Dave Morris

Fifty-two cards are the key to Dave Morris’ exotic, unpredictable memory palace, which the Victoria storyteller generously unlocks during this hilarious and heartfelt homage to mnemonics. “It’s a pretty weird place,” he says.

A few years ago, Morris stumbled upon the high-stakes world of memory competitions, deciding to take on a challenge that suited him best: rapidly recalling the exact order of a standard deck from front to back. Using a system called person-action-object, Morris encodes three-card sequences into codon-sized chunks that reveal not just how the comedian remembers, but which parts of his life he’s been unable to lose in the shuffle: the queen of spades is Maleficent, the two of hearts is his grandmother, and the three of diamonds is a symphony.

Each card unlocks a story that will lodge its way into your own hippocampus: that’s what happens when you’re in the hands of a masterful player.

To be clear, it’s not a magic trick. It’s technically a memory exercise, but Dave Morris will still delight with his amazing show, 52 Stories.

Morris opens a deck of cards and gives them a shuffle, passing it into the audience to mix up. He’s going to memorize the order of the deck and recite it back.

Morris uses mnemonic devices to memorize the order, constructing small stories for each three-card combination. He works his way through the deck with visuals such as “Kim Kardashian painting her teeth,” with each card being a person and an action, then putting them together for the visual.

What’s more impressive is that after memorizing the deck, Morris is able to stop throughout and tell stories about people he uses in his mnemonic device: his grandmother, his mother, and his uncle. After a quick five-minute story break, he continues to march through his memory and the deck of cards.

He struggles with the last few cards on my night, but that doesn’t make the entire experience less wonderful. This is a storyteller with a trick, a memorizer with a story, and a Fringe show full of magic.