Before I begin sharing my thoughts on the entertainment value of juggling, I want to clearly state that juggling can have many purposes or no purpose at all. It can be done for fun, for artistic expression, for exercise, for personal achievement, for therapy, for competition, and for many other reasons. All of these are perfectly fine motivations. I’m not making any judgement or stating any opinions about any of these at all. The following is about the use of juggling to entertain an audience and nothing more. I also want to clearly state that I am in no way saying that we jugglers should be hacks, performing the standard things that every beginner does. Innovation and creativity are extremely important and are the ways that we separate ourselves from other jugglers. So, keeping those things in mind, let’s get into my thoughts on using juggling to entertain.
In May of 2024, Simon Cowell, the entertainment mogul behind America’s Got Talent, Britain’s Got Talent, and the other international versions, made a statement during a BGT broadcast that, ” juggling is normally unbelievably boring.” Lots of jugglers would immediately scoff at such a statement, but a great many professional jugglers, myself included, understand where Simon is coming from. In fact, I’ve thought that this is often the case for quite some time. Now, when I say that, I don’t mean that juggling is boring to me. I’ve spent the past 40 years as a professional juggler and the past dozen years as a juggling historian, researcher, and writer. What I mean is that to the non-juggling audience (sometimes called mugglers), just watching juggling gets old very fast. This is especially true if they’re watching yet another person toss juggling balls, rings, or clubs. If they’ve seen similar juggling before, the level of retention of attention is not going to be very high.
I’ve argued in the past that siteswaps are nearly useless when it comes to entertainment. Siteswaps would be like just running scales on a guitar or a piano. They have little or no emotional or connection value, and 99% of audiences can’t tell the difference between patterns, especially if the changes in pattern are somewhat subtle. So many jugglers “perform” what would be the equivalent of random scales and chord progressions in music and expect the audience to enjoy and care about it. Juggling is a tool that an entertainer can use in a wide variety of ways, but it’s rarely the juggling itself that’s entertaining. It’s the comedy, movement, danger, story, dance, risk, music, message, sound, or something else that is related to or created by the juggling that is entertaining. Just like a composer or songwriter using scales, chord progressions, and harmony to create something artistic or entertaining, a juggler has to use their skillful manipulation of objects as a tool to create something greater. The visual aspect of juggling has some entertainment value, but that value is quite rarely very high. It’s often the combination of the visual aspect of the object manipulation paired with one or more of those other elements that creates something that the audience enjoys or cares about.
Regarding toss juggling, body throws (back crosses, alberts, under the leg, head rolls, chin rolls, kick ups, etc.) are almost always more entertaining than siteswaps to general audiences. Audiences understand involving your body with the prop far, far better than they do siteswaps. With a run of siteswaps, they might notice that the pattern changes slightly at times, but they certainly don’t understand how. In fact, I’d argue that throwing one object high, collecting the others, and resuming the pattern when the high prop comes down is greater than or equal to any siteswap pattern to the muggler’s eye. They simply don’t see the differences like we do. I understand this, because when I watch ice skaters, I can’t tell the difference between a toe loop, a flip, a Lutz, a Salchow, a loop, and an Axel. I can just see that the skaters are jumping up and doing some number of rotations in the air. I can often tell how many rotations, but I don’t notice which edge they’re jumping off of or which direction they’re jumping from or landing on. I would argue that the same dynamic is true regarding siteswap patterns.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Jugglers are more than welcome to practice anything they want for their own personal enjoyment. I love to see world records broken and technical limits pushed. I helped write the IJA Numbers Championships rules and won 13 gold medals in the Numbers Championships. Likewise, any juggler can perform whatever they want, but I think that if you want to be a successful performer as a juggler, it’s helpful to consider what engages the non-juggling audience. Even just giving the audience some context of what’s happening increases their enjoyment of it. Literally telling the audience what you’re doing while you’re doing it will increase the entertainment value, even if you’re not adding any other artform or entertainment component to the juggling. Why? There are a couple of reasons for this. Understanding something naturally increases your potential enjoyment of the activity. It is difficult to enjoy a sporting event if you have no understanding of what’s going on during the game. But as your understanding increases, so does your engagement and enjoyment. Likewise, when a juggler’s audience understands what is happening, it naturally will increase their potential appreciation and enjoyment of the performance. It’s much easier to enjoy an opera if it’s in a language you understand or if you have read a synopsis of the plot. Understanding increases enjoyment. I also believe that you’re creating a connection with the audience by aiding in their understanding of what you’re doing. And connecting with the audience is the key to being a successful entertainer. I’ve often said that if you can get the audience to like you, they’re almost assuredly going to like what you do. In the art world, the most successful artists are not necessarily the ones with the greatest technical skills. It’s the artists who move the viewer and create an emotional connection between their art and the viewer who prove most successful. Similarly, in music, it’s not usually the greatest vocalist or instrumentalist who becomes most famous. It’s the artist who can create a connection with the audience that succeeds. Some incredibly creative and innovative music composers are unheard of while a band who writes songs with the same three chords over and over again become household names. Why? Because they successfully connect with the listener.
