One of my deep dark secrets is that I'm pretty into magic, and I come into that from the perspective of a guy interested in science, math, and reverse engineering. I love being fooled as much as the next guy but I need to spend my time immediately after that trying to find ways to do that trick. Odds are my methodology will be significantly different (one of the fun things about reverse-engineering, well, nearly anything) but could, with practice, reveal the same effect.
While I have opinions about Penn and Teller's politics (though they're at least not spending time trying to propagandize against the risks of anthropogenic climate change with the stuff they do these days -- progress!) I do have a soft spot indeed for their Fool Us show. I don't find it a huge dilemma to watch, because while I cannot see the hosts without envisioning the logo of the Cato Institute projected right behind them, the show really isn't about them, but about their guest performers and the magic they do.
FWIW, given the strikes with WGA and SAG-AFTRA, it's interesting that the show is taping now, which I put down to it being, effectively, a reality show akin to The Voice, but given the hosts of the show have those Cato Institute fellowships mentioned, it's hard not to be at least a little suspicious. They cut against that character, at least, by letting the magicians share the footage of their performances freely; nearly, if not all, are on youtube, and easily consumable without having to worry too much about the hosts monetizing their work.
This is less of an invitation that you must watch the show as it is a YMMV recommendation. Frankly, nearly all of the show I've seen comes from youtube to begin with.
To that end, I want to talk about what I think is probably one of the low-key funniest tricks ever featured on the show, because it's a massive troll moment, designed primarily with the goal of fooling the hosts but still being entertaining in its own right and easy to catch you unaware if you're not watching closely.
I'm putting it under the cut for fairly obvious reasons, i.e., talking about how I would try to do the trick if asked and why I think the setup is funny.
Here's the footage of Asi Wind's trick that reveals itself, uploaded by the performer himself:
What's funny to me is that the way the trick is designed, most of the misdirection comes at the end of the trick, a sign that it was designed to be performed for elder statesmen of magic who might already know what to look for to see how the trick is done. This is of course what makes it so funny -- he's taken what is ultimately a pretty simple trick and, through this convoluted contraption he reveals, makes it seem much more complicated than it is.
Relatively speaking, of course. The fundamentals of magic are, I would argue, making the complicated appear simple and the simple appear nonexistent.
The first part of the trick is a pretty straightforward force. One of the fun things about tricks that you don't see more than one time is that you don't always know when a force is done. Here, however, the use of "pull out" in reference to cards is notable, because it's not what people normally would say as part of their patter; the stereotypical phrases is to "pick a card", or select, or anything like that. The reason for "pull out" seems to be to force the face cards if the audience member had secretly said the number cards. By forcing the face cards, there are really only 12 cards that need to be selected from in the course of the trick.
Taking the sip of drink is mostly done to be funny. While it is part of the misdirection late in the trick, note that he doesn't sip from the drink after the card has been named, so it's not part of the selection trick.
When the card has been named, and he goes into the wooden box, note that he doesn't remove the card deck from the box in a single movement; his hand lingers there for a bit, as if he was removing something that was fastened, somehow. This is key to the trick, as it's where the load happens. Note how quickly the box is unsealed and opened after it is removed from the box -- the card deck was not sealed when it was removed.
My suspicion is that at this point the card is at the bottom of the box, probably done to allow for the load to be done in a single movement while removing the deck. Trying to remove the deck and shuffle the card into the middle here would take long enough that it would get people suspicious, or at least make it harder to make the deck look like it had been closed.
I say this because, with the benefit of replay and slow-motion, you can see that he does a bottom-deal of the king to the right side of the deck while he fans the cards out. It's subtle, and especially easy to miss from a distance. While my understanding is this episode had a gimmick that everyone on it got a Fool Us trophy, I wouldn't be surprised to find that P&T might have missed this in the process, because the spiel they gave makes it sound like they did. It is, after all, a close-up technique.
The deck of cards being blank serves a straightforward purpose, in that you can add any face card to it and you won't get a duplicate of it anywhere in the deck. The people watching the stage won't be able to distinguish 40 cards from 52 from 53 from 60. You can add any face card and it will look equally like it belongs there. No duplicat...well, ok, nearly all the cards are duplicates, just not the chosen card.
And that's what makes this trick so funny -- at that point, that's basically all he needed to do. Everything from this point on, about half the length of the routine, is gravy. Misdirection. Making you think the trick could have been done differently to how it was.
And that's what's so funny to me. This being the guy who consults for David Blaine makes a lot of sense, because the trick isn't so much about the trick as it is about an emotional raising of the stakes to the point where the trick is almost irrelevant to the story. In a way, everything else here is a second trick because none of it has anything to do with the king of clubs appearance.
Like this sort of raising of stakes was such a signature of Blaine's act that it became the subject of some really incredible parody. (Seriously, that video is shockingly well-made, and I suspect that our modern obsession with single-take scenes being timed with the people who might have seen that video as middle schoolers going through film school probably isn't a coincidence.)
One of the biggest tells about how this trick is done is that the cards are freely given to P&T to examine -- straightforward, basic cards, just that only one shown has been printed -- but the box is very quickly moved away. Easy to see that everything needed to do the trick is in that box, going away with the assistant, along with the box the deck was in (though my attempt to reverse-engineer the trick probably wouldn't require the deck box to be taken away -- probably a sign there's a bit to how the load was done that isn't the way I'd have done it). What's in that box, though? Presumably, the other 11 face cards.
Again, it's basically a second trick from here on out. It's pretty clever that all of this managed to be obscured. Given the magnets on the table, I wouldn't be surprised to find that it's being sloped away from the audience very slightly as a perspective trick, making it harder to tell that the gimmicks exist.
Note that up until this point, the place on the table where the mug apparently needs to be to turn the wheel under the table is not where the mug has been. It's a very clever mechanism, though! Again, very funny that all this work was done to hide what was an extremely low-tech card trick up until this point. It's very clever.
Filming from top-down makes it less obvious that this wasn't how the trick was done. If you weren't watching very closely at the movement of the deck before, it's easy to get invested in all of this big reveal -- and you can't tell that the perspective of the camera means the decks being rotated are fake. Again, no part of this reveal is genuine, but you can't immediately tell that fact.
That's why the reveal that this elaborate gimmick is actually fake is so powerful -- for a beginning magician, the prop itself doesn't require the kind of technique mastery that trying to hide a card deal does. There's ingenuity, but not the level of fine-motor athleticism that a lot of fine-tuned practice requires. There's a reason that kids' magic sets look like prop comedy; no 4-year-old picks up a card deck for the first time and manages to hide dealing the cards. The actual sleight-of-hand is the hard part, the gears and plastic and glass are the easy (though, y'know, the $$$) part.
It's a perfect routine for the modern age. I want to see more like it. "Here's an incredibly simple trick that you can do with simple tools, years of practice, and just a touch of crowd psychology -- and here's the complicated setup I potentially could have, but didn't, use to perform it." A truly perfect kind of trick for the kind of magic smark that I am, one that took me a few watches to really get what was going on and that still impresses me for its narrative even then.