Magic and its secret weapon: How Derren Brown uses comedy in his show

A bonafide psychic plays a major Edinburgh venue. She's talking to the dead; she's reading minds; she's seeing ghosts. She, presumably, doesn't tell her audience how she manages any of these amazing feats. Few psychics ever will, and very few will actively encourage their audience to laugh at or question what's happening onstage.

Fortunately, Derren Brown is not a psychic.

“People who are interested in what I do would be sceptical of any claims of real magic or supernatural abilities," says Brown. "There’s a kind of balance in enjoying the half-world of belief that I encourage.” This half-world of belief involves watching a man reel off your phone number from across the room, or answer a question about a family pet he’s never seen, all the while knowing that it’s trickery.

Over the last 13 years of stage and TV shows, Brown has developed two distinct personas. While po-faced on his TV specials, the enigmatic performer takes on a more comedic role when he’s onstage for two and a half hours. “The fun part of the stage show for me is the fact that it has to be funnier and hit a lot of other kinds of notes,” he says.

“People aren’t expecting the show to be funny, and that’s a real bonus for me. I’m in awe of people that do stand-up, but it’s kind of a nice way of having it as a freebie, because it’s unexpected.”

It’s clear that comedy was never the primary aim of the production – so did comedy come out of nowhere, or was it added in consciously?

“Very consciously,” Brown affirms. “When people laugh they relax and they’re off guard, so it has its uses from a magical point of view. There’s a lot that you can cover by making a joke just before [the trick], especially if you’ve built up a bit of tension, because people for that moment just sort of gloss over and stop paying attention.”

Throwing in the odd joke, and stalling for time with seemingly effortless patter with the audience, also goes some way to remind us that we are here for entertainment, not to just stare in wide-eyed wonder at a genie in a fetching waistcoat. “I’m building up more obvious tension than a comedian would because of the nature of what I’m doing, so puncturing that with an element of release is even more important,” Brown explains. “Otherwise there’s only so much you can take.”

An enormous amount of research goes into each of Brown's shows, whether it’s into the history of his own art or the tricks used in someone else’s. He has an uncanny way of slipping something serious in among the baffling sleight-of-mind tricks that keep everyone watching. Previous shows, onstage and off, have focused on cold reading, explored troubling ideas such as how easy it is to torture someone when they can’t identify you, or conjured spectacles such as 'possessed' clockwork dolls. His last stage show, Infamous, took a similarly pensive tack, and, along with the mind-reading, this year’s Miracle is set to explore Stoic philosophy and the theory of happiness.

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“When people laugh they relax and they’re off guard, so it has its uses from a magical point of view" – Derren Brown

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Magic, of course, isn’t usually a platform for philosophical musing. Or, to put it bluntly: “It’s a fraudulent route to making yourself look amazing.” But Brown is interested in more than 'looking amazing.' “The magician tends to create an interesting persona around themselves, which can become a bit tiresome, and then everybody starts to take the piss and magicians start to become these slightly ludicrous figures,” he says. “People know they’re being tricked, so the seriousness with which a lot of magicians treat themselves can be a bit foolish.”

The Derren Brown we see onstage doesn’t take himself or his act too seriously. He often tells us we’re being tricked, and giggles at himself when everything appears to have gone tits up. He eggs on our scepticism and picks holes in his own techniques, showing how easy it is to pick holes in other performers too. What he takes more seriously is the effect his techniques can have on his audience, and what this might say about people generally.

“I try and do shows now that have a kind of message to them, maybe because it’s quite a big investment making shows and I want to do something that feels worthwhile. Essentially, though, it’s about drama.

"Teller [of American magic duo Penn and Teller] has spoken about how if you’re a magician and you click your fingers and something amazing happens, there’s no drama to that – that’s like a god figure who can whimsically make things happen. What interests us in drama is a hero struggling through a journey and learning things along the way and so on. So when I was first doing TV I tried to take that on board in terms of what I was doing, and put more emphasis on the process, so it didn’t feel too whimsical.

"What I’ve tried to do over the last few years is to preserve drama, and move the focus onto a member of the public to do extraordinary things. That’s inherently much more interesting than a person saying, ‘Look at me, I’m so clever, I can read your mind.’ I can still use my world and my skills and so on to facilitate that but it’s no longer about me, and I think that’s more interesting.”

In this particular show, it’s not all about his theatre audience, either: "Every night I ask people to tweet in any word they like, and something happens onstage that, fingers crossed, makes that extraordinary as opposed to just a bunch of words.”

At the end of each show, one lucky Twitter follower is told they have read an audience member’s mind – from perhaps miles away, and without ever knowing they were doing it. A trick, again, which, in the context and the drama of the show, suspends our disbelief.

There's another kind of laughter that pervades every stage show Brown has done – the laughter of complete bafflement. In 2007’s An Evening of Wonders, Brown seemingly transports from one end of the stage to another, reappearing from the wings in a gorilla suit. The trick is a simple one – watch the scene back once and you’ll spot it – but the reaction on that first view is one of the biggest of the night because of our hoodwinked expectations. There are gasps, even the odd scream, and more than a few guffaws of laughter. The big reveal feels like a punchline, and the reaction of shocked laughter is rife throughout the rest of the show too. Even without an actual joke, we’re often reduced to nervous giggling when we realise we’ve been had, once again.

Looking back – way back – 'fear grinning’ has been documented in macaques and chimpanzees, signalling that a less dominant member of the group doesn’t want a disagreement to escalate. The grin and the laughter are all about reassuring everyone that it’s all a joke. Seen in this light, with its roots in dominance and avoiding conflict, laughter is even more at home in a show that involves misdirection, altered states of mind and the apparent ease of making an adult human lose control of their own body.

While people acknowledge Brown's abilities, it's sometimes done with a worried twinge. The amount of control one man can have over so many others could be frightening – one review by Planet Ivy describes the experience as being ‘so confused that you resort to violence.’ With shows on television, we’re given a reassuring end-screen notice that everyone has been successfully de-programmed, shop owners have been reimbursed, and all that stuff destroyed in that guy’s house was replaced in full. And after that, everyone changes the channel and tells themselves it was just a TV show.

In Brown’s stage shows, however, we need a different kind of reassurance. “Originally the second half was very serious but sort of bizarre," Brown says of Miracle. “It was asking a lot from the audience to sort of come with me on a journey, and we realised that in order to make that work it was very important to let people know that it was fine and safe and I hadn’t gone mad. Putting jokes in was hugely important and totally allowed the second half to work.”

Many of Brown’s tricks come with a disclaimer. In his live shows he often goes halfway to explaining how something is done, ridiculing those who claim to actually talk to the dead, read minds, see ghosts – before he appears to do just that. As long as there are laughs along the way, and we know it’s all a show, that we’re only being tricked, comedy seems to reassure us that this is a monkey fight with no bloodshed. Not real blood, anyway.