I feel like a googling pro but I still can’t track down how this trick is done (found a video link with the purported evidence but it’s no longer up).
Anyway, last year went to Vegas and hit up Penn and Teller’s show, and was used in a part of the act. They handed out a series of joke books and told the audience to pass them around together as music played, when the music stops whoever held the books got to pick one to remove from the bunch. I don’t like public speaking so I was less than thrilled when the last book ended up with me as the music stopped for the last time.
So, Penn tells me to pick a joke that is something I feel I can relate to. I flip through multiple pages of this book, I even fully read more than one joke to pick one that was “something I could relate to” like he asked. I’m telling you, this book had HUNDREDS of pages, and while I can’t be sure that every page was completely different, I can vouch that the few I looked at were. I don’t have any recollection of the joke other that it involved prostitution. When Penn was slowly getting it out of me. He said, “Now it’s not about bestiality, but there is sex involved, right?” something along those lines. He then told me the exact fuckin joke I picked. My heart dropped when he asked, “Zach, was that your joke?” I replied, “Maybe” before finally admitting it, b/c I just couldn’t freaking believe it.
I know this is by no means “magic” but I still found it impressive when after the show I approached him for a pic and he said, “Zach, thanks for coming out from Oklahoma. I appreciate it.” (information I gave when introducing myself during the act, but impressive that he retained it). Class act I tell ya.
Sidenote: I’m not some ignorant idiot, but even I was looking for a flaw while it was happening and I got nothing. Had been a fan of BS and everything else they do years prior so I’ve missed it if they ever explained how it’s done.
As is usually the case when magic is concerned, the answer is almost certainly somewhere in the bit you’ve left out. In your description you went from selecting a joke to, “When Penn was slowly getting it out of me.” What does that mean?
google “magic book test”, this is a pretty common trick and there’s many ways it could have been done.
Eg maybe the jokes were only 10 or 12 variations repeated many times to fill the books. A few questions was enough to narrow it down.
there’s a thread on this exact trick on Randi.org here: Mind-reading trick - International Skeptics Forum
That’s my guess as well. Likely Penn knows every single joke in that book very well. What he did to ‘slowly get it out of you’ probably narrowed it down very quickly.
For some reason I remember someone (I don’t remember if it was IRL or here, it might have been my brother) talking about picking a random word out of the dictionary and having his students try to guess it. The only thing he would tell them is that the word they guessed was either before of after the word he chose. He said they usually figured it out in about 20-40 guesses. If they can do that with the entire dictionary imagine what Penn can do with a book of jokes when he asks you to chose one that relates to you…especially when he’s going to banter with you for a minute before hand.
Also keep in mind that he’s the one setting the pace. If the trick goes well and he manages to get enough information quickly (however it is he manages to do that), he gives an answer quickly, and impresses the audience. If it doesn’t go well and it takes him a while to get it, well, the audience has no way of knowing that it’s not going well.
This trick was done when I saw the show last summer. Penn announced ahead of time that it was an example of cold reading. He did an example of hot reading too, but I forget what that was exactly.
Wouldn’t surprise me if he had the book memorized. Several other tricks in the act relied on his formidable memory as well.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he had it memorized. He’s impressed me repeatedly with memory feats. Penn & Teller truly are the shit. I love them both.
A brother of a friend went to see his show and backstage he performed a “trick” where he took a nail gun and alternately shot his arm and a plank of wood (there were “blank spots” as well as real nails so he had to have memorized the pattern - so three times in the arm, then twice in the wood, then once in the arm, then four times in the wood, etc) while holding a very in-depth conversation with all the gathered fans. Perhaps not that impressive of a trick but you can bet it left an impact on the people he was talking to.
I thought a simpler explanation for the nail gun trick would be that it had been modified so as to make it possible to choose (at the moment of operation) whether it just makes a noise, or shoots out a nail.
Probably he was being the equivalent of a human Akinator, extracting surprisingly accurate guesses from what looks like a very small amount of information, due to the questions being perfectly calibrated to maximize elimination. With the added bonus that he could read your body language.
Yes, I started to compose a response along these lines earlier today but got distracted (by work :eek:). It may well have been cold reading, but made a lot easier because Penn knew what the variable parameters were.
Regardless, P&T put on a great show (even on TV, which is the only forum I have seen them in), and I am envious of the OP because he not only got to see them, but to participate.
What a great experience to tell one’s friends, children and great-children.
With a binary search, twenty guesses would be enough to pick one word out of a million. There’d be some wiggle room since the ideal case narrows the field by half each time, and you wouldn’t get the exact midpoint with the book in your hand and having to guess where halfway was, but on the other hand most dictionaries probably have maybe 60,000 words tops.
I can’t answer the OP but wanted to chime in to say that P&T are awesome. I’ve had the pleasure to work several of their shows as a stagehand, some when they were in residence at my theatre for a couple months while they designed a tour. Their stage antics and banter might seem fresh and unrehearsed, but everything is timed and perfectly choreographed down to the finest detail.
Also, although Penn does all the talking during the show, during development of the tricks and rehearsals, Teller is the one on stage running things, totally in charge and designing how it will all go, while Penn is over by the craft table picking up the cocktail waitresses. Then he comes on stage and does his part right, first time, every time.
I bought a Penn & Teller book (oh, about 20 years ago) that came with a mini book of random stories. It was a prop book used for a trick in which you’d give it to someone and let them randomly pick any page and read the first line to themselves. You’d then make a quick sketch on a notepad and ask “Does this image mean anything to you?” You were to draw a circle with wavy lines coming off of it.
The trick was that every page’s first line was made to look like a random segment of a sentence. i.e. “in which I squished the round multi-legged bug flat”, “the sun beat down on us with its sweltering rays”, “the dismembered head lied face down with blood trickling out from all sides”, “peered down into the top of the vlocano cautiously.”
For an explanation of cold reading (and hot reading), see: How come TV psychics seem so convincing? - The Straight Dope
The Joke Book trick can easily be a variation on cold reading. “Now it’s not about bestiality, but there is sex involved, right?”: you could answer, yes, it is about bestiality; or yes/no about sex. The process of yes/no elimination would select a single joke from 1000 jokes in about 9 questions. But that question actually had two responses in the same question – from that one question, he got two yes/no answers.
And, of course, if you’re a male and picked a sexual joke that “connects” to you, the odds would favor certain types of jokes and against other types (that might be picked by a female, say.) So, sounds like a combination of cold-reading techniques with a rapid yes/no elimination process.
When I saw them do the nail gun trick on “Fool Us”, he started out by saying the trick was easily done by memorizing the pattern of nails and “blanks”…by the end though, after pretending to forget the pattern and “firing” at Teller’s throat, he basically tells you right out they would never do anything that actually dangerous.
(My guess from seeing it presented on the show, in which you only saw the board from one specific, straight-on angle, was there weren’t any nails in the gun at all, and that the nails were somehow spring-loaded in the board and released on cue.)
In any case, it reminded me of another trick in which they purport to tell you how it’s done, then turn things on their head - the one where they “saw a woman in half”, then remove the front of the apparatus to show you how it’s deep enough to hide the flexible assistant’s midsection well below the path of the blade - then “accidentally” saw through THAT, sending (fake) blood and guts flying everywhere.
