Below, is the trick that changed how I thought about magic and made me see tricks in a new & more interesting light., I’ll explain why in a second.
[WARNING: the sound quality is awful on this video but it is all in one piece, see below for links for better quality split over 2 videos (or if you're reading this in an RSS reader)]
…this trick is split over two much better quality videos, you’re probably better of viewing them on YouTube:
Part 1: The World’s Most Expensive Card Trick, starting at 8:28
Part 2: The World’s Most Expensive Card Trick, second half
I’ll run through the trick in just a second, first a little background on my introduction to magic.
Like many people around my age in the UK, I grew up watching the Paul Daniels Magic Show, we only had three channels at the time so Saturday night entertainment TV options were limited. We ended up watching magic not because we sought it out but rather because there was nothing else on, we didn’t hunt it, it came to us.
Noel Edmonds, Tomorrow’s World, Grange Hill and Paul Daniels; entertainment, wonky technology, school life and magic was part of our growing up curriculum, it’s just something you had to sit through until you graduated to being old enough & trusted enough to go play with your friends in the street.
Thus the UK ended up with this odd magic literate generation, some hated it, some loved it and some of us had a passing interest.
I generally took magic at face value, a trick designed to delight and entertain, being happy to play the roll of the naive observer trusting what the magician said to enjoy the surprise payoff at the end. The magician isn’t really the one doing the tricking it’s the audience, successfully fooling the magician into thinking they’ve pulled off the trick. The better the audience is with this deception the greater the magician. Otherwise everyone would just sit there and go “Trap door! Slight of hand! Twins! Hidden compartment” and no-one would have a very good time. The audience make a deal with the magician(s) to go along with the deception for everyone’s benefit.
Penn & Teller changed that deal.
They were magicians who showed us how (some of) the tricks were done, this was new and interesting to me, it also changes the dynamic. Now we weren’t on two separate ends of a deal but on the same side, still complicit with each other but now just focused on enjoying the performance rather than fooling each other.
Or so I thought until the above trick.
Ok, so about the trick then
For those that don’t care to watch the trick, here’s the run down.
Penn is out in the street, explaining to us the audience in the studio and watching at home, how the trick is going to be done. How we are going to fool a couple of people on the street, using a couple of top-of-the-range tricked out computers and a perfect fanning of