It's a kind of magic

Star ratings: Firman 3; Barry & Stuart 2; Ali Cook 4.

Humour is an indispensable part of almost every magician’s tool kit. A well-timed pun or a bit of wry self-deprecation can be a great way to get the audience on your side, leaving them all the more vulnerable to your devious trickery. But a number of magicians at the Fringe each year emphasise the comedy element of their shows to a larger degree, attracting audiences who come as much for the gags as for the illusions. 

Pete Firman is perhaps the most popular practitioner of this hybrid style at the moment and has given his show the unambiguous title of Jokes and Tricks. His studiedly old-fashioned, end-of-the pier style clearly appeals to his mainstream audience, but both the jokes and the tricks are only moderately effective. Some rely too heavily on specially designed gadgets and props, like a refilling wine glass and a pipe that allows Firman to "breathe fire". Others are just obvious variations on rope-cutting, card-guessing and object-swapping routines familiar from many a schoolboy magic set, albeit pulled off with consummate skill. 

The humour is a familiar combination of old-school innuendo, with Firman encouraging a woman in the crowd to "take the shaft in [her] hand" and boasting that he will "get inside her... mind", and slapstick, like when the industrial fan needed for the "floating orb" trick is conspicuously set up onstage. It’s a smooth performance and the paintball-based finale is nicely set up and pulled off. But a bit of originality would have gone a long way in helping the audience to suspend disbelief.

More daring is Barry and Stuart’s latest endeavour, a Victorian-style séance performed by two self-proclaimed sceptics. It’s an attempt to do a Derren Brown, explicitly telling the audience that it’s all nonsense and revealing how some of the effects are achieved, while still pulling the wool over their eyes just enough that they come away stumped. All the tropes of a proper Victorian séance are here, including Christian spiritual music, a Ouija board and disturbing plunges into complete darkness. The emphasis is on the magic, with the pair’s matey, nudge-wink humour doing just enough work to slightly leaven the atmosphere.

Some of the audience are clearly quite spooked, but often the duo get the balance between explanation and bedazzlement a bit wrong. There’s an admirable honesty to telling the audience the secrets behind roughly 50 per cent of your tricks, but it risks raising the scepticism levels in the room to such a level that the remainder of the illusions fall flat. Most of their set doesn’t withstand this pressure and the audience’s suspicion that the final effects are achieved using a stooge (which they address and deny at the end of the show), is hardly helped by encouraging us to be so questioning.

Unexpectedly, the most impressive act on all levels is Ali Cook. It takes a while to get used to his onstage persona, a sort of children’s-entertainer-cum-sex-offender with wild, darty eyes and a crazed grin. His jokes are a combination of obvious innuendo, bad puns and some really very smart one-liners, all over-delivered in a hyperactive, gurning style that is initially off-putting but soon becomes quite an effective joke in itself.

Cook specialises in "sick tricks", illusions with a dark edge that cater for the late-night crowd. Some are quite gut-churning, featuring a duck, a chicken and later, razor blades, while others are more standard and only perturb because of the personality surrounding them. But what most have in common is that they’re dazzlingly good. A demonstration of close-up table magic shows Cook’s skill and dedication to the craft, and the water tank finale, though familiar in style from many a TV magic spectacular, is jaw-dropping when seen at such close quarters. The drunk sections of the audience that the Gilded Balloon inevitably attracts at this time of night are over-chatty at the start of the gig. Stumbling out of the venue afterwards, all seem lost for words.