Mark Panner submitted sixteen articles this week (and it's
only Tuesday). This one made the least
sense so we print it without comment.
You can reach Mark Panner at magicmark@insidemagic.com.
Introduction to this Column
It used to be magicians were clean-cut, All-American men. Not any more. No. Now, magicians have to look like every other performer in the side-show. They have long hair, tattoos, pierced body parts, and even facial hair.
Walt Disney didn't allow facial hair on the people meeting the public. He knew that facial hair (on men or women) makes people nervous (when it is on men) or nauseous (when it is on women). Mr. Walt Disney did not let his women wear too much make-up or his men wear any make-up at all. Men couldn't have ear rings or any other kind of piercing and no visible tattoos were allowed at all.
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.
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