I've got a pet peeve about this. I had never seen anyone else talk about it until James Brown. And basically what it comes down to is hating those "Oh damn, who turned up the gravity in here?" one liners when you drop a prop.
You're creating a moment in which the audience realizes you made a mistake. Hell, you might as well take out large neon lights, make them start blinking "I made a mistake," because that's what your audience is going to remember at the end of it all.
Making that witty one-liner doesnt dismiss the mistake for the audience but rather frames is and draws it to their attention.
Let me give you an example. The other day I was out with a buddy who does some magic also and I was performing. Now I've been getting into some coin stuff and was performing this one-coin flurry type thing that I've been doing for a while, and i dropped the coin in the middle of it. Now instead of saying anything, I just picked up the coin and went on. At the end of the routine i thanked everyone and walked away. Talking with my buddy afterwards he told me everything seemed to have gone well, they reacted well and what not, and I said something along the lines of "well yeah, except i dropped the damn thing." And you know what? He asked me when. The magician watching didnt remember me dropping the coin. You think the laymen did? No chance.
So what am I trying to tell you to do? Well...It's simple really; forget your mistakes. Don't frame them, dont make them obvious. If you make a mistake, you make a mistake and you move on. Think about the mentalists who supposedly contact the dead. In a single session, they throw out about 20-30 names and only get 6 or so hits. The audience, however only remembers 1 or 2 misses and that they were right most of the time. Why is this? Because the mentalists FRAMES the times they hit, and just ignores the misses.
Magic is about what the audience remembers. Memory is about framing. It's all about framing.
Also..half the time it's a minor stumble that means nothing to them, but you feel like it's a huge flash.
I mean, what's the worst thing that can really happen during your show? Basically when a spectator does say "I've caught you; I know what you did," right? And it's important to know what to do what what's hapenning when they say that.
Situation 1, they could be lying. They like to do that.
Situation 2, never assume you've been caught, cause you might not have been. You may have flashed, but never assume they saw it. If you go on as if nothing was wrong, so will they. The key here, is to not care. If they catch you, they catch you, oh well! Go on. But finish the trick. If you dont care about whether or not they catch you, when you flash on something like that, you'll go on as if nothing was wrong and so will the audience (generally.) If you care, however, you'll actually hurt yourself and give something away by getting nervous and thinking "Oh no! I've been caught!"
Situation 3, they really did catch you... And i guess you're getting into heckler stoppers here, but the best thing you can do is, well, not care. See, now when a heckler catches you and calls you out on it, their ego starts to grow... They get all proud of themselves "Ouuu I caught the magician, I'm special." And by going "no...no you didnt" or trying to make some excuse, their ego grows even more because now they know they caught you. The only way to get rid of this problem is to stop this from hapenning; burst their bubble. And the way you do this is to literally go "I dont care." You make it clear that no matter how big their ego gets..You just dont care.
So when you do a deck vanish and someone goes "You put that in your pocket!" You go "Yeah." and shrug. Because youve just burst their bubble. Again, this is all about framing. They wont remember "I caught the magician!" anymore because you didnt make an issue about it. You gave them no reason to remember the moment. They'll remember the other awesome stuff you did.
Just a few little things. Credit to James Brown for a bunch of the thinking here.
Cheers,
Lucas