Think about two of the most famous jugglers of all time to the general public. In the 1980s, Michael Davis was on television constantly with his comedy juggling. And what did his comedy juggling consist of technically? The answer was usually a three object cascade.
It was Davis’ pairing of juggling with comedy that succeeded. Likewise, in 2006, Chris Bliss achieved incredible success with the video of him juggling balls to some Beatles songs. The video received over 20 million views in 40 days and has been viewed more than 80 million times. Bliss is a stand up comedian who closes his show with the musical juggling piece. While his stand up is pretty much unknown, the juggling connected with audiences in a very powerful way. The three-ball juggling by itself is nothing all that special. It’s actually quite repetitive and jerky, but when combined with the music, it’s hard to argue that it’s not entertaining.
So, my challenge to the performing jugglers reading this is to think about what you’re performing from the audience’s point of view. Consider how you can best make your juggling connect with the audience. There are numerous ways of doing this. Juggling is a wonderful storytelling tool. It’s great paired with movement and dance. It’s a wonderful way to make people laugh when paired with physical or verbal comedy. It’s a way of building and releasing tension with the audience via danger or risk of failure. It can be a great visual component for sharing a message or idea. It can be an innovative way of making music. And yes, it can create wonderful visuals just via the juggling. But keep in mind that what you can see and what they can see might not be the same thing. Let’s elevate our artform. I’d love to see juggling shows on television like there are magic shows. If I were to go up to the average person on the street and ask them to name a famous magician or ventriloquist, they could probably do so. But very rarely could they name a juggler. It’s up to us to elevate our craft. Magicians invest their time and money to become better at what they do. They attend lectures, buy numerous books, and find a mentor. Yet when I offered my professional services to help jugglers craft a show that they could market and perform last year, not a single juggler took me up on my offer.
If you want to be a performing juggler, I’ll leave you with a last few thoughts. Consider the time that you invest in learning a new skill. If you can juggle and perform 7 balls, you could take one hundred hours of practice and learn to juggle 8 balls, which the audience can’t differentiate from 7 balls and which would likely fill a few seconds of your show. Or you could take that same 100 hours of practice and learn multiple routines with cigar boxes, devil stick, ball spinning, poi, or any of the dozens of other juggling skills that might be new to the audience and build connection with them. Consider the investment of you time. Realize that audiences like seeing a variety of skills instead of just an additional prop or the same things done with rings and clubs that they already saw you do with balls. Variety is good, so broaden your skill set. Another helpful tip is to think about how you can get your entire audience involved with what you’re doing. Can your juggling become a game you’re playing with the audience? Some of my most successful routines are games that the audience is engaged in that involve what I’m doing with my juggling. If you want to be a successful performing juggler, be an entertainer and artist first and a juggler second!
Be on the watch for more of my thoughts on this subject coming next month.
David Cain
David Cain is a professional juggler, juggling historian, and the owner of the world's only juggling museum, the Museum of Juggling History. He is a Guinness world record holder and 16 time IJA gold medalist. In addition to his juggling pursuits, David is a successful composer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and singer as well as the author of twenty-six books. He and his children live in Middletown, OH (USA).