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Teller Reveals His Secrets

smithsonianmag.com

21–30 of 40 posts

Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets

#21
post #11
post #4

"Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. My partner, Penn, and I once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat on the desk of talk-show host David Letterman. To prepare this took weeks. We hired an entomologist who provided slow-moving, camera-friendly…

There's a grave marker in Los Angeles for Penn and Teller with a 3 of Clubs on it. It's definitely one of their "make a trick a lot more trouble than it's worth" routines. The payoff is featured in one of their videos from the late 80s.

They use the 3 of clubs in a lot of tricks, especially when they want to make it clear that they used a card force.

Here it is on The Unpleasant World on Penn and Teller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JomTxDb_HfM

Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets

#22
post #7

"You think you've made a choice, just as when you choose between two candidates preselected by entrenched political parties." That about sums up American politics.

And there he reveals the biggest trick pulled on the "free world"... and it's performed over and over and over with the same resulting awe and enchantment in the magicians' subjects. With this trick the viewers are distracted enough to fail to realize that they've selected the same person with the continuation of same agenda every single time.

Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets

#23
post #14
post #3

The real trick here is that Teller hasn't revealed anything new about the secrets of magic. One of the dirty secrets is that a magician does her best work with a willing audience. People want to be amazed. All magic requires misdirection, sure, but the audience is usually in a frame of mind that's willing to suspend disbelief for a moment long enough for the magician to exploit it. Think about how a street magician w…

"Magicians do the sleight of hand right in front of a crowd of people, in plain sight, but nobody notices." Could you define "in plain sight" in this context? Are card manipulations that are almost impossible to detect, even when known and watched for considered "in plain sight", just because they don't happen "out of frame" to use Teller's term. If so, it isn't "because you don't want to notice", it's because you ca…

Excellent points.

For example, I'm specifically referring to things like in the rising card, having the person place the card in the "middle of the deck" and holding out the entire deck minus a single card. That's not out of frame at all. It's a reframing of the definition of the middle of the deck. It's in plain sight and depending on the size of the crowd, it's impossible to completely control all your angles.

Another example would be the double or triple lift where the magician lifts more than one card as though they are a single card. This always happens in frame. Everyone is looking at the cards. Even sloppy lifts, from a magician's standpoint, usually pass without detection, regardless of the speed of the lift. I've always figured this is because people focus their attention on the pattern on the back of the card and not the edges of the card.

Lastly, in pickpocketing tricks, the lifts always happen right in plain sight. For example, I may ask you step forward "so I can do card trick," lift your wallet, and with your wallet in my hand (in plain sight to anyone looking at my hand) reach into my own pocket for a deck of cards. I'll try to limit people noticing the wallet by gesturing to something with my other hand. I'll do a card trick or two and then move into the routine that involves your missing wallet. This is what I think Teller means by "out of frame."

The misdirection needs to be there, but if you watch, they happen several steps before a reveal. Savvy members of an audience might watch other parts of a magician's body, but they don't have the correct timing. They're thinking cause, then effect. Not cause, some random things in the middle, then effect.

Anyway, in that time between, people tend to wander in and out. In one moment they may be trying to figure out the trick, in the next, they're being amazed by the trick.

So, I guess to clarify: Once the illusion is completed, people have given up trying to figure it out. They allow themselves to suspend their disbelief in that moment.

Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets

#24
post #19

"It’s hard to think critically if you’re laughing." I find this very useful while giving speeches. Most of the audience are quite critical before you can prove yourself worth their time. Putting an appropriate joke beforehand helps to grab their approval earlier. OFF-TOPIC: Copying any part of the article automatically adds the url of an article to the clipboard. This is first time, I've seen this, very annoying!

