I’ve never seen this on TV or entire episodes - I’ve recently been watching YouTube clips of some appearances - so it’s possible that I’m just not aware of some well-known facts about the way it works. But as it is, a couple of questions. Both are related to the fact that Penn sometimes suggests how the trick might have been done, and if this is incorrect, the magician is victorious.
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[li]Do the successful “foolers” have to reveal to P&T how they actually did their tricks? On the show, they get declared victorious simply by asserting that they didn’t do it as Penn suggested. Is this verified in any way?[/li][li]Do P&T get one guess and one guess only? (This was suggested by one episode where Penn guessed wrong and then said “that leaves one other option …”, received from pushback from the host, and then “… that you fooled us!”) If that’s correct, then that leaves an option for the contestant to game the system. Suppose he has a trick that P&T would likely figure out. What he does is to make it seem like he’s using a different well known magician’s technique (e.g. deliberately give himself opportunities for sleights of hand that he doesn’t actually use, or places which might have hidden compartments that have nothing in them, and so on), so as to get P&T to assume that’s how it was done. Then once they make that their one guess, the contestant wins. (Perhaps that’s an accepted part of the system.)[/li][/ol]
The secret to the tricks must be revealed to magician/producers backstage before hand. So those guys determine whether or not P&T have been fooled. It’s usually not an issue, but there have been a couple of guys who didn’t pick up Penn’s subtle references to how the trick was done. There was also one guy who thought they did figure it out but actually they hadn’t.
They sort of get one guess, but it can get complicated since the tricks may have several parts. After one such incident, I think in the first US episode, they concentrated on revealing the technique without getting too specific on the details. There’s an entire thread on this show here.
This did come up in the case of Jay Sankey, who did not win on the show, but who later posted a video in which he bragged that he had really fooled P&T by deliberately pretending to use standard magic techniques while actually using different techniques.
This prompted a (rather petulant) response from Penn in which he asserted that Sankey had sort-of gamed the show by performing standard tricks that can be done as well or better with standard methods with nothing in the trick itself to indicate that he hadn’t used those methods. Essentially, that there was no point to what he did and that he “fooled” P&T in a completely meaningless way (though he did seem to give him credit for not insisting that he had won on the show).
The tricks have to be fully explained to the producers (or someone involved in running the show) beforehand, and they act as judges. There have been a few cases where they’ve called for a ruling on whether what they found ‘counts’. Exactly what counts as one guess is a little open to interpretation - there have been some where they have taken a bit of leeway with ‘refining’ a guess, but they seem to be playing entirely fair with it. Also they do have a judge offstage who will overrule them. There was a trick in an early season where they got fooled by the people crowding the stage with a ton of stuff going on to the point that they couldn’t track exactly where the trick happened, but they clearly thought it was a bad trick gimmicked just for the show, and changed something in the rules or selection criteria because no one has tried a similar stunt again.
“I clearly saw you stick your thumb in the deck when she put the card back.”
“That’s right.”
“Also, she then mouthed the phrase TWO OF DIAMONDS at you.”
“Yup.”
“So there’s a 50-50 chance of you losing, here?”
“Nope!” [fans cards] “See? Every card in the deck was the Two of Diamonds!”
I’ve watched a few episodes of this show, but I had to give it up.
I love P&T, having even paid a princely sum to see them in Vegas - something I would gladly do again if given the chance.
But Fool Us would ruin magic for me if I kept watching it. I know, academically, that all stage magic is merely the application of centuries-old techniques (misdirection and such). Nevertheless, a performer flawlessly executing those techniques with panache is the reason people keep paying to see magic shows.
However, P&T come perilously close to revealing how certain tricks are done several times on the show, even though they use industry language and doublespeak when talking to the contestants. They’ve already ruined most forms of close-up card magic for me because I now know how a Force works. One performer did a pretty amazing mind trick, but I knew seconds into it how he’d gamed the performance to his advantage thanks to P&T revealing how a previous magician did another version of the same trick in another episode.
