Household Magician

Submission 29,477

Part of a series on Advice Animals. [View Related Entries]

About

Household Magician is an advice animal image macro series featuring an image of a bearded stage magician and captions undertaking mundane household tasks that are deemed surprisingly difficult to accomplish without trial and error. Each act is typically introduced with the phrase “for my next trick” or “for my next amazing act,” emulating the manner in which magicians transition between acts during live performances.

Origin

The original stock photo of the bearded magician was taken by Australian photographer David Freund^[1] and uploaded to iStockPhoto^[2] on April 20th, 2010. Years later on July 6th, 2013, Redditor unenlightenedfool submitted the first Household Magician image macro to the /r/AdviceAnimals^[4] subreddit with the caption “For my next amazing act / I will put this air mattress back into its original package,” describing the cumbersome process of repackaging an inflatable mattress after it has been used.

The post received more than 17,000 upvotes, 2,300 points overall and 260 comments within 48 hours. Redditor unenlightenedfool provided the blank template for the image macro series in a comment on the post, which accrued more than 400 upvotes, making it the top comment on the thread.

Spread

Shortly thereafter, several users began submitting their own Household Magician image macros to /r/AdviceAnimals^[5] as well as within the comments of the original image.^[6] Later that evening, Tumblr humor blog Tastefully Offensive^[11] shared a compilation of six Household Magician instances, which gained more than 6,000 notes in 48 hours. On July 7th, the air mattress instance was reposted to 9gag^[8], where it gained more than 1,100 Facebook likes, as well as on Flickr^[9], while another instance was shared on FunSubstance^[10] later that day. On July 8th, additional compilations were posted on humor sites FunnyChap^[12] and Caveman Circus.^[13]