Penn & Teller do have a show called "Fool Us" where a magician performs a trick for them, and then P&T try to guess how the trick is done, immediately confirming their accuracy with the magician. They're quite good, but they're also "fooled" reasonably often.
Although maybe that just makes for better television... ;)
Well according to the rules, if their first guess is wrong, they are considered fooled. I'm pretty sure they have the right guess for all of them somewhere on their list of possibilities. There have been a couple where they very convincingly look fooled though.
A very good and memorable one where they were very fooled was Shin Lim's card act [1]. As is common with card acts that have someone from the audience pick a card, he has them sign their card. Before moving on with the amazing card manipulation, he makes the pen disappear. According to Teller (as reported by Penn), "We didn't even know how you vanished the motherfucking marker".
Yeah, sitting here rewinding dozens of times on Youtube I can see a couple of his tricks. But they all require insane dexterity and coordination. We see in the intro that he's capable of that, which I guess he could have skipped if he wanted to conceal that for us. And that vest of his is clearly not ordinary at all. But I think almost getting it makes it even more impressive really, which is why I think he hints at some of it. It's pretty beautiful.
Every time he's making the marker disappear he's making small movements with lots of energy in them - he's clearly throwing the marker, and he's throwing the marker so that it's path is obscured by his hands. I'm speculating that it lands inside his vest. That must have taken an insane amount of practice.
He's also moving a card from one side of his body to another. Later he's moving a card back the other way. My bet is that his vest has some sort of mechanism for moving cards. He moves very awkwardly while doing it, so he's certainly doing some complicated procedure we can't see. He could of course be throwing the card, deflecting it with the insides of his hands or otherwise creating a very curved path, but that's just barely plausible.
Yeah, in one episode the contestants optimized for the benchmark and purposedly faked a sloppy move that could explain the trick, but wasn't the real method they employed. P&T went for the obvious move and got fooled.
I think you are referring to Jay Sankey's appearance on the show. He has a YouTube channel where he teaches magic in a manner that I think any engineer would respect. I first discovered him watching the video where he discusses his appearance on the P&T show [0].
I have been watching a lot of his videos since then. I doubt I'll ever learn to do any of his tricks 100% but I find his commentary on the social aspect of magic very interesting.
There was one episode where they didn't even make a guess. Penn got really pissed off and said something to the effect of, "Fuck you, I have no fucking idea how you fucking did that!" Not sure if the anger was real or a put-on but it was a lot of fun to watch. Just thinking about it is making me smile :-)
That was real! I mean he wasn't really angry but he really did have his mind blown.
The backstory is that the magician in question (Kostya Kimlat) did a trick that Penn & Teller also do, and he did it more or less the same way they do it - except that at the end, at the part where P&T do the sleights that make the trick work, in Kimlat's version the effect was already done because he'd done a different sleight, earlier, about five inches under P&T's noses. It was pretty glorious.
I think his move is at 4:04 in the video, when he cuts the deck, saying some cards are face up, some face down, and Penn groans at his patter.
Edit: I think the actual trick starts at 3:49, when he asks Teller to insert his card, either face up or face down. The move at 4:04 finishes the trick and it's done.
This is great, I love watching magic at 1/4 speed. I think he's sorting the cards into a face up and face down half and puts the two picked cards in the opposite half. It looks like he sorts faces up on the top half and faces down on the bottom. He might even have left the top card face down so the deck looks more unsorted because he flips it during the 4:04 move. Then he flips the halves which results in a sorted deck with the picked cards flipped.
Yep, you got it. The trick happens entirely during that fan-out of cards that Penn and Teller are inserting into. The trick is that Kostya's bottom hand is not a passive receptacle but is actively reaching out underneath the deck to grab any face-down cards and pull them onto the bottom, but he's practiced it so well that it doesn't look unnatural or jerky. The "into" hand is holding in order:
1. a few face-down cards on top to make it look like it's still mixed,
2. all the face-up cards plus Penn's card, which went in face-down,
3. all the face-down cards plus Teller's card, which went in face-up.
