Well, Penn & Teller have a television show named "Penn & Teller: Fool Us", that will start its third season on The CW eventually. Basically, on the show, magicians are invited to go on their show and do a magic routine for them. If the routine fools them, the magician that did it will get to be the opening act in their headline show at the Penn & Teller Theater in Las Vegas, Nevada. However, if they fail to fool Penn & Teller, they are sent home emptyhanded.
In season two, there was a magician that performed on the show named Jay Sankey.
After he performed his routine, Penn & Teller were convinced that Sankey failed to successfully fool them.
They were wrong.
I love Penn & Teller, but Sankey has recently opened up about his performance on the show and in case you haven't seen his performance on Fool Us, watch this video.
The performance begins with Sankey holding a deck of cards over a lit candle. A card, the ace of spades, floats out of the pack. Sankey then takes two cards from the pack and puts a dollar bill between the two cards. He staples all of them together and rips out the dollar from between them. The host, Jonathan Ross, looks at the dollar bill and finds no holes and the cards have remained stapled. He takes the two cards, rips them both into quarters, rubs them against his arm and shows that they have restored. Sankey takes out a sparkler and gives it to Ross. He then has Ross select a card and it is put in the deck. Sankey lights the sparkler on fire and stuck through the middle of the cards. He rips the sparkler out and there is one card impaled through it: his card.
It was truly amazing. Sankey has created tricks for David Copperfield, David Blaine, Criss Angel, and many other magicians.
After the routine, Penn and Teller discussed silently and believed that Sankey did not fool them. But Sankey has recently released a 13-minute video proving that he actually did fool Penn & Teller. The video is here.
According to Sankey, he had six weeks to prepare for the performance. After four weeks, he felt he was ready. But here's what he had to say:
"It's one thing to deceive an expert magician for a beat or two for a moment, catch him or her off guard. That's one thing. But to permanently fool an expert magician means you have to perform something that they can not possibly reconstruct and then, the more I thought about it, I thought 'Wouldn't it be cool if I not only permanently fooled them, but I was so sneaky, so tricky, that they didn't even know I fooled them?'"
The first trick he did was the trick where the card rises out of the deck. There are two predominant methods. One, is invisible string, and two, is a gimmicked "Rising Card Deck". The explanation Penn gave was "I think that you know that we know 'Rising Card'". I think that Penn believed Sankey used the Rising Card Deck. That's what I thought when I first saw the performance, but he revealed that he actually had a hole in the back of the box and he used his finger to push the card up.
The second trick he did was the trick with the dollar bill and the two cards. He revealed that the cards were prestapled and the sound you hear when the dollar bill sounds like it is being torn from the cards is made by Sankey's mouth. Penn's explanation was "We saw a little bit of larceny at the beginning of this that helped you do that trick."
The third trick he did was a trick that was cut from the show's final edit. The trick was he had a ring through a straw and he folded the straw. He pulled the ring out of it and then stuffed it back. The trick was never televised. I mean, you can even see the straw on the table in the image below.
This trick is the only trick that Penn never gave an explanation to and if you look at the image above, you'll see Sankey's hands in his pockets. Sankey did this on purpose to bait Penn & Teller.
The fourth trick he did was the torn and restored card trick. When he does it, he says he was intentionally curling his fingers so that Penn & Teller would think he was hiding something in there. He then rubs the cards on his arm hair and while he does this, he puts his hands behind his neck. This was done to throw off Penn & Teller and make them think he was ditching the cards there. Penn's explanation was "One of the things I loved the most was the way you look when you show off the hair on your arms." This was likely meant to imply what Sankey wanted Penn to think.
Sankey did not reveal his fifth trick (his finale).
And there it is. Jay Sankey fooled Penn & Teller on their show without them knowing it. :)
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