On real stooges, my opinion is a bit nuanced. A small number of stooges is acceptable, where “a small number” depends on the audience size. If you’re doing a trick in front of two people, and one of them is in on it to fool the other, that’s not a magic trick, that’s monkey-in-the-middle where you don’t even let the third person know they’re a monkey. On the other hand, if you’re doing a trick in front of an audience of a thousand people, it’s fine if you need three of them to be in on it. The trick then becomes how to make it look like that was enough people.
For instance, there’s an old mentalist’s trick (typically performed in front of 50-100 people) where you supposedly read everyone in the room, which depends on one out of those 50-100 being a plant. That’s fine, provided it isn’t too obvious how you did it: Every one of your legit audience members gets to experience the trick, and they each know they weren’t a stooge, so it couldn’t have been done using stooges (except that it totally was). On the other hand, Copperfield’s levitating railroad car, in which every single one of the physically-present audience members was a stooge, was just plain stupid.
Now, see, that has the opposite effect on me. To me, it just screams “I’m using a stooge”, and it turns the trick, in my eyes, from “How did he do <whatever> without using a stooge?” into “How did he get the stooge to end up with the frisbee?”, which is a less interesting trick (especially since it’s a trick you end up seeing so many times). I’d much prefer the magician to just point to some audience member and say “Hey, you”, and then set up the trick in such a way that it doesn’t seem like having a stooge would matter.
That sounds like a no true Scotsman, to me, since you have to define David Copperfield, Cris Angel, and David Blaine as not “top-notch magicians”, despite being quite famous and successful.
This whole thread might have been a better discussion if the OP had given even one example where a stage magician had used an instant stooge. Otherwise, this is all theoretical. As in “Don’t you feel cheated when you go to the bank and the teller slips $20 of your cash into their pocket?”
Yeah, I agree that for a televised performance, cutting away, showing a poor angle, etc. are cheating. Sadly, on Penn & Teller: Fool Us sometimes they cut to a long shot or a blocked angle at a key point. This lessens the enjoyment of the act considerably.
A good magician will look good even with a normal framing and angle. (I don’t expect the camera to show what’s going on well beyond a regular audience view.)
Citation accepted. In fact, I’m bowing in your general direction. I had NO idea a legit magician would do this…
…and yes, I do feel cheated.
Less so than if I’d paid to see his act, where he’d be clearly “cheating the audience”… here he knows he has no chance of cheating his audience of two (P&T), and is going for entertaining the masses.
And he’s clearly not trying to fool anyone once he eats the dollar bill at the end.
When I watch a trick, if there’s some incredibly lame and straightforward way to accomplish it, I almost have to trust that the magician isn’t using that incredibly lame and straightforward method, or else it’s no fun to watch. Stooges is the most obvious lame/straightforward method, so I assume magicians don’t use it, and totally feel cheated if they did. (Camera angles are similar).
I think one of Scylla’s epic stories started with a magic trick that he did where he appeared to pull a dime out of his nostril, which he actually did by… actually pulling it out of his nostril.
I can’t tell you for sure. I can tell you that I would want to shout out that the guy is faking and that it is a shitty trick. I also know that I would be in a panic at the time, and might just freeze up, or if they badger me at all, go along with it to get out of the situation. Or I might just have that panic fuel a rage: you know, fight or flight (or freeze).
The main problem with any sort of using stooges is that it makes the trick so trivial as to not be worth watching. It’s the same reason why camera trickery is considered “cheating.” So I have no problem with calling it that.
Now, if they fool the stooge into doing one thing while making the audience think they are doing another, that I can say counts as okay. And I’m okay with attempts at forces that can backfire–as long as they can recover. But not with just having someone who simply lies.
There’s no way I’d be a total asshole about it, but I’d probably go along in a pretty unenthusiastic fashion, and be done with the magician from then on, and would happily tell my friends afterward. So I guess just mostly an asshole about it :).
Of course, the magicians who use such techniques are usually pretty good at sizing up who’s likely to go along with it or not, and so they wouldn’t pick either of you in the first place.
How about reversing it where the entire audience is the stooge playing against the non-stooge brought on stage. I’ve seen that where a magician is doing a trick with a person on stage who has no idea how it is being done but the magician is letting the audience see and entirely dependent on nobody shouting out to the guy on stage.
I think using stooges isn’t magic, it’s acting. I didn’t pay to see a stage play.
Making comments like “were you disappointed real magic wasn’t used?” is just being snotty. Real magic doesn’t exist, but “real magic” is a practiced skill that looks like real magic, and preferably the only people who know how the trick was done were the magician and assistant.