’ve been doing elements of it for years, but it didn’t come together into a cohesive whole before the pandemic,” says Deemer. “I was really forced to think about how to perform magic on Zoom, where people couldn’t choose a card and things could be enhanced digitally. But with Zoom, everyone has a front row seat, so you can watch everything I do up close and hopefully still be tricked and entertained.
But there’s a dark side to Deemer’s show, which dovetails with the rise of conspiracy theories in America’s mainstream consciousness over the past year.
“It starts out as a very vanilla family magic show,” says Deemer, who portrays a version of himself, a kind of alter ego, in the performance. “For the first 60 or 72 seconds, it’s very happy and almost Pee-wee Herman-esque,” he says.
But, after this brief foray into the happy and fun world, his alter ego persona realizes he has a captive audience and passionately delves into conspiracy theories, using magic tricks to convince audiences that they are true or “to prove that there is government mind control”. and that drinking this mixture of Red Bull, coffee, Mountain Dew and bear urine will actually boost your memory.
One of the things this theorist of magic is convinced of: the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln are linked to each other, and linked, in some way, to contemporary singer Taylor Swift.
“I’ve always been interested in conspiracy theories,” Deemer says. “I think they’re wonderful and entertaining until they get dangerous. And, over the last year, after I started doing the show, they got really dangerous. QAnon has become a family conversation and fear of vaccines has become so prevalent. »
Weaving conspiracy theories with compelling magical feats is Deemer’s way of highlighting the ‘truth’ – to borrow a term from comedian Stephen Colbert – of claims presented as fact, regardless of evidence, logic and research. rigorous intellectual. Truth is, in a way, the very thing that makes us believe in the veracity of parlor magic.
