Talk:Magician's assistant

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[edit] Intro

I still feel the intro is making a mistake in trying to define assistants by listing what they do. My original intro was an attempt to define assistants in terms of their billing and audience perception. I accept that perhaps the wording needed improving to avoid any possibility that it might be perceived as a POV statement about assistants' status or lack of it. However I don't think there was anything in there that really counted as controversial like a subsequent edit summary suggested. If it was the reference to popular perception of assistants and the impression that performers try to project to audiences then I thought that was a fairly straightforward factual statement. The same with the mention of lower billing. Actually there's a good case for the most general definition of an assistant as being "someone who appears as part of a magic show and who receives lower billing than the magician". I prefer that approach to trying to list out the tasks an assistant performs for the same reasons that I prefer not to define a supporting actor by writing a comprehensive list of his or her tasks but instead by coming up with a phrase such as as "an actor who plays a supporting role and receives lower billing than the stars". I also have problems with the sentence:

"Although magician's assistants appear to play a supporting role and therefore receive a lower billing than the magician who appears to be the source of illusions, the assistant is often the one making the illusions work."

In addition to some slight grammatical confusion (stemming from uncertainty about whether a magician might have one or several assistants) I think there's a POV issue around billing. There are lots of reasons why assistants might receive a lower billing: Playing a lesser role is one, but so are social attitudes and cold hard entertainment industry power games. Dropping the word "therefore" would be more straightforwardly factual. I don't pretend to have all the answers and I'm open to counter arguments if anyone has some. Circusandmagicfan 13:25, 19 April 2007 (UTC)Circusandmagicfan

I think you'll find that most articles start with a definition. Occupations such as this are defined by the duties of the occupation (e.g. the opening paragraph of Target girl is well written.) I haven't been able to find "magician's assistant" in authoritiative listings of occupational descriptions, so we'll have to write it ourselves. For example, are those men dressed in black who assist David Copperfield by inserting blades and pulling the boxes apart for him also called "magician's assistants", or are they "stage hands"? I don't have all the answers either, so that's why we need to find out the boundaries of this term.

If you define them in terms of their billing status, then how do you explain the inclusion of the performers under Notable Assistants who get equal or top billing? Therefore, they have to be defined by their duties.

The exposure of the secret that the assistant often makes the illusions work doesn't have to be stated right away in the second sentence. I'm not against exposure in the magic articles, but it can be revealed later in the article. When you said it is "popularly perceived as a supporting role", don't mince words -- magicians deliberately staged it to appear as a supporting role (except for recent double-billed acts.) Go ahead and remove the word "therefore", and the three issues linked together in that awkward sentence can be discussed separately in the article. GUllman 23:08, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I don't mean to sound as if I'm getting worked up over this - it's more that I'm just a bit pedantic and I like to cover points thoroughly when I post on forums. I agree with a lot of what you say and I'll need to think it over for a while. You're right about billing status not being a sufficient defining factor when sometimes assistants receive equal or nearly equal billing.

I think the general definition "assistant" probably does cover people who might also be termed "stage hands" (certainly if they're part of the magician's company or team rather than part of the venue staff). I have also seen it used often to include people who are effectively just dancers (in which case the assistants who work the illusions are sometimes billed as "principal assistant" or some such title).

Another role in which assistants are found is posing as members of the audience or volunteers who are called on to take part in tricks. I don't think it counts as exposure to mention this in general terms (same goes for assistants sometimes being the ones making illusions work). The fact that these things happen is not secret and I've seen plenty of respected magicians acknowledge this in open forums and on TV documentaries. The situation where magicians tend to get upset is when reference is made to such things when talking about a specific illusion.

I'll make one small edit to take out the word "therefore" and then I'll go away and mull over the rest of it.

Circusandmagicfan 10:12, 20 April 2007 (UTC)Circusandmagicfan