Penn & Teller: Fool Us, US run on CW

Cafe Society
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The only interesting bits to me were the Rubik’s cube guy and the suction cup guy. But, as I’ve said before, I’m also a sucker for close-up magic over stage magic. The French séance guy, while very polished, didn’t do anything special. The Shocker guy was practically a hack.

I noted the show 3 sides before then show 3 other sides after thing for the millisecond trick. But haven’t figured out the rest. I had considered that there were magnets/rubber bands inside so that when released it would “spring” back to the solved state. But there’s too many issues with that. Note in the film intro he showed the cop the trick using a 4x4x4 cube. Too bad all he used on the show were 3x3x3 ones.

As to the suction cup:

At first I considered a magnetism based trick. There’s a strong rare earth magnet in the plunger and one of the cards is magnetic. He could place the magnetic card above the selected card and pull off the top of the deck, revealing the selected card on top. But … the selected card is under the pulled group.

Also, a magnet in the suction cup would be a problem if it got near certain jewelry or people’s glasses if they held it close to their faces.

I focused on Penn’s use of the word “breathe”. Is air somehow involved? E.g., pinholes in the cards allow suction to pass thru them in most spots, but if a card is turned around, it’s pinholes don’t line up, allowing the suction to grab on it from above. But Penn was allowed to examine some of the cards as well as both held onto cards at other times.

One thing to note is how little card manipulation the guy did. Shuffles or standard cuts. He seemed keen on preserving order in the deck.

Stepping thru the “pulls” showed that the deck really wanted to stick together. The bottom cards lifted up en mass and separated after a bit and plopped down together with very little disturbance. I think that generally the cards stick together but a little offset would “break” that. He could set the offset, then do the pull.

P&T’s bit was disappointing. Lot of extraneous misdirection crap. Having something hidden inside something inside something is boring.

The camera work was awful as usual. Cutaways are critical moments. Agh.

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Rubix guy had some good magic, but his show wasn’t all that impressive. He needs to develop better patter.

Overall, I liked the plunger the best. Fun gimmick and decent magic.

I expect that they bring in almost any magician willing to appear on the show, just to pad it out to multiple episodes, so long as they think the audience will enjoy it.

But The Shocker’s bit wasn’t just poor magic, it also wasn’t very entertaining. One would think that a guy in a wrestling outfit would be sort of zany and funny, but his performance was really pretty pedestrian.

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People have posted the videos from the phone trick. Teller definitely has the phone. You see the hand off.

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Phone goes into bucket and backstage guy puts it into A fish. Is that enough of a clue?

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The audience member’s phone isn’t thrown into the bucket - it’s handed off via the Criss Angel prop.

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Nope, nope, nope. Just before Penn puts the lid on the cup he has an “oops” where he shakes the cup. “Almost dropped it on you, Jay. Sorry.” You can easily see the phone flying into the bucket Teller is holding in slo-mo. The cardboard prop is long gone by that point.

The audience is intended to see the phone flying and think it’s in the bucket as it is raised up, making the question of how it got into the box come up in the minds of the audience. Of course, at that point Teller already got it out of the bucket before it was raised. It was never put into the box before it was retrieved. That would have attracted a lot of audience attention. The phone ring was recorded and played back via a radio in the box. It isn’t until Teller does his stuff with the fish that it is put into it.

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Yep - along with the (audience member’s actual) phone.

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If I were to make a signed coin appear inside an sealed aspirin tin, I’d also have a few aspirin in there so they would fall out along with the coin when I dumped the coin onto my, table, er, other hand.

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There are a few videos on YouTube uploaded from audience members’ phones at the P&T Vegas show. Those confirm that the audience member’s phone is switched behind the Criss Angel prop with another phone and THAT is the one that is thrown into the bucket. So I ammend my previous statement on the phone to bucket aspect. The rest of my clues stand, as this only affects the way the phone moves from Penn’s hand to backstage.

This makes sense because it assures that the audience member’s phone is never thrown through the air.

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And, of course, it adds a layer of deception - Penn’s throw of “his” phone into the bucket (with a knowing wink to the audience) leaves them to wonder how it was retrieved, since the bucket hangs unmolested in plain view over the stage the entire time.

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They have a “consultant” who is told the trick and arbitrates. On a previous show, Penn used the words “false shuffle”, which got declared he was wrong.

