What is a thumper? Can anyone just lay out what that is and how the dude does the trick?
My guess as far as I can tell - say the different colored markers are given numbered codes, 1=red, 2=blue or whatever - someone offstage is signaling to the magician in which order the guy is picking up the markers, if not by “thumping” on the stage with his boot (as Penn alluded to - maybe how they did it in the old days?) then via some sort of device, maybe a vibrating one in his pocket.
I noticed it, too. They didn’t do it for the first, but did for the first. Which is particularly stupid, because (a) the audience wasn’t hearing it, why did we need to? and (b) he specifically said he did his act without any words.
But that’s why I loved it - they geared the trick to the specifics of the audience. Now their AGT stuff was all bland, and if they’d done this trick there, it would have been nothing. But they got the point of this particular audience over AGT, and used the techniques of magic to a beautiful turn. Now if they can find a way to use that creativity to their regular show, they would be better for it. But I love that what they did was much cleverer than it appeared. That only works for this format, of course, unless they can find a twist, like Penn and Teller explaining how their tricks work afterwards. No, that’s not what they should do, they have to find their own “magic”.
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What is a thumper? Can anyone just lay out what that is and how the dude does the trick?
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Apparently you can buy a device called a “thumper”. I presume it’s a magic term for a method of signaling, a secret communication language.
As I said before, someone offstage is watching the show, sees which marker the audience guy picks, and signals the color via the thumper. An electronic device that vibrates quietly in the magician’s pocket is much more subtle than thumping the floor with your boot, or whatever.
So he picks the order for coloring once he knows the marker color selected.
In an interesting bit of recursion, searching for “thumper” lead me to this reddit, citing our thread and me. I bring it up because that links to a very interesting video about using magic to connect with your audience, and applying that in life. Good TED talk, but also relevant for the bit where he explains how he did a magic act for a blind man once. You should watch it just for that experience, because he explains his thought process as well as the technique he used.
Couldn’t disagree more.
Watching magicians perform tricks that are so baffling that not even seasoned magicians like Penn & Teller can work out how the effect(s) are achieved, is one of the huge appeals of this show.
Or… take a fairly bland magic trick, but perform it with a few fake/bogus moves, but make them look like real moves, then hope Penn & Teller, armed with only one guess, choose one of the fake moves? Huh? That’s a thousand times more boring.
That’s what happened with Leon and Romy. Anyone could take a simple trick using multiple possible handoffs and then P&T have to work out which one it is?
Now it’s just a show, that’s the premise, they win a funny looking FU trophy, and good magicians get exposure anyway even if they don’t fool the guys.
Thumper review and explanation. Yes, it’s exactly what Irishman described. A device that vibrates by remote control.
… Once you know that…well I can see why the guy was so quick with the STOP and “Oh yeah thanks everybody bye!” as soon as he got what they were getting at with the cartoon rabbit thing. My original line of thought was along the lines of the old foot-tap, but in a large venue that would be tough to hear, so maybe the deal with the jokes in between was so that his partner in the audience could signal with a certain laugh, or number of guffaws or something for each color and it would be discernible to him but not out of the ordinary. Knowing he’s just got a wireless doorbell in his pocket seems slightly less clever, or less “magic” or something.
But I don’t think P&T are limited to one guess. They’ve done an “either” in the past with at least 3 options, and done the “I thought it might be, but Teller thinks it is” before. Simply in this case, the craftsmanship of the misdirect was aimed at P&T, and it worked.
Now maybe it’s less interesting if all magicians just start doing fake moves, but I just think this was a beautiful turn of the magician’s art against P&T.
Maybe it’s too meta, I’ll accept that. For me, it was great precisely because it was twisting the expected. You see a lame execution of a bland trick, but that’s not how it was done.
By the way, that’s largely what magic is - doing something incredibly simple that you miss because you see the obvious misdirect and fall for it.