At 4:04 Kostya does a simple move which Penn and Teller are totally allowed to see which reorients these; indeed, Penn's bellow at 4:06 is apparently because he was 100% convinced that this was going to be a "blink and you'll miss it" trick: maybe swapping out the deck, maybe the cards are not perfect rectangles and he can separate them at will, maybe a dozen other ways he knows to get the same illusion -- but instead he just saw the guy turn half of the cards over, meaning that they were already split into face-up and face-down: and he had totally missed it because the cards seemed to move so naturally and the hand underneath was 100% totally hidden from him.
The moves start earlier than that, from when the cards are being selected through to when they're replaced. Penn's groan at 4:06 is because the move at 4:04 tells him that the up/down cards are already separated and the trick is already finished.
I think the only reason they get fooled is that they're time limited to come up with a solution and only get one shot at it. 99% sure it's not 'just for TV' as they did the original series in the UK and as it's a competition (which is highly regulated) they said there were lots of rules in place to ensure it was real and not set up or anything like that.
Being a huge P&T fan who's watched them all, of the tricks where they get fooled there are a small handful where someone just flat-out, stone-cold bewilders them. But there are a lot more where they clearly know pretty much what's going on, but either they take a 50/50 guess and miss, or there's some hangup about wording or somesuch. But definitely I agree that they don't miss on purpose for TV reasons.
Agreed. I happened to watch a video earlier today of one (from the US series) and it seems like one that really does fool them [0]. Worth watching if others haven't seen it.
Yeah, the "ideal" format would be something more like Mythbusters, where they get to go off and try various things for days/weeks (shown as a montage), and then come back to the magician with their best shot.
I'd bet if they did that they would figure out how 99.9% of the tricks are done and it wouldn't be much of a competition. It would be cool to see though, particularly if they explained the method.
Penn has talked a few times on his podcast Penn's Sunday School about the format. The idea is to showcase magic on TV, but in a way that reassures the viewers that there isn't any camera trickery etc. "If Penn and Teller are trying to figure out how it is done, why would they let them do camera tricks?" To that end, they don't need time to go away and figure it out; a couple of minutes is just fine.
The default case is the that the contestant's trick isn't original to them, and Penn just gives the trick's trade name or its inventor's name, obfuscated a little, and the contestant grins and waves goodbye.
When P&T actually make a guess about an original mechanism, sadly Teller either whispers it or draws it on some paper that they then dispose of in some suitably flashy way. (He's usually right of course!)
They're kind of vague on what the solution is since they don't want to give it away to the audience so they just kind of say a hint. The attempted fooler will generally understand what they are getting at and say if they are correct or not and there are some judges listening who know how it was done as well.
Those guys do come on the show, and very rarely win.
The winners are most often low-profile professional magicians who make a significant income consulting for the famous ones. Inventing and selling tricks is an important revenue stream for many magicians.
So they come on, do some trick that they invented in secret and worked on for years, and give P&T that same childlike sense of awe and amazement that the rest of us experience almost all the time. It's the best part of the show.
Huh, I never thought about "consulting magician" as a career. Sort of like the professional songwriters who work for music labels, ghostwriting for dozens of bands.
Given that these exist, I wonder how many magicians with a signature trick got it from a consultant instead of inventing it. Are a few people creating all the world's magic acts?
You should watch Jonathan Creek - a murder mystery series about a consulting magician. Pure fiction but rekindled my childhood interest in magic. I'm currently, slowly, teaching myself card magic now. Starting with The Royal Road.
In this case it's difficult to tell. A lot of small time acts hit it big with their one REALLY good trick they develop, or just good enough showmanship that there's reasonable doubt.
I've watched the show a few times and I don't know how carefully detailed the rules of success vs failure are, but on a few instances, Penn and Teller announced they had a fair idea of what tricks were being done but couldn't really place it in an acceptable order or say the how/when.
So even if Teller is the magic encyclopedia, he can be fooled, it seems.
Although maybe that just makes for better television... ;)