PENN JILLETTE AND “WIZARD WARS” MAGICIANS EXPLAIN HOW MAGIC WORKS AND WHY IT’S STILL RELEVANT
By Dan Solomon for Fast Company..
If you think about it for more than a few minutes, the fact that magic is still a popular form of entertainment in 2014 is kind of surprising. When the first magic theater opened in Paris in 1845, people had few opportunities to see the impossible. Right now, without leaving your chair, you can watch a lifelike giant lizard stomp the hell out of San Francisco; you can control your favorite football players on a photorealistic gridiron; you can send a message around the world in seconds flat. With all of these things in mind, the idea that magic is still relevant to people seems hard to imagine.
But magic is relevant. Top magicians still sell out theaters, Hollywood scores regular blockbusters with films about magicians, and–as evinced by shows like SyFy’s Wizard Wars and the CW’s Penn & Teller: Fool Us–the reality of an illusion crafted by sleight of hand and misdirection can catch our eyes even when that same screen could also be used to show big-time special effects.
No one knows magic–and how it stays relevant–like Penn Jillette, and he can trace the evolution of the form in recent years from David Copperfield (“he had a debonair quality that magicians jumped on”) to Doug Henning (“he created the kind of casual hippie magician”) to current stars like David Blaine and Criss Angel…