Since Disney owns The Simpsons, there are sometimes episodes that are only on Disney+. Despite The Simpsons being one of the shows I regularly play in the background while I’m doing other things, I’ve never watched any of these until yesterday, when a Christmas episode featured UK mentalist Derren Brown.
Brown is, to my understanding, very well-known in the UK, but not so much here in America. I came across his work all the way back in 2012, when I was writing a play about–stay with me here–spiritualism after the Civil War for a queer history arts festival. As part of that, I was doing a ton of research about how seances, spirit writing, and table turning were actually performed, reading lots of old books by debunkers of the movement (including, fun fact, Harry Houdini). This led me to Brown, who in addition to debunking faith healers and mediums, has also performed versions of some spiritualist tricks, like billet reading, as part of his stage shows. I was delighted by his stage work and devoured what I could find on YouTube (most of it, alas, seems to have been scrubbed now). I’m less of a fan of his TV specials, where he’s done things like convince someone they’ve emergency landed a plane, played Russian roulette, or otherwise performed somewhat manipulative stunts that have always felt a little too “TV magician” to really resonate with me.
I interviewed Brown in 2017 for Jezebel, when he brought his stage show Secret to the US. If I recall right I found some roundabout way of bringing up our shared interest in spiritualism but maintained the professional boundaries necessary to not devolve the whole interview into talking about it. Since then, I’ve a little bit lost track of his work, though it’s always stayed with me as a gateway into a fascination with stage magic.
So that was a long-winded way of saying I was surprised and excited to see him headline a 45-minute Simpsons episode, “O C’mon All Ye Faithful.” The episode is structured around his TV stunts, where he attempts to manipulate Springfield into the Christmas spirit through his brand of tricks. The second half of the episode centers on Flanders’ religious faith as a result of Brown’s actions, a topic I’m always excited for The Simpsons to explore. The episode does a good job of explaining who Brown is to an audience I can’t imagine is familiar without over-explaining, and while the whole thing feels like a cameo geared toward a very narrow audience who’s excited about both Brown and how religion is portrayed in media (namely, me), it’s a pretty OK episode. I was moved, but also a little let down, by its climax, where I personally feel it fumbles the bag on why people are religious, but this response is also very me. I was charmed by how much Brown sounds like himself, with all his familiar-to-me patter and some of his personal stances regarding psychology and religion.
If you have Disney+ you should totally watch the episode, but this blog is mostly an excuse to tell you how glad I am that Brown’s work introduced me to stage magic beyond the cultural presence of David Copperfield and the worst parts of Penn & Teller (as opposed to the best parts, like how beautiful I think their version of the Miser’s Dream is on Fool Us). I have become in particular a huge fan of card tricks, which I maintain are our most human narrative art form: they work because of how our brain works and how it intersects with our culture, how we are hard-wired toward meaning and connection; a card trick happens in the performer’s hands but also by drawing on the very foundations of how we live in the world. The big thing with stage magic seems to be not knowing how it’s done, but I’ve never found this true for myself. I found magicians pretty offputting, the way I think many people do (they often don’t do themselves any favors), until I learned more about how their effects are achieved, when I was able to see precisely how complicated and beautiful and deeply human even the simplest-seeming trick is. I am hardly an expert (unlike my old G/O coworker Kevin Pang, whom I would constantly DM about either magic or food writing), but the more I’ve learned about how effects are done, the more in awe I am of a field I think a lot of adults write off. I’ve been excited to see the growing popularity of more “mature” stage shows, like Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself (which I will admit I saw live and thought was just OK but liked more when I saw it again on Hulu; both times, I thought the best effect by far was the very last one).
I woke up this morning feeling overwhelmed, in dread of the tasks of the day before I’d even opened my eyes. But now, a few hours later, I’m thinking about how the same thought patterns I apply to spreadsheets and to-do lists to keep a business running can be applied to cards and coins and envelopes to expose how beautiful and miraculous it is to walk around with a human brain, how our instinct for meaning-making can be used to both maintain our day-to-day and break out of it. For about as long as I’ve been aware of Brown’s work I’ve been carting around a used copy of the seminal Royal Road to Card Magic, with the dream of learning to do a single card trick before I die, just to know for myself how it feels to make something so lovely out of so little. That dream gets less and less likely every year (Do you know how to do this? Help me out!), but sharing my enthusiasm for it with you has reminded me that there’s still time.