All this to say that I prefer to keep such things at arm’s length so that I can enjoy the “magic” of it all. It’s the same reason why I will never go on a backstage tour at Disneyworld. Seeing lockers, pipes, trash dumpsters, et al behind the scenes would spoil the “magic” for me.
I’m not sure I understand the question. If that counts as “fooling” P&T, then the point from the perspective of the contestant is that they get to open for P&T’s act, and - perhaps more importantly - they get to advertise that they fooled P&T.
But the bit I mentioned requires no skill; it wouldn’t be worth advertising. If a guy did what I’d said, there’d be no point in having him “open for P&T’s act” with it, or with anything like it — because doing a card trick that could be worked in multiple obvious ways, and then saying “okay, but which obvious method did I use?” before then maybe shouting FOOL doesn’t seem even a little bit ‘important’.
I don’t know if the guy needs to open P&T’s act with the same trick that he used on the FU show. But in any event, for an aspiring magician, I think any chance to open for a major act like P&T is gold.
Similar for advertisements. The guy wouldn’t advertise “hey I managed to ‘fool’ P&T using some stupid trick which exploited a weakness in the rules”. He would just add “Successfully Fooled Penn & Teller on National TV” or something like that to his ads.
There is some vetting. They aren’t just putting GOB Bluth up there. The contestants are all up-and-coming magicians who already have the respect of their peers.
Well, surely not that guy who did the hands-on-a-watch trick?
But my general point is: let’s say your trick can be worked in a way that P&T can easily spot, and easily duplicate — as is usually the case on that show, even though it’s for respected folks like you were just saying. So they say you failed.
And say I pull the same trick, but by (a) using a different method, while (b) going through the motions of doing what you did; why should I win? My trick would’ve looked just as fake as yours; I’d figure that they were just as dismissive, and that they were just as unimpressed. Now, as you say, we can assume that you and I are both respected up-and-comers, so it’s not a ludicrously bad trick that I’d be aping; but it’s still one you didn’t wow ‘em with; and it’s one that I equally fail to wow them with, since they know exactly how the effect they saw could be done.
He certainly sticks out as the one who is the worst magician they’ve had on the show.
And that one guy who stole his entire routine from someone else, including jokes and style of the routine. I forget who he was. He may have bought it, actually, but it was hardly original work from him.
Good point. Somebody was asleep at the wheel that day.
I don’t understand this. If you used a different method that they don’t guess, you fooled them. That’s the point of the contest. Lots of tricks have many methods.
But these aren’t people wandering in off the street. They are professional, working magicians who the producers have auditioned and found worthy of being on the show. They may blow it once in a while but you’ll never see these ridiculous scenarios on the show.
It’s worse than that, really. There are two possible scenarios:
Sankey did the trick in the way he currently claims he did it, but lied during the taping of the show by agreeing that he’s lost, for … reasons?
Sankey did the trick in the way that he claimed he did during the taping of the show when he agreed that Penn had ‘busted him’ and was well and truly found out, but is lying about it now that it’s impractical to demonstrate which way he did it at the time.
Given that he’s already proven himself to be a liar either way, I expect that 2 is far more likely as it’s awfully convenient that there’s no longer a way to check which way it was done.
I found the initial episode which piqued my interest and led to the OP.
These guys actually won the show because Penn guessed incorrectly they had done a substitution. But the opportunity for a substitution seems to be a very obvious one.
If you look at about 4:16, the guy - after having taken the card from his partner’s mouth - briefly sticks his hand behind the lapel of his jacket. This was pretty noticeable to me, a complete layman, and it couldn’t have escaped the attention of P&T, who I assume guessed that he had the real card hidden there the entire time, and the card in his partner’s mouth was a dummy.
