Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants
The magician and historian Ricky Jay's 1996 HBO television special, "Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants," begins with two segments of card tricks. He starts the show by locating and ejecting the queen cards from a shuffled deck three separate times in the historical styles of different eras, ending in a hilariously snobbish moral fable about the inability of the nouveau riche to ingratiate themselves into high society. Next, he calls two audience members to the stage and demonstrates how easily he could fleece them in gin or blackjack or basically any game played with cards - not only by producing a winning hand, but by controlling essentially every card at play so that he can win, believably, every time.
This is a short summary of the performance, but I encourage you to watch the entire special - it’s available in full on Archive.org, thanks to Chris Person - because a capsule description of what happens in a magic show doesn’t even feel besides the point, it feels oppositional to the act itself. You can write down “Ricky Jay produces four queens from a deck he has shuffled multiple times” and it completely fails to capture the experience of watching it happen, even mediated through a 29-year old TV special. If I tell you that a magician does a magic trick, it’s like, sure, no shit, of course they do - that’s the job! They do a magic trick, it’s incredible, you’re not going to be able to figure out how they did it. Those are just the rules of the game.
Except Jay violates those rules, because during the second segment he provides a multipart explanation of exactly how he has done every trick you have seen so far - breaking it down to controlling the placement of the cards in the deck by shuffling, and by surreptitiously dealing those cards. There is one line where - speaking from the perspective of the audience - he expresses bewilderment at the virtuosic sequence of tricks he has just performed, and says
“Now look, if these cards aren’t marked, and I tell you they’re not - I mean, I don’t know if you’re going to believe me or not - how does somebody do this? I think there are two things at play here: one is I have a very good memory and the other is I kinda know what happens when cards are shuffled.”
This is a beautiful explanation of the feats you have just seen because when you realize what it means - that for the last ten minutes or so Jay has been mentally keeping track of where all four aces and at least several other cards are in the deck, through multiple shuffles and tricks, while not only performing the tricks themselves but also doing a fairly complicated comedy routine - it seems like it would be literally less impressive if he had just been like, “Yeah, I’m actually a wizard.” Jay can reveal how he is pulling off these tricks because the performance of them requires so much practice and mental fortitude the only way to do them is, essentially, “become Ricky Jay.”
Immediately after the second set of tricks Jay dismisses his volunteers into the audience, steps out into the floodlights and - using the same deck that he just used to demonstrate his ability to recall and produce cards - presents ten different cards to ten different audience members and then brings them back in a sleight-of-hand cavalcade. It feels like a concert program - he’s moving from a series of difficult etudes to a concerto, and now the knowledge of what he’s doing - what he must be doing, inside of his head, the entire time that he is chatting away with the audience - weighs on the viewer.
And what viewers we have! “Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants” was directed by David Mamet, and the sequences are peppered with cuts to a delightfully 1996 audience (it’s always incredible to me how people in the mid-90s appear exactly how we now think everyone appeared in the late 80s) looking wonderfully bewildered. There are multiple shots where one audience member turns to the other and visibly makes a remark in the vein of “how is he doing this?” But, despite the tricks being more impressive than literal miracles the audience members don’t actually think that Ricky Jay is performing magic. So what do they think? What are they thinking of?
Maybe they - like me, 19 years later - are trying to figure out how he’s doing it - the exact moment when Jay is dealing from the bottom of the deck, or how he seems to turn one card into another. But the effect of one impossible thing happening after another is a kind of befuddled rapture, you end up just along for the ride because it becomes very clear, very quickly, that Ricky Jay is not going to fuck up, especially in front of the likes of you. I think to some degree part of the appeal of a magic show, to adults, is that it can restore a form of the wonder/horror of childhood, which is that there are a lot of occasions where you have no idea what is going to happen or what is even possible.
But also, watching a show like this teaches you an important lesson: never gamble any money whatsoever on cards, ever. More seriously - that you can’t trust your eyes, that there are ways that every single smart, capable, rational person can be rooked or fooled, because there is a lineage going back hundreds of years of people who have learned and practiced how to rook and fool smart, capable, rational people. And part of the charm of “Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants” is that Ricky Jay is not just showing you that he can make cards do basically whatever he wants, right under your nose. He is giving you an education.
I haven’t really touched before on the larger structure of “Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants” yet, which is absolutely not what you might imagine when you think of a magic show. When Jay is not manipulating cards, and often when he is, he is lecturing - on the history of card handling, on the history of magic, on the lives of individual magicians. At one point he recites a 19th century translation of a 15th century French poem by François Villon, which lists a compendium of disreputable or illegal professions, all in impenetrable slang. He demonstrates his skill at throwing cards, at one point spending entire minutes trying and failing to penetrate the rind of a nonplussed watermelon, and immediately after that performs his first non-card magic trick, which doubles as a history demonstration on the classic “cups and balls” trick. It is - even through 20 year old 4x3 video tape - astonishing.
The whole thing is weird, is what I’m saying - there are magic tricks and card tricks, explanations and demonstrations, histories of magicians and histories of hustlers. It’s erudite, not only within the world of magic but in general - when dismissing the volunteers for the card game tricks, Jay quotes George Bernard Shaw. It has nothing of the focused arc that you might see at a Vegas magician’s show - at the end of the cups and balls act, he tips back the cups to reveal that the fuzzy red balls he has been playing with have been replaced by a plum, a lime and a potato, and this isn’t a callback to some earlier trick - we have never seen these comestibles before.
Throughout there are references to Jay’s personal weirdness - he mentions that he has been “unable to get married,” he makes remarks about his wardrobe that belie an awareness that he has the face and body of the character actor that he sidelined as. At one point, after a series of children’s wind-up toys have been unable to locate the card picked by an audience volunteer, he proclaims, “Ladies and gentlemen there comes a time in every strange person’s life when he must get serious; for me that time is at hand.” Even the title of the special is a bit of a joke: Ricky Jay’s 52 assistants are not the lovely young women that a stereotypical magician might have, but the pack of cards that he uses - outside of the volunteers and the plastic animals he decapitates with playing cards and I guess the watermelon he’s all alone up there.
So if it’s not a normal magic show - if Ricky Jay recites poetry and explains how he does the tricks and relates anecdotes and histories and again the watermelon thing, I have a hard time getting past the watermelon, what is it? He could do all of the tricks in half the time if he just rattled them all out one after another. But the dialogues and the jokes and the stories, I think those are kind of a primer on what it was to become Ricky Jay. He tells you stories about famous magicians of the past, about card sharks and hustlers, about his friends and acquaintances, and what he is saying is, these are the people I love, these are the lifestyles that attract me, these are the histories that have enthralled me.
And when he tells you how he’s manipulating the cards he is revealing his incredible degree of skill and dedication, and he is saying, this is what I can do, this is what I am capable of. I may be a strange person, I may be a bit of a clown, but if you were me - if you were Ricky Jay, and you had these talents, and you loved these things - am I not exactly the Ricky Jay who you would want to be?
It is possible that this newsletter is trying to do the very same thing: here are the things I love, and here is what I have done with them. I hope to do this weekly.
A friend asked if this newsletter would come with music recommendations, so it does: I know absolutely nothing about Balada Pendekar by Bimbo & Lin other than it’s pretty much wall to wall bangers. Give it a listen!