This is where we diverge. I strongly suspect that Sankey’s materials have never been read by Penn and Teller. On the contrary, it’d be poor sportsmanship indeed for someone to come on the show and perform an original published trick, only to have Penn say, “Yeah, we read your book before the show, so we know how you did it.”
Also, who’s ever heard of Sankey before?
It seems far likelier to me that he used his original method, which is both clever and obscure, and coupled that with the pretty bogus fake-out method. FP’s guess, that he lost his nerve, makes sense to me. He may also have figured that he had no chance of fooling them in a “fair” trick, so he did his nonsense as a consolation prize for himself.
My take on the show has been that they’re such keen observers and students of magic in general that they can spot most tricks. Part of the fun of the show is matching my own wits against P&T (which inevitably I fail at), trying to see if I can spot the same things they’re spotting, or even something in addition to what they’re spotting.
If they’ve read someone’s published account of how they do a trick, where’s the challenge in figuring out how they did the trick?
That seems to pit the magicians’ need to make a living against themselves.
I’ve seen them say this to magicians who fooled them. These were magicians who were very well known and who they knew (I believe Paul Gertner was one) and who knew that P&T knew the trick and therefore added on something extra. In getting fooled, Penn said that he knew the “basic” trick from the guy’s book but couldn’t get the add-on. It doesn’t seem that Sankey is such a well-known guy.
BTW, re my earlier comment about Penn indicated that he didn’t know Kostya Kumlat was going to be on the show beforehand, I see where Kimlat himself says “… Penn and Teller were never told who was going to be performing for them”.
P&T know absolutely nothing until the contestant comes out. Everything is arranged by the producers of the show and they work very hard ensure that information is strictly segregated. I believe Fool Us qualifies as a game show under FCC regs and therefore they have to be extremely uptight about any appearance of collusion.
That has led to situations where contestants are well-known to P&T, even including at least one guy who lost because Penn had read about the exact method he performed in his book. (I don’t remember the guy’s name, but the trick involved a contraption to grab a paper prediction and secretly transport it to the back of his jacket.)
Are they supposed to not read any published books about magic? This is just one show that they’re doing as part of a multi-decade career, expecting that they completely stop reading about the field they’re in, and somehow forget everything they’ve read from decades past seems utterly bizarre to me. They wouldn’t really be “keen observers and students of magic” in the first place if they never read any books on the topic.
The name of the show is ‘Fool Us’ and the challenge is to fool Penn and Teller, who are known to read and remember writings about magic since they often reference books on magic by name. Crying ‘foul’ that you told the world about your trick and they know about it seems to run directly counter to the challenge presented by the show.
Ah, that’s what I wasn’t getting. I assumed they were told the magicians’ names, and thought it’d be crummy for them to research the magician and read their books prior to the show. If they’ve just happened to have read the tricks coincidentally, that’s a totally different kettle o’ fish.
OK, that objection makes sense to me, specifically looking someone up does seem against the spirit of testing P&T to look for the person specifically. Bear in mind though that they are already familiar with a lot of the acts (especially the ones who’ve published real books) so it’s really not that rare for them to know someone’s history. Also, some of the acts have been on the show more than once, and if they did pique P&T’s interest or ire the first time around it would probably behoove them to assume that P&T read all of their published secrets after the first appearance.
One of the quiet satisfactions insofar as illusions are concerned is that I saw Penn and Teller in San Francisco before they were famous.
I’m not sure how correct the article cites is because I saw the show on 1981, it was in The City itself (the Phoenix Theater is in Petaluma), there were only the two of them, and it was still being called The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society. Perhaps the departure, the venue change, and name change were not all synchronous.
My girl and I were in the front row so we saw Teller do the Indian Needle illusion up close. The other thing I remember is Penn saying, “You, the audience, have only one job, which is–” A bright spot lit up in an aisle at the back of the theater under which there was a guy in a gorilla suit whanging on a pair of cymbals for a few seconds. “–never take your eyes off this stage!”
The Fireballs “Bottle of Wine,” a hard rocking version of a Tom Paxton song. Paxton himself loves this one, and admits “If I tried to sing like that, my throat would jump out of my mouth.”