I assume that’s a question for the magic community, and women’s interest level.

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RE: tonight’s episode. Penn was obviously trying to say “Thumper” without actually saying it. OK, so what was the cartoon guy trying to ‘thump’ that would make the volunteer draw the right colors? Or was the thump from the markers being dropped into the bin significant in some way?

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I think it’s more of a terminology thing for having someone cueing him in some unobvious manner, not necessarily audible thumps in this case. My take is that the audience guy wasn’t in on it, but someone else offstage would ID the color of the marker and that is when he would tell the guy which part of the diagram to color. He had 5 marker colors, two sets of each, and said “pick 5 different ones”. Then he’s sufficiently blindfolded. Then he has the guy pull a marker, gets informed some surreptitious way which color was picked, and tells the guy what to color in. That’s why the order of the items was so haphazard, rather that starting at the top and working down, or some other sensible order.

The first two, Leon and Romy, were on America’s Got Talent a couple seasons ago. This was a better trick than what they did there. What I loved is that it was expertly crafted to use the magician’s craft against the magicians. They had an excellent use of decoy misdirection with Romy. It was the obvious handoff, so obvious that even Penn and Teller fell for it. She took the card bags and walked off stage one direction while Leon had the audience paying attention to him and Jonathan. I was right there with Penn and Teller, totally caught by it, too. I went back and watched it a second time, and I totally see it now. That whole bit with the “safety helmet” wasn’t just for amusement, and it wasn’t to distract from Romy transferring the card - that was the plant of the card, and Romy was the misdirect. Nicely done! Even first time through I got puzzled over why they put Jonathan in a helmet, then just had him stand off to the side.

That’s the beauty of watching a second time, after you see what the act is supposed to be. It’s much easier to see things when you know what to expect. Often magicians use the fact that the audience doesn’t know what the trick is going to be to execute the trick move before the audience knows to look for it. In this case, the trick is right in front of you, but you expect them to do it one way, so they did it a different way.

Mike Hammer was the drawing guy. Somehow his personality wasn’t a winner for me. I wasn’t sure until Penn made his comments, then was able to piece together my expectation.

Shin Lim’s performance was artistic, but I didn’t think it so fooling. There were a couple obvious things, and a couple things I have to guess at. But I have a hard time believing P&T couldn’t figure out how he made the marker disappear. :dubious: Doesn’t he just stuff it in his vest? The second one, he slides behind his back hand and then drops behind the table.

Peter Boie did the classic spiritualist act. I like that he didn’t try to claim anything mystical, just used the historic set up to show the kind of things they did. I respect that approach to doing the performance. I didn’t need Penn’s remarks to know what he did. We’ve discussed this kind of act with respect to David Blaine on the boards, so I was looking for the invisible touch, which was masterly done and well-hidden in plain sight. Took rewatching to spot it. Note how when he asks her where she was touched, she tries to reach over her shoulder to her shoulder blade, not on top of the shoulder. And the part about no gimmicks was nice, even if I didn’t know the name he dropped. I didn’t need to. I saw a version on AGT a season or two ago where the guy did use a gimmick - the chair was rigged. Definitely classier to do it this way.

The slate trick was also expected. At least on AGT the guy who did it incorporated a prediction and number combo into the slate message. Peter had a good delivery of an act I thoroughly saw through.

Teller is a mesmerizing performer, making it look like the ball was alive. No need for a trick hoop.

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I ran across this article that goes into some depth about the lengths that Teller went to practicing this trick. I thought it was very interesting.

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The Rubiks Cube guy did an AMA on Reddit. He’s apparently a big Redditor, and contributes to /r/magic and /r/rubiks a lot.

He says he used only two cubes in a new way to do the trick, and deliberately didn’t do certain things in order to give Penn and Teller a chance to screw up. He also accidentally made it look it look like he did a switch at one point.

In fact, he’s awfully talkative for a magician. I’m going to be archiving the page in case it disappears.

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The guy’s performance was superb. I’m sure P&T could take a guess at how each part of the routine was done, some parts of it were obvious, others less so. His movements were obvious clues to much of what was done, yet he did not actually let the motion of the items themselves be seen. In that regard though P&T could guess reasonably what he had done, they had not actually see it. Still they were not fooled, but did what I think the show should be about, selecting the magician to perform in a night, not the one that managed some minor manipulation unseen. I’ll guess that Teller saw a routine he himself could not perform so well and wanted the man to get credit for that.

