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By Root 428 0

As for technical knowhow, Gob cannot operate a trapdoor or keep a dove alive long enough to use it in his act. In the episode “Public Relations,” Gob gives the elderly volunteer (for his illusion, the Aztec Tomb, err, box, we’ll just say “box”), the founder of the prestigious Milford School, last-minute instructions about a “hidden panel” inside a coffin, only to end up “killing” him. Gob aspires to grand illusions, but struggles to perform simple sleights of hand that can be mastered by anyone with a library card (or a connection to the Internet) willing to practice them. His struggles are captured on a “Girls with Low Self-Esteem” video, where Gob repeatedly fails at basic tricks.

But of all Gob’s shortcomings, his lack of humility is most responsible for his failed magic career. Hardly an episode passes where we’re not reminded of Gob’s perpetually low self-esteem and his parents’ indifference to him. In a classic case of overcompensation, Gob appears to deal with this poor self-image by fancying himself a heroic and misunderstood genius, ready to serve as the president of the Bluth Company, fool a polygraph, or break into the Orange County prison using a jetpack, all in vain efforts to win his father’s love. In the eyes of modern psychiatry, Gob exhibits symptoms of bipolar disorder, alternating between depressive phases (feeling despondent and worthless) and manic phases (feeling elated and highly confident, as if he is on a mission). Whenever Gob’s self-image is punctured, he breaks down, sometimes being pushed over the edge, as when he attempts to hang himself for making a fool of himself in front of the prosecutor, or when he swallows a “forget-me-now” to cloud his memory of having bonded with his illegitimate son. We see both the fragility of Gob’s confidence and his need to compensate for low self-esteem in this memorable exchange with his brother Michael, who is ever eager to puncture Gob’s inflated self-image:

Gob: It’s a classic bait and switch. This is a decoy cooler. We take it in, switch it with the one from the photo, and get out of there. Kitty comes back, everything’s normal. It’s like we were never there.

Michael: But Dad’s gone.

Gob: Long gone. But it buys us all the time in the world. I got it back, Mikey, the self-confidence. I am a magician.

Michael: No, I’m saying, when Kitty comes back and notices that Dad’s gone, the first thing she’s going to do is check the cooler to see if the evidence is there. It buys us, like, one second.

Gob: I’m a worthless magician. [“Spring Breakout”]

But it’s the manic phases that seem to influence Gob’s behavior more and that derail his magic career. Not only does Gob lack humility; he has its opposite, the excessive and tragic pride Aristotle called hubris. This lack of humility can be played for laughs precisely because Gob himself is blithely unaware of both his incompetence and his lack of humility. Gob’s failures are not only professional, of course. Other human beings and their motivations are opaque to him. But his ultimate failure is that he is not self-critical in the least, and as a result, he is opaque to himself.

Inscribed above the Temple of Apollo at the ancient Greek site of Delphi is one of the best bits of advice ever offered: “Know thyself.” Gob is an abysmal failure when it comes to following this advice. His lack of self-knowledge explains his inability to learn from his mistakes and may also go a long way in explaining his misguided hope that a singular event—making the family yacht disappear, or attempting to bury himself in his father’s coffin, only to emerge alive a week later (“Good Grief!”)—will be his salvation, or will at least get him the cover of Poof magazine. Sadly, Gob does not recognize his own impotence, a common tendency among incompetent people.5 Thus, the only illusion Gob consistently succeeds at creating is an illusion about his own competence.

Gob not only lacks the professional virtues of a magician; he exhibits full-out contempt for professionalism of any kind. Gob’s various professional