I think we’re way overcomplicating Farquhar’s trick.
He doesn’t have a full copy of the book to work with. It’s not like he says to the audience member “pick a paragraph, and I’ll read the first sentence” - he has facts about each page that are meant to look random but are actually an exact pattern. “There are 7 paragraphs. The fourth paragraph starts with the words ___, right?”
So all he needs is a small amount of information like
134: 7p. p3=“The clues of the case”
for each page. Then whatever page she turns to, he can consult the little fact he has about that page. If he uses a coded shorthand system, and writes in small print, you could easily fit a bunch of facts about the entire book on something smaller than a notecard. The glasses may actually be relevant in that they’re magnifying glasses to read such a note.
So the book is legitimately blank and can be examined. At some point he pulls some sort of card or something like that out of somewhere, places it in the book (so he can read it while he pretends to be reading the book), and then make it disappear at some later point. Boom, you have little factoids you can read out about every page, anyone can examine the books, and all you have to do is some very basic sleight of hand with a little notecard.
I wonder why Eisenberg wasn’t on in S2E1? I mean, sure, either way it’s not as good as showing up to promote Week One of the movie – but, since the show wasn’t back on when the movie hit theaters, he was going to perform this week or last week.
So why not last week?
If his appearance is going to do anything to build interest in seeing the film while it’s still in theaters, wouldn’t doing it the other way around make more sense? (And if it’s to build interest in the DVD, why not wait longer? That’s not until September!)
I suggested this. It’s possible. He said it wasn’t a memory trick so the info must be written down, or he has someone backstage feeding him the info. They didn’t really examine the book so there’s not a lot of info to work from.
The form of the trick that he sells has reveals for all the cards drawn on the backs. This deck (or at least the one P&T looked at) had only the reveal for the 10 of hearts. I think it was just a deck switch, but P&T failed to notice it and assumed it was the stock version of the trick.
As they noted, Kyle’s great skill was his entertaining humor. I saw him as a teenager doing the same deadpan routine. He’s a hoot, but he’s also very skilled at sleight of hand, he just didn’t do anything that would actually fool them. Appearing on a show with P&T is a tremendous honor for magicians, they’re not going to turn down an appearance just because they don’t have something that will fool the hosts.
With the Dan Harlan card trick, did he force the audience member to pick the 10 of hearts? I know it can be done, though I’ve never really understood how. The thing is, I was playing along as I watched the show and I picked the 10 of hearts also. Maybe it was a coincidence (a 1 in 13 chance, I guess) but it made me wonder if my choice wasn’t as independent as I thought.
And by the way, I’ve noticed that the bit where a magician riffs the deck and says “Tell me to stop whenever you want” is completely pointless. The other person only has a few seconds before the riff is over, and most people aren’t willing to just be quiet until only a couple cards are left. Plus, the magician’s patter will create a rhythm that prompts the other person to go ahead and speak. It all happens in a few seconds and the end result is that the magician can stop the riff where he intended to all along and it will seem the other person stopped it there. (That’s probably really obvious to magicians and magic buffs, but it jumped out at me last night when Penn did it with Hanigan.)
Not a force. He was teasing P&T with his method which can be used to force a card, but he said before the audience members made their choices that he would keep the card(s) based on their choice. To use it as a force you have them make a choice then afterwards say whether you are keeping or discarding cards based on the choice. 10 of hearts would be a common result of his method, but he needed to be prepared with reveals for every card in the deck (or to switch in the standard trick deck). It was simply a card switch, but he misled P&T successfully.
Tripolar, wait a sec, I’m not following.
Why would 10 of hearts be a common result of the force? So it was only a coincidence that I picked the same card? He was ready to finish the trick no matter what card was chosen? And I don’t know where the card switch was.
I don’t recall the details, given choices of cards like that people tend to pick the suits and card numbers with different frequencies. His patter may have pushed that more towards the 10 of hearts also. Your choice was just coincidence. He had tons of opportunities to switch a card or the whole deck. Remember him putting the little toy in his jacket pocket?
Watch his left hand during that maneuver. It looks like he is palming a card as he straightens his jacket. I think the toy is just an excuse to disguise that move. He could easily have all 52 choices stashed somewhere is his coat. All he has to do is palm the right one and put it on the bottom of the deck.
The table does appear to be there to obscure a move from the audience, but if he had multiple cards there, P&T would have seen them at the end when they came up to look at the deck. It had to be pulled from his jacket.
Could be either one, or both of them could have been fakes to mislead P&T. Turns out they didn’t need to be faked out, they assumed he used his standard gimmick, or maybe they thought the actual move was a fake out. Or maybe nobody caught the actual move.
I’m guessing that to get the golf ball into the jar he did something like freezing the golf ball to get it to contract and heating the glass to get it to expand as part of the setup long before going on stage?
Yes, the golf ball was already in the jar. All the cards Allyson could choose from said Golf Ball. I’ve seen jar props with removable bottoms that are very difficult to detect. When glued in properly you’d need a magnifying glass to tell. But I don’t even know if the jar was made of glass, it might be plastic and a little heat used to close the neck after the golf ball is inserted. He did ok, he had a good rapport with the audience, he just didn’t do anything that was going to fool the guys.
Can anyone explain why Penn said that assistant’s big, clunky shoes gave them an idea how the trick was performed? I’m guessing something was hidden in them - maybe a light source?
Also, I’d like to point out that Allyson Hannigan is a good fit on the show. I think she and P&T have good chemistry, and it’s cute when she’s grossed out by the tricks.
I have been wondering that. I thought at first they were saying the eye candy was outside of the hamster wheel, maybe hidden behind that assistant. But that thing had tons of space down at the bottom for her to hide in. Joyce said it was an old trick, maybe in his stage show he allowed people to examine the wheel and she actually has to be on the outside. I’m going to have to see that one again. Or it could all be more code language, like ‘boot’ is how to describe the trap door in the wheel. i’m bad at nomenclature, I never learned much magic lingo.
The direction/editing of the show was really bad for the muddled judging of Dan Harlan’s trick - they basically said “Great trick you created there, but we’ve already seen it done a hundred times before”, when he had added another layer they did not anticipate - he never got the big “You fooled us!” moment he deserved.
That was my takeaway too. Penn was taking his joke about the increasing height of the pole and using it to “contrast” how at the start of the trick, the guy needed to get on a chair to place the box atop the pole, but he was able to reach it at the end of the trick unaided. Penn joked this as the pole “getting shorter”, but the subtle implication was that this of course means that he could have just put the box atop the pole without the chair, so the fact that he used a chair to place the box is clearly part of the jar swap. The fact that he puts the jar in the pink box (there may have been some foolery right when he loads the pink box, based on his hand movements; or it could have just been an awkward angle) and then puts the pink box into a yellow box, and at the end only opens the top of the pink box within the yellow box suggests some obvious apparatus involved in the swap.
I found the policeman’s toilet disappearance far more interesting than the assistant. I assume there was some sort of hidden compartment in that stand, but it was very quick and well done. I did notice that the assistant raised her hands and it was pretty clearly to the untrained eye that the hands that emerged were not her own. That said, they showed a side angle, and the hands atop were very far towards the front of the case, so I thought that was a nice touch (you might expect fake hands to be from a double further back, which you wouldn’t notice much from the front angle)
The farquhar book trick, if there were lenses in his glasses at one point, I’d instantly look at a trick book where the lenses allow you to see something that is otherwise invisible (polarized text, for example). However, from subsequent comments it sounds like that’s not it and I wonder if he explicitly added them (with lenses) as a misdirect for P&T. One comment on the trick Shawn sells is that the trick is “angle sensitive”. That could just be because you don’t want anyone to see your book is blank until the reveal though… It does appear from the sold trick that the books are the key and that is all you get (other than perhaps an instructional dvd), but it’s not always easy to tell from those pages.
Penn and Teller don’t necessarily get notice of every magic item that goes on sale anywhere; and even if they do, they don’t necessarily buy them all and learn the technique.
P&T’s card ripping trick, I am sure I could plot out the mechanism they use and figure out why it always works, but I just didn’t care enough about the trick to track it. They prompt you all thru the show to have 4 cards, but they don’t once tell you you will need to have someone to swap a card with. (since that can’t possibly be the card that ends up on your heart, maybe it didn’t matter). Or maybe there’s a chance the card you put on your heart is one of the two mismatched halves and that’s why some people end up with mismatches at the end?
I agree re: the bottles that I don’t like storebought apparatus magic on show like this. The technique the guy had was very fast and flawless, but I don’t like tricks on the show that have no intention or expectation of fooling them, because they aren’t original. I thought Penn might have mentioned that he does a very similar (looking) book-memory trick as Farquhar.
They nest. They are just empty shells. You reach into the tubes and you also put your finger through the top of the “bottles” and lift them or drop one or all of they. That’s why the trick suffers (imo) from the very awkward hand placement of always having to have a couple fingers inside the tube in the exact same placement. It makes clear that something is going on there. So the first time you see a bottle, it probably is actually a stack of 3 or 4 “bottles” (think upside down paper cups with the bottoms cut out - except instead of all being the same size, and slightly angled, you have each bottle a touch smaller than the last, and vertical sides, so the inner bottles are completely covered. You can see some of the bottles are slightly smaller/shorter than others
I didn’t go back to check this episode, but sometimes the glasses are tall enough for the performer to grab the glass along with the bottle and pick it all up together. Other sets of bottles, the smallest inner bottle has a small chamber at the neck you can pour liquid from…
That’s my take on ep 1. Be back in a few re: ep 2.
I think you might underestimate Teller’s dedication to magic. The guy has a giant library and thousands of props.
One thing I was wondering about Harlan’s trick…could the bear itself be important? Could it be used for a forced stooge, like it’s either got 10 of Hearts written on it, or a speaker inside asking the audience member to pick red, then hearts, then 10? And then if they don’t cooperate, he can do the standard method for the trick where he has all 52 reveals in the deck and just has to slide in the right one.
I think that the bear is in on the trick inasmuch as it’s a misdirect during some other action. Otherwise, Harlan could have just said, “Penn, point to someone in the audience.” Harlan must know that Penn isn’t big on relying on an “instant stooge”.