I think you've found their use of Tynt, or something like it: http://www.tynt.com/

Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets

#25
post #14
post #3

The real trick here is that Teller hasn't revealed anything new about the secrets of magic. One of the dirty secrets is that a magician does her best work with a willing audience. People want to be amazed. All magic requires misdirection, sure, but the audience is usually in a frame of mind that's willing to suspend disbelief for a moment long enough for the magician to exploit it. Think about how a street magician w…

"Magicians do the sleight of hand right in front of a crowd of people, in plain sight, but nobody notices." Could you define "in plain sight" in this context? Are card manipulations that are almost impossible to detect, even when known and watched for considered "in plain sight", just because they don't happen "out of frame" to use Teller's term. If so, it isn't "because you don't want to notice", it's because you ca…

In Derren Brown's excellent Tricks of the Mind[1], he mentions the lengths that audiences are willing to go. In one example, he says something about "this coin in my hand" while holding his hand up near his face for a moment, index finger and thumb spaced to the approximate distance of a coin, yet there's not actually a coin there, just empty space! Afterward, people will swear that there was a coin in his hand, going so far as to describe what sort of coin it was.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Mind-DERREN-BROWN/dp/1905026358...

Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets

#26
A great article, but it has a misunderstanding about what is 'science' trying to figure stuff out. He's right about the neuroscientists - they're trying to figure stuff out from the bottom up, and it's a fairly new discipline. But he's wrong to think that that's all science is. The other half of science in this field is psychology.

Neuroscience is a 'bottom-up' field, starting from the smallest components and trying to understand how they're interacting. Psychology is the 'top-down' field, starting with complex phenomenon and trying to break them down. The psychology of cognition and attenion is the stuff that's relevant where magic's involved. Much of the things that Penn & Teller expose in the workings of magic is known to cognitive and attentional psychology - it's the flawless execution to make it work that is the trick, an idea supported by the magician's mantra 'practise practise practise'.

The problem with the two disciplines above is that there's so much we don't know - we're nowhere near being able to make them 'meet in the middle'. The human mind is incredibly complex.

Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets

#27
post #7

"You think you've made a choice, just as when you choose between two candidates preselected by entrenched political parties." That about sums up American politics.

And there he reveals the biggest trick pulled on the "free world"... and it's performed over and over and over with the same resulting awe and enchantment in the magicians' subjects. With this trick the viewers are distracted enough to fail to realize that they've selected the same person with the continuation of same agenda every single time.

> With this trick the viewers are distracted enough to fail to realize that they've selected the same person with the continuation of same agenda every single time.

And what agenda is this?

Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets

#28
post #19

"It’s hard to think critically if you’re laughing." I find this very useful while giving speeches. Most of the audience are quite critical before you can prove yourself worth their time. Putting an appropriate joke beforehand helps to grab their approval earlier. OFF-TOPIC: Copying any part of the article automatically adds the url of an article to the clipboard. This is first time, I've seen this, very annoying!

I've encountered it before and I agree that it is very annoying. When I last encountered it I did some looking around and found that a specific company dealt with providing the service on several websites and on my windows machine by adding the ip of their server to my hosts file I could stop it happening. I hate it when this happens but I just can't remember what company it was and I've been searching for a small bit and can't get anything due to vague keywords.

Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets

#29
post #19

"It’s hard to think critically if you’re laughing." I find this very useful while giving speeches. Most of the audience are quite critical before you can prove yourself worth their time. Putting an appropriate joke beforehand helps to grab their approval earlier. OFF-TOPIC: Copying any part of the article automatically adds the url of an article to the clipboard. This is first time, I've seen this, very annoying!

I think you've found their use of Tynt, or something like it: http://www.tynt.com/

Yeah, I was just about to post that I'd found it was Tynt via ghostery.

Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a myriad of ways to do this, but usually through slight of hand, he slipped you the duplicate card which you thought was the ripped up version - when it reality, was a folded version. Here's a great video of how this is done: http://bit.ly/yWQgQL

In the parent's description, it doesn't sound like he ever gave the card back to the magician. He himself ripped the card, then immediately keeping the pieces tight in his fist.

Right. The thing that blew our minds (my friends and I) was that I clenched my fist around the pieces and watched my hand like a hawk. The only rational possibility I see for misdirection would have happened before I knew I was supposed to close my hand; but hard to say. Greatest trick I've ever witnessed!
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