They’re the only two esteemed British Jonathans I know of. 
Unfortunately my revelation occurred after the dreaded 5-minute edit mark, so now everyone knows my shame. How could I forget Wossy? :smack:
Penn pretty much gave the secret away with the repeated mention of his and Teller’s “stares.” AKA, “stairs”
Apparently Shawn’s glasses are misdirect as well. The trick is sold here and the demo video is without glasses.
Shawn just keeps knocking it up a notch. I have a feeling he’s gonna come back every year until Penn has an aneurism.
Hmmm…I didn’t catch the disappearing lenses but yeah I could think of several approaches using special glasses!
I thought I could be as simple as a hearing aid / receiver device and an offstage helper looking up pages in the book. I think P&T gave him the win on that one because there could be several ways to send him the book info.
I was REALLY impressed by the audience participation card trick. I did not catch how many and what type of cards were given to the audience.
True, anyone who’s seen those “Magic Secrets Revealed” shows will know that rolling stairs are often used to sneak things in and out. We may be selling the trick a bit short however in that the stairs are removed*** before*** the assistant’s hand disappear. So there was a nice bit of added misdirection there that required a second assistant to be hidden in the apparatus the entire time (the extra hands were definitely real). As I was watching the post trick discussion I was thinking how uncomfortable that girl must be, still cooped up in there.
As for the final P&T trick at the end, there is no need to rip up a deck. Just take two pairs of 4 cards in order and it will work just as well (say A-2-3-4 of Clubs then A-2-3-4 of Spades). At the end you’ll end up with a matching number so long as you stated with them in matching order as they’d be if you ripped up and stacked real cards.
I can’t say that’s not it, but if it’s for sale I thing P&T would know about it and the one you can buy uses a book switch or something else they would have picked up. Or he got lucky and they didn’t know about his technique, but I think he had every angle covered.
It’s definitely got something to do with the book itself. One of the commenters who bought the trick writes:
Similar principle to this mathematical card trick I think. I like these kind of card tricks because a) I have no sleight of hand skills and b) I enjoy math.
But the book wasn’t put away. Perhaps if P&T had decided to actually examine it they’d have figured out the technique, so maybe he just managed to fake them out. But he only denied that it was a book switch or a memory act, not that there was something to see in the book. The descriptions of magic tricks are often deceptive themselves though.
It doesn’t matter, any 4 different cards will do (I made my own “cards” out of notepad paper I happened to have on my desk to follow along)…the “math” of the trick will make it work out in the end if you follow the instructions correctly.
The book is not blank, maybe? Text revealed with certain glasses or contact lenses?
I don’t know. I did suspect that initially. I don’t think it matters much, he fooled P&T, not simply from his performance there, but from his reputation as well. We know it wasn’t a book switch or a memory trick, there a lot of ways to do it, fooling P&T means he picked the right one on that night.
The pole didn’t shrink, but Penn’s claim that it did allowed him to “explain” that a bit of it had fallen into “Harbin’s ditch”. Robert Harbin was a famous magician who invented a variety of classic stage illusions (most notably the ZigZag Girl). So one of his techniques for ditching / swapping objects was used to swap in the loaded jar.
Apparently it has something to do with angles, as the discussion here states (plus Shawn shows up there).
Reading the comments, there must be something really simple and we’re just missing it.
Also I don’t quite get how passe passe bottles work. I’ve read the explanation from an old magic book I found online, but still don’t quite follow. Are the bottles collapseable?
Also I like the card trick at the end. If you listen to Penn’s Sunday School over the last year, you can hear them discuss the production evolution of this trick. The main point, apparently, was that the Rio thought that since the audience rips up cards, it would make a mess of the theatre and the staff would have to clean it up and Rio didn’t want that. However Penn said that by giving everyone the cup and asking it really works well. That and they needed to get rid of boxes and boxes of used-up cards.
I read the magic forum postings and I know how I would do it and it could be pretty simple! The technology likely could NOT be homemade for the trick to work well. The “angles” have to do with how the audience sees the blank book.
From the magic forum; the trick was for sale in 2014 and I wonder if P&T just thought it was cool and worthy of a demonstration on their show.
No, they nest. They are just thin aluminum shells (or plastic depending on the product). They are different sizes, several can nest together. You can see they are different sizes when he has a lot of them out. It’s most obvious in the necks which have to get noticeable smaller and shorter because of the smaller diameter to start with.
We may never know for sure, possibly only Shawn and the back stage expert that keeps the contestants honest know exactly what he did. I don’t think they gave him a pass, but you’d have to ask them. Remember that there are a lot of ways to do this, including confederates backstage signaling him. I really think P&T didn’t want to guess what his standard method would be because he’d change it up to fool them. And then maybe he just faked them out that way. You can tell they respect him, they’re all high level magicians engaged in a little dance.
Kudos to laughingboy for picking up on the reference to Harbin.
Episode 2, spoilers on how I think some of the tricks were done:
Brett Loudermilk: While Penn noted that the sword swallowing was real and impressive, the actual trick performed was incredibly lame. It’s not a trick helped by HD cameras as it was obvious that the fish pulled out of the fishbowl was plastic and the model that came out of his mouth was also plastic. The swap between the plastic model and the real sushi was also barely disguised.
Dan Harlan: While I was happy to see Penn so impressed by the act, the show did a very poor job showing exactly what was so impressive.
Ryan Joyce: I guessed almost immediately that the “shadow” was front projected onto the screen rather than being back projected. All but confirmed when the assistant brought the second screen out onto stage and the shadow wasn’t at all synchronized with her actual movement.
Kyle Eschen: I’ve seen this guy perform before and he’s always incredibly funny but I don’t even see what the actual “trick” was to his trick. Of the dozens of ways to do it off the top of my head, the easiest would be to do a deck switch to a deck with all lentils written on it, then palm some lentils into the handkerchief.
In short, the people who had good stage presence had lame tricks and the people who had good tricks had lame stage presence.