I think everyone is underselling Shin Lim’s performance. That was one of the most beautiful and baffling acts I’ve ever seen. Sure some of his moves could have been cleaner, but the fact that everything was done so slow and out in the open really made it so impressive. I think Penn’s comment about the marker was just eluding to the fact that there were MANY pieces of the act that fooled them (at least they couldn’t say FOR SURE how parts were done).
Two parts in particular have me baffled. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the effect where a deck full of cards gets compressed down to a single card. You can kind of see where he has an opportunity to do a deck swap for what must be a gimmicked “non-deck”, but still, it’s a beautiful how it folds away to nothing. And then to have it come back in the other hand, wow.
The other part I don’t get is when he has his back to the audience. He clearly has the signed card in his right hand near his belt, but then without moving either hand, it suddenly appears in the other one?! The only thing I can think of is that he must have some apparatus in his clothing that can pull the card from his belt up through the sleeve of the other hand, but even in slo-mo, I caught nothing. Or else there are somehow TWO signed cards all along, but that just raises more questions. Kudos on a great routine.
The only other thing on this episode that I’m stumped by is the chalk in the two slate boards. If the boards were “not gimmicked”, how did the message get in there? I can imagine he could manipulate a hidden piece of chalk to write the message when collecting them from the volunteers, but unless there was a big camera cut that hid it, I don’t see how he had time to write all that.
I’m loving the discussions here, thanks all for the participation and inside info!
The Rubik’s cube guy in the Reddit AMA linked to above says “Penn and Teller get only one guess… If they say I used a trick or gimmick cube essentially they lose. I did so many things to draw them in thinking it was a gimmick or trick cube.”
The big difference to me, though, is the end result - “Wow, I can’t tell AT ALL how they did that!” vs. “Oh, that was just a red herring? Meh…”
I can see how, by the rules of the show, “I don’t know how you did that” and “i know two ways you could have done that, and one is slightly more likely bit oops it was the other.” both count as fooling Penn and teller.
But if you want to ask what impressed them? There’s only one choice out of those two.
Back in my thread from 2011 about the original run of the show, I and others wondered whether “impressing” P&T would be a better criterion for the show rather than “fooling” them, after an act successfully did so by obviously gaming the system with the addition of a false move to their trick…I guess the lesson wasn’t learned!
With regard to the guy coloring on the paper, we concluded that the caps of the markers made a distinctive sound and that’s how he knew where to direct the audience member to do his coloring.
We’ve watched both episodes of this season and had a weird problem. The audio is about half a second off from the video. Lips don’t match the words; sounds don’t match what we’re seeing. This has happened in both episodes. We also watch Whose Line is it Anyway on the same channel immediately after P and T that show doesn’t have that problem. We’re watching the Austin CW affiliate via DirecTV. Anyone else having this audio problem?
I wasn’t a part of that original discussion, and at the risk of re-hashing it here…
I don’t think that would be a good premise for the show because it almost seems too mean. “Your magic was boring and didn’t impress me, so you don’t win” seems out of character for the nice guys that P and T are.
We watch on Hulu and don’t have that problem
I believe he has duplicated the signature on a card while his back is turned, perhaps twice to finish the trick.
Well, let’s think long term. There is absolutely nothing stopping P&T from taking a talent that impressed the hell out of them while not technically fooling them, and offering that person a job, grooming and training them, and generally promoting their career.
Whereas a pair of unimpressive, dull magicians that “win” the show on a technicality are going to get what’s promised: an opening slot for P&T. Once. And unless they step up their game a helluva lot, then that’s it for them. I doubt P&T are at all happy with Romy and Leon, and probably don’t plan to do a thing for them beyond the minimum that was promised.
I think the premise of the show is a good one, and having a loophole like that is great. It tells you who wants to be genuinely amazing, and who is satisified with winning via loophole.