Since the move was so obvious and wasn’t otherwise necessary, my assumption is that this was done with the deliberate attempt to plant a red herring and mislead P&T into guessing incorrectly. And it’s quite possible that were it not for that move they would have thought along other lines and possibly discerned the real trick. (I would guess that when these guys do the same performance for other audiences, where the goal is to completely baffle the audience and red herrings are counterproductive, that they don’t do this move.)
What makes that different than Sankey is a couple of things. 1) their trick is a more original trick as compared to Sankey’s which were very standard. 2) Sankey made a video gloating about it afterwards.
But at any rate, it does suggest that the show could be gamed in this manner.
I would think #1 is more likely. I don’t think Sankey really lied during the show. Penn said he did it such-and-such way, and Sankey kind of went along with it. But Sankey did demonstrate his alternative method of doing that trick, which is less “standard” than what Penn assumed. What he’s saying seems completely plausible, and conversely it’s hard to understand why he would have done it in a method which is so completely obvious if he had a better method available.
As for why he went along with that, I agree it’s a bit odd. (He claims out of respect for P&T, but it’s hard to reconcile that with his gloating video afterwards.) I think it’s possible that he thought it was cleverer to come up with a video of his “con-within-a-con” than to win the show. But it’s also possible that he initially intended to win via this gamesmanship, but once standing there on the show he realized how egregious is was and lost his nerve.
I can totally imagine Sankey trying to catch P&T by deliberately choosing to do an ambiguous trick - one that can be done using two different methods which are difficult for a professional to distinguish from one another. He might then deliberately choose to do it in the more obvious way, all the while hoping they will incorrectly guess the harder way. If that was what was happening, he might then look a bit confounded and mumble agreement when they get it right by guessing the easy way.
Oh, and I don’t put any credence on is post-facto claim that the second way was particularly clever. I suppose it might be actually clever, but given the context I wouldn’t take his word for it. Besides, if he had an actually clever-to-a-master-magician trick I would have expected him to just do it and fool P&T legitimately.
I don’t get what you’re saying here. You don’t have to take Sankey’s word for it, he demonstrated what he (claims he) did in the video, and you can watch his original performance as well - it’s all linked in post #3. It seems clear to me that the way Penn said he did it (substitution when he put his hands behind his neck under the pretext of rubbing cards on his arm hair) was more obvious than the way he claims to have done it - rapidly making complex folds in the cards.
More obvious? Yes. What does that have to do with anything?
Suppose that:
Sankey chooses a trick that can be done in two different ways, both of which are well known and obvious to any professional magician. One of the two methods is more complicated and flashy, but Sankey can and does expect that P&T will be well aware of both. In Sankey’s own video he admits he published the folding method of doing the trick in the 1980’s: it’s emphatically not a secret method. Further, let’s say that it’s difficult even for a professional magician to tell which of the two is being used within a given performance.
It then becomes a guessing game, where Sankey tries to predict which of the two possibilities Penn and Teller will choose to guess when presented with the ambiguous trick.
Sankey expects P&T will expect him to do it in the way he’s published before. Therefore, Sankey deliberately chooses to do the trick the easier, less flashy way - expecting and hoping that P&T will guess the more elaborate method and he will get the gotcha that it’s clear from the video that he desperately wants.
P&T go off of his intended script and don’t tell him he did it in the method he published in the 1980s, but correctly state that he did it the other, easy way. Sankey doesn’t get his gotcha, but instead posts a petulant video afterward lying about how he actually did it.
OK. My money is still on him having done what he said he did, but you never know. (I don’t know that P&T are that into published writings of Jay Sankey. Also, it’s unclear that P&T even know in advance who is going to be on the show - from the clip in which Penn discusses Kostya Kimlat it sounded like they find out right beforehand.)
One key question is what method he told the producers before the show.
If you’re stipulating that “let’s say that it’s difficult even for a professional magician to tell which of the two is being used within a given performance”, then I suppose it made no difference to Sankey (or to any of these theories) which he actually did, since regardless of which he did he could claim to have done the other, and the only question was whether Penn would guess the same method that Sankey told the producers.