There is a question that, once you hear it, you cannot unhear. It follows you into every rehearsal, every performance, every moment of creative development. It sits on your shoulder during practice sessions and whispers in your ear before you walk on stage. It is the most useful and the most uncomfortable question in all of magic performance.
The question is Michael Close’s: “Why should anybody bother to watch?”
I first encountered this question through Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic, where Close is interviewed extensively about his approach to performance and scripting. Close is a musician, a writer, and a magician whose philosophy of performance is built on a foundation that most magicians never examine: the idea that every trick must justify its existence.
Not justify it to you. You already like it. You find it interesting. You enjoy the method, the moves, the clever construction. You have reasons to perform it.
But why should anyone bother to watch it?
This question haunted me for weeks after I first read it. I walked around Vienna with it rattling in my head. I sat in hotel rooms and applied it to every routine in my repertoire. And for some of those routines, I could not come up with a convincing answer.
The Devastating Specificity of the Question
Close’s question is devastating because it is specific. It does not ask whether the trick is good. It does not ask whether the trick is fooling. It does not ask whether the trick is technically impressive. It asks whether any reasonable human being, given the choice between watching your trick and doing literally anything else — checking their phone, talking to the person next to them, getting another drink — should choose to watch your trick.
This is a much harder standard than “is this trick good?” A trick can be good — clean method, strong effect, solid technique — and still fail Close’s test. Because “good” is an evaluation made by people who understand magic. “Worth watching” is an evaluation made by people who are deciding how to spend their attention.
Attention is the most valuable commodity in modern life. Everyone has a phone in their pocket offering infinite entertainment. Every audience member is choosing, every moment, between watching you and doing something else. Close’s question acknowledges this reality and demands that your trick compete for attention not against other magic tricks, but against everything.
The Three Failed Answers
When I first applied Close’s question to my repertoire, I discovered that most of my answers fell into one of three categories. All three were wrong.
Failed answer one: “Because the trick is amazing.” This sounds reasonable until you examine it. Amazing to whom? Amazing compared to what? The trick is amazing to me because I understand how difficult it is and how clever the method is. But the audience does not share this perspective. They see the effect, not the method. And the effect — a card changes, a prediction matches, an object vanishes — may or may not be amazing to someone who does not spend their free time studying card magic.
Darwin Ortiz makes this point directly in Strong Magic: “The fact that you like a trick is not enough reason to perform it.” And further: “The fact that a trick fooled you is not enough reason to perform it.” Being fooled as a magician is a completely different experience from being a spectator. What amazes me does not necessarily amaze them.
Failed answer two: “Because I perform it well.” Skill is a prerequisite, not a justification. Nobody watches a performance because the performer is technically proficient. They watch because something about the performance engages them emotionally, intellectually, or socially. Technical proficiency makes that engagement possible but does not create it.
This is like saying people should eat at a restaurant because the chef has excellent knife skills. Knife skills are necessary. But people eat at restaurants for the food, the atmosphere, the experience. The knife skills are invisible.
Failed answer three: “Because it fits my show.” This is a structural argument, not an audience argument. It says the trick serves your needs as a performer, not the audience’s needs as spectators. A trick can fill a slot in your running order, provide a change of pace, or set up the next effect — and still not be worth watching on its own terms.
Close’s question demands an audience-centered answer. Not “why do I want to perform this?” but “why would they want to watch it?”
The Answers That Work
After failing the Close test with most of my repertoire, I spent several weeks rebuilding my answers. The routines I kept were the ones where I could give an answer that passed a simple test: would the answer make sense to a non-magician?
Here are the types of answers that work.
“Because it will make them feel something.” This is the strongest possible answer. If a routine creates genuine emotion — wonder, laughter, surprise, warmth, unease, delight — it justifies its existence. Not the theoretical possibility of emotion, but the reliable creation of it. If you can say, “Every time I perform this, the person across the table laughs” or “Every time I do this, the room goes quiet in a way that tells me something real just happened,” you have passed the test.
Close himself frames performance as a gift: “Art is my saying, you know, I look at the world this way, take a look and see if that means anything to you.” The gift is emotional. The trick is the vehicle for delivering the gift, not the gift itself.
“Because it will change how they see something familiar.” A card routine that makes someone reconsider the nature of choice. A mentalism piece that makes someone wonder about the limits of perception. A simple effect that reframes an everyday object as something mysterious. When a trick changes the audience’s perspective — even briefly, even subtly — it is worth watching because it offers something they cannot get from their phone.