I think when they said he wasn’t using a gimmick, it referred specifically to the “invisible touch” or “psychokinetic touch” trick, which is apparently sometimes done by rigging the chair. I think (I didn’t look it up and I don’t think it was discussed here yet) that the chalkboard was just an invisible ink sort of thing – it was written on the board from the start, but invisible, and activated by the wiping to turn white in a minute or so. The wiping was made sure to be very deliberate, very thorough, but really, if the board’s blank, it’s blank right? But it had to be wiped anyway. Of course everybody thinks the volunteers are confirming that the board is blank, and that seems like a great place for the actual misdirection to be that they are unwittingly activating the appearance of the pre-written text. Maybe there’s another way to do it – a really quick Google seems to tell me that “appearing ink” isn’t really a thing. But I can’t believe you can’t find some substance that will turn white (or dissolve, exposing the white underneath) after a time after being exposed to some other substance. But I might be wrong, and there may be a non-gimmicked way to do this, too.
That’s an interesting thought. It’s pretty clear from Penn’s comment that he was using the “Thumper” device, though, but a somewhat interesting twist would be if it was triggered not by an assistant, but if each marker was rigged to send a unique signal when the cap was removed. I seem to remember they certainly looked large enough to house the necessary components for that. Neat thought.
Got around to watching. A … peculiar range of strategies to win.
The last guy with the slates wasn’t remotely trying. Standard stuff you can buy at certain specialty stores. No real “art” to it once you buy the stuff. Hence Penn just dropping a name was enough to send the guy packing. A waste of time.
The couple went the other way. Doing so many fake moves for getting the card off stage just hoping P&T couldn’t figure out which one is the right one. My guess is when the guy went over and got the hardhat. You can see his left hand with the deck dip below the stand. And since that stand was right next to where the skateboarder appeared … . Not much style or finesse or anything to recommend them.
The marker guy was a so-so. Nice way to end it, etc. But once you notice that he asks the guy to pick a marker and then tells him what to color, the magic’s over. Made the rigamarole of applying/removing the duct tape practically pointless.
Shin Lim has good and really bad stuff about his act. Being mute hurts a lot when he has audience interaction. Do one or the other, not both.
I have no idea why Penn made the comment about the marker disappearing. In the first case, you can see the marker being turned inwards and then his hand makes a pass close to the edge of his vest. They should have seen that. In the second case, when he seems to be inserting the marker between his hands, it’s actually going behind his left hand which then drops down below his leg. Nothing new there either.
The worst was the last move. When I saw him sweeping the table with one hand and drawing the box back with the other I knew he was going to do a switch right then. So I saw the other box pop up weirdly. I also figured out he was going to crunch the new box before it happened. You could even see the slight right hand move to push the crushed carton off the table.
He made quite a few moves at that level of obviousness. OTOH, there were quite a few that were much, much better. If he “evened” out his act and varied the type of moves more, he would be fairly top notch.
I want to make a special comment on Teller’s thread and ball bit. This demonstrates the amazing range of persona that Teller has. A lot of the time he does pretty gruesome stuff. Arms being chopped off, etc. But at the other end, he can also adopt a child-like persona. And he’s 67 for Pete’s sake!
I couldn’t help but just sit back and enjoy the bit. This is how a good magic trick works. You stop being interested in how it’s done and just watch it.
The slate trick is usually done with an extra loose slate sitting over another slate in one of the frames. The message is already there, when he reopens the device the extra slate from one of the frames is now covering the slate in the other frame. The message is written on the back of that and the original slate that it was covering. With an extra slate in both frames he could close them up again and then reveal an entirely different message.
With the drawing guy, a ‘thumper’ was used, simple enough with all the wireless electronics these days. But the guy was good at the core of the gimmick, entertaining the audience sufficiently with his patter that they don’t notice that he is telling the volunteer what to color in after he knows what the color is. If he really wanted to impress P&T he should have found a way to use the same color caps on all on the markers. But really he’s doing a comedy routine, the magic isn’t that important.
Ah, got it. That would work too 
EDIT: but he puts the chalk pieces in between the slates before he closes them up and hands them off. That’s throwing off my visualization now…Is there room in that frame for extra chalk pieces between the “middle” slate and the bottom slate, too? (For it not to look obviously like one of the slates is way thicker than it should be)