“Penn & Teller Ring Someone’s Neck,” and Magicians and Card Sharps…
Here’s episode 12 of Penn and Tellers ‘Fool Us’.. in its entirety.. featuring Victor & Diamond, Francis Menotti, Nash Fung and Chad Juros. ..
Penn and Teller Are Revealing How Their Magic Tricks Are Done — And It’s O.K.
As one of the few humans on Earth who un-ironically calls himself a “TV magic obsessive,” let me tell you, there’s never been a magic show on television like Penn & Teller: Fool Us.
I approach the show from several perspectives. As a layperson, it’s entertaining as hell with a clear-cut premise. Fool Us is a magic competition on the CW Television Network in which performers try to fool Penn Jillette and Teller as to how their trick was done. If they succeed, the aspiring magicians win an opening-act slot in the duo’s longtime Las Vegas show. The show has been a surprise ratings hit in its Monday primetime slot, averaging 2 million viewers (it’s been renewed for a third season).
I also watch the show as a guy interested in magic since age six. I’m comfortable saying Fool Us has advanced the art form within popular culture better than any televised magic show in recent memory. The variety of magic subgenres given the spotlight is encouraging for those of us who don’t perform with live tigers: there’ve been acts of coin and card magic, mind-reading, escapology, quick change (where costumes transform in a flash)—even a man who solves Rubik’s cubes, magically. Read the interview..
How I Fooled Penn & Teller..
Rick Lax is a magic trick inventor, author , and (non-practicing) lawyer from Las Vegas. I was introduced to him because we have the same book editor, Dave Moldawer. On his Facebook page, Rick posts videos of the tricks he’s created. The thing I love about his videos is that he shoots them in a coffee shop with his mobile phone. The tricks are great and he has an appealing personality so the Starbucks production values are fine. I prefer his videos to the edgy, atmospheric videos that so many other magic trick sellers use.
Rick does not perform in front of live audiences, but on Monday he appeared on Penn & Teller: Fool Us with a memory trick. He wowed Penn & Teller and the audience by glancing at a packet of 21 cards, mixing them up, then separating the reds and the blacks without looking at the cards. Teller grabbed some of Rick’s cards to see if they’d been marked or stripped or otherwise doctored but he came to the conclusion that they are ordinary cards. Penn & Teller were fooled and Rick won the challenge. (Photo from Boing Boing) Read the interview..
http://boingboing.net/2015/09/17/rick-lax-how-i-fooled-penn-an.html
Viewer fascination with TV magic shows surges..
Mike Hughes, For the Lansing State Journal (courtesy photo)
In the high-tech, special-effects world of TV, this is a surprise: Magic is back.
Yes, trickery — a 500-year-old art that needs no camera tricks, a skill often tried by bumbling grade-school kids and tottering old men – is hot again. “We’re just in a new wave now,” Rick Lax said.
Lax, a former Michigan State University student, has a small piece of that (performing Monday on “Penn & Teller: Fool Us”) and had a big piece recently, as a TV creator and producer: “I’ve had a very charmed video life …. My very first idea (’Wizard Wars’) gets on TV and gets great ratings.”
That’s been part of a revival that includes:
•“America’s Got Talent.” Its 10-act finale – 8-10:01 p.m. Tuesday, 8-11 p.m. Wednesday – includes magicians Oz Pearlman, Derek Hughes and Piff the Magic Dragon.
•Last year’s winner of the show, Mat Franco. He has a special from 9-11 p.m. Thursday on NBC.
•“The Carbonaro Effect,” with Michael Carbonaro mixing magic and hidden-camera. New episodes are at 10 p.m. Wednesdays on Tru TV and reruns abound. There are rerun marathons on Wednesdays (7-10 p.m.) and on weekends, including 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 7-10 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 19.
•And the CW summer shows. “Masters of Illusion” is 8 p.m. Fridays; “Penn & Teller: Fool Us” is 8 p.m. Mondays, plus a rerun at 9 p.m. Friday, Sept. 18.
•“Fool Us” is something CW originally bought as low-budget reruns from England, then ordered new episodes for this season and next. “It performed far better than we had ever anticipated,” said Mark Pedowitz, the network programming chief.
Why the surge? Lax gives some credit to two 2006 movies, “The Prestige” and “The Illusionist,” and the 2013 “Now You See Me.” These were no magician-as-nerd cliches; they starred Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Edward Norton and Jesse Eisenberg. A generation already familiar with TV specials by David Copperfield, Criss Angel and David Blaine saw magicians as cool guys.
But there’s another factor in stirring young magicians, he said: “I believe it’s because of the Internet.”
He grants that some magicians dislike the impersonal nature of seeing and buying tricks online. “If you grew up in a town that had a magic shop, you could go there and talk to a real magician.”
That’s what he did, going to a shop in Royal Oak. He’d been hooked on it ever since his parents bought him a magic kit when he was 5. “My grandmother would be baffled and say, ‘How did you do that?!?’ I saw the effect it could have on people.”
Lax became obsessed with performing. At Andover High (near Bloomfield Hills), he was drum major, a playwright and a pianist who performed the first half of “Rhapsody in Blue” by memory.
At MSU, he was in the State Singers, in addition to being vice-chairman of the Freshman Class Council. He says he loved James Madison College and Schuler Books … but grants that he departed after a year, when he finally got accepted at the University of Michigan.
There, Lax majored in political science and prepared to follow his dad’s profession as a lawyer. He did get a law degree (DePaul, in Chicago), was admitted to the bar and interned with the Cook County State’s Attorney office. “I did enjoy it when I got to court (on traffic cases), but that wasn’t often.”
Instead, he moved to Las Vegas and communed with other magicians. “We would sit around and take some objects and try to one-up each other with what we could do with them.”
That led to “Wizard Wars” and a two-season, 12-episode run. Now Lax designs tricks for an Internet company (www.penguinmagic.com) and sent an audition tape to “Fool Us.” Soon, he was trying to fool Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller … the same guys he’d hired as his “Wizard Wars” judges.
This was a new experience, he grants. “I’d never (performed in) a paying show for adults.” Now he was joining the performance part of TV’s magic surge.