“Because it will create a shared experience they will remember.” The corporate event where two strangers at a table shared a moment of genuine astonishment. The dinner party where the trick became the story everyone told the next day. The keynote where the audience collectively gasped and then laughed at their own credulity. Shared experiences are rare and valuable. If your trick reliably creates one, it earns its place.
Applying the Question to My Repertoire
When I seriously applied Close’s question to every routine I performed, the results were humbling. Out of roughly fifteen routines I was performing regularly, I could give a convincing answer for about seven. The other eight had to go.
Not all of them were bad routines. Some were technically excellent. Some had strong methods and clean effects. Some had gotten good reactions from friendly audiences. But when I asked “Why should anybody bother to watch this?” and tried to answer honestly, the answer was either one of the three failed answers above or no answer at all.
The routines I could not justify were, almost without exception, tricks I performed because I enjoyed performing them, not because the audience needed to see them. They scratched my itch, not the audience’s. They demonstrated my abilities rather than creating an experience.
Cutting them was painful. One of them — a card routine I had spent months developing — was my favorite thing to perform. The method was elegant. The handling was smooth. I loved every moment of it. But the honest answer to Close’s question was: “People should watch this because I am good at it.” And that is not a good enough answer.
The Flip Side: What the Question Reveals About Your Best Material
Close’s question is not just a scalpel for cutting weak material. It is also a spotlight for identifying strong material.
When I applied the question to the routines I kept, I discovered something about each one that I had not fully articulated before. Each one had a specific, describable gift that it offered the audience. Not “it’s amazing” or “it’s fooling,” but something concrete: this one makes people laugh at themselves in a way that feels good. This one creates a moment of genuine wonder that makes the room go quiet. This one gives a spectator an experience of being understood that they carry with them after the show.
Once I could articulate the gift, I could refine the routine to deliver it more effectively. I stopped worrying about whether the trick was fooling enough or impressive enough and started focusing on whether the gift was landing cleanly. This shifted my attention from technique to effect, from method to experience, from what I was doing to what they were feeling.
This shift is what Ortiz means when he writes that the effect happens in the spectators’ minds. The effect is not the trick. The effect is the experience — the emotional, intellectual, or social gift that the trick delivers. Close’s question forces you to identify that gift and then evaluate whether it is worth giving.
The Question as Daily Practice
I now ask Close’s question every time I practice. Not before performances — before individual practice sessions. Before I spend forty-five minutes rehearsing a routine in a hotel room, I ask: “Why should anybody bother to watch this?”
If I cannot answer, I do not practice the routine. I spend the time developing material that I can answer for, or I go back to the drawing board on the unjustified routine and figure out what gift it is supposed to deliver.
This has made my practice more productive. Instead of rehearsing everything in my repertoire equally, I invest more time in the routines that have the clearest, most compelling answers to Close’s question. These are the routines that deserve the most polish, the most refinement, the most of my limited practice time.
It has also made me braver about creating new material. When I start developing a new routine, the first thing I do — before I think about method, before I think about technique, before I think about scripting — is answer Close’s question. What gift will this routine give the audience? What will they feel? Why would they choose to watch this rather than do anything else?
If I have a strong answer, I proceed. If I do not, I wait. The answer will either come or it will not. And if it does not, the routine does not deserve to exist — no matter how clever the method, no matter how clean the technique, no matter how much I personally enjoy it.
The Question That Never Goes Away
Michael Close’s question is not a one-time test. It is a permanent companion. Every routine that passes the test today must pass it again tomorrow, because audiences change, contexts shift, and what was worth watching last year may not be worth watching next year.
This is not discouraging. It is clarifying. It means you can never rest on your reputation or your repertoire. You must continuously earn the audience’s attention, not by performing more impressive tricks but by offering more valuable gifts. The question keeps you honest, keeps you audience-centered, keeps you focused on the only thing that truly matters: the experience of the person watching.
“Why should anybody bother to watch?”
If you can answer this question for every routine in your repertoire — not with enthusiasm or defensiveness or technical justification, but with a calm, specific, audience-centered reason — then your show is worth giving.
If you cannot, you have work to do. And that work is not technical. It is philosophical. It is the work of figuring out what you have to offer people, what gifts you carry, what experiences you can create that are worth someone’s most precious and limited resource: their attention.
Close’s question is a gift too, in its way. It is the gift of clarity. And like all great gifts, it is uncomfortable to receive and invaluable to have.