On Fool Us Joshua was using several tricks on try and get the audience member to focus on the number 4. Joshua had the Four of Diamonds in the blank deck. Joshua is ready both for when things go well and for when things don’t, for great magicians always have an out.
Fortunately things went well for him on the Fool Us show, and he was able to show the chosen card. At other times when it doesn’t go so well, he can just palm the Four of Diamonds and still reveal a blank card, then the entire blank deck.
Just watched a repeat, and I’m amazed that with all the talk regarding the bag trick, no one mentions the fact that all the bags were facing the correct way, so the cards could be pulled straight out, with the number side facing out. Maybe it was just luck, and he would have had them turn them around, but that would have looked suspicious. If they were plants, that is why, so they held the bag the right way, but that seems overly complicated, yet turning the bags would have been odd too.
Penn & Teller have an ongoing policy that prohibits plants and stooges, and no camera trickery is allowed either.
With regard to how he did the bag trick, it’s only after she’s chosen a bag that he decides where that bag is to go. A thumper in each bag that gives a signal, is the standard technique that can easily be used to achieve the effect given.
And of course, Jared Kopf said that P&T were close enough in their discussion to indicate that they had not been fooled.
Ratuso, he explicitly states to have the back of the bag toward themselves. Also, he places the bags carefully with the front down, and has the shuffling done while watching. That helps ensure the orientation of the bags when picked up by the woman.
The cards are adhered to one another. Probably not rough/smooth because they’re stuck pretty good. Look at how he breaks off the four of diamonds before setting it aside. He grips the card with forefinger on top and thumb on the bottom. There are just multiple things unsettling about this action. I cannot say I’ve never handled a card like that before, but it looks like he’s breaking a double, and that would be the preferred method over what we usually do (thumb the card off the long side with one hand, or take it with the thumb on top and the forefinger on the bottom). The very fact that he spread down to the 4D and then sets half the spread aside is a tell. It’s an unnatural action. He needed to lay down the cards in his right hand in order to break the double. You can see the card underneath slide forward.
When Jay offers to allow the spectator to examine the cards, “pull them apart,” he’s offering the cards used for the dealing procedure. Those are clean. Offering the rest of the pack is a bluff. It also makes the deck uninspectable for Penn & Teller.
I am not completely satisfied with this explanation either, but I think it’s more plausible than using an index and sneaking the card into the pack (there’s a commercially available version of this effect called “I Hate Card Tricks” which does exactly that). I think using a psychological force is way too ineffective and risky. I thought about an instant-stooge, but the spectator is too far away and besides, it’s fraught with too many unknowns.
I believe earlier there was some discussion over why Penn & Teller thought it might have been a deck switch. This is because magicians think in terms of methods they have already seen, and that’s precisely what Dean Dill did with a well-known magician-fooled called Blizzard. Someone named a card and it was shown to be the only card in a blank deck. I, too, initially thought Jay was using a deck switch that was covered in an camera edit.
And did I read correctly that Jonathon Ross didn’t sign on for the next season, instead being replaced by Allyson Hannigan? (or was that some April Fools article I came across?)
Penn talked about it on his podcast. They had to tape the new shows now, and he had another commitment in the UK and couldn’t break that. So they had to get a new host for this season.
I thought by far the best trick was the bottles, which didn’t fool them. The showgirls was uninteresting, and the thing with the jar was dull. The first trick, which did fool them, suffered from having a very simple and obvious explanation for how it could have been done (switching books). Even if that wasn’t how it was done, it just wasn’t amazing at all. Unsatisfying to just be told “no, that’s not how it was done”.