Leon and Romy were boring. I saw them before on AGT doing unimpressive stage magic. They don’t have charisma, with Romy to look at they’d have nothing. I don’t understand why P&T just didn’t mention the two obvious ways the card could be handed off instead of just one.

In contrast the drawing guy was entertaining. His bit was edited because of the time it took for the guy to draw, but he does the comedy well. I had no idea what Penn was talking about afterward so I had to go look up Wikipedia’s list of fictional rabbits and then knew what he meant. But that’s not really the gimmick of course, it can be done many other ways and he did leave the tape sufficiently open for a nose peek, though in this day and age I don’t know why a magician would bother.

The spiritualist, meh, I don’t understand their praise.

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But that hasn’t been their MO in the past. I’m specifically talking about the guy who did sleight of hand that Penn described as spending over 4 decades perfecting the moves, yet they still didn’t call themselves fooled, even though they let him come on twice, and still took him to Vegas. To me, the point is not to reward good acts, but to get something past P&T. They can also reward good acts a if they choose, but that’s independent of the show.

Maybe they rethought the premise a bit in light of the other guy. Still, that rankles.

I did, too, and thought the same thing. Especially that one act “from behind” that only had one trick and too much of one cheesy gimmick.

Because in this case they were truly fooled. They thought they saw the move. To turn around and say “Oh, then I guess it was” isn’t playing fair. Sure, they’ve hedged bets before by leading in with the possibility of two or three different things. But in this case, they were thoroughly sure they knew, so they were decidedly fooled.

In fact, that’s why the trick was perfect for this show, but wouldn’t have been as impressive on AGT; because we got someone to state the obvious, and reasonable assurance they didn’t just lie about it.

His stage act wasn’t bad, but the part about picking up the ladies was bad, not funny, lame.

What drawing? The sketch was up there to begin with, and the audience member only colored in, and that didn’t take that long. He had banter to fill the time, and predictably the guy was standing in front of the paper. Anyone without stage awareness is going to do that.

It was the gimmick, or he wouldn’t have agreed they weren’t fooled. Sure, the “same trick” could be done other ways, but his version used some firm of “roger rabbit”*, even if audible thumps weren’t it.

He had the audience’s attention, he presented it without declaring the supernatural as real, and most importantly, he didn’t use a prop or secret gimmick. He simply performed the touch under the watchful eyes of the audience, most of whom still missed it.

[Spoiler] He touched her on her back right shoulder twice while waving his hands wildly in a way that appeared his hands were never close enough to touch her. By swinging them around very widely at the first, he established there was a gap between him and her. At just the right moment he removed the gap, but most of the audience didn’t notice. I had to back it up and check again to be sure.

Then he stepped over to the guy, gave his pause and clear moves. During the rest of the act he is sufficiently clear he couldn’t touch her. That’s what the audience sees. [/spoiler]

A different version will use string on his hand, or even a rod on the chair to give the touch. That’s what Penn meant by being pure, no gimmick. The audience could inspect the furniture afterwards and not discover the trick. Thus, it is much more flexible, can be performed almost anywhere with little prep, and actually takes skill in mastering the moves of the performance.

That link by BigT has a spot where the rubix guy discusses the show dynamics. He said you perform for the producers, then break it down and show them how it works. For the US version at least, he named two big names in magic (other than P&T) who are producers in the room. Those are the checks that P&T are fooled.

*He’s not in Bambi? Crap.

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I got a laugh out of the fact that they thought it was necessary to subtitle Shin Lim gesturing/asking the audience member to “Pick a card” etc.

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They fooled them, but in a “meta” sort of way geared to the format of the show, which is why I didn’t like it - the obvious move they worked into the trick (hoping Penn & Teller would fall for it - which I, like you, did) made for an overall effect of a rather lame/obvious trick, despite the fact that the way it really worked was more clever…to me it was somewhat reminiscent of the infamous Brynholf & Ljung fake move from the original show.

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You know what’s the most fun about this show?

Watching it on Hulu a day (or two) later and watching it while reading how all you magic lovers break it down. Ms. Cups and I love magic, and watching theories on how it’s done just make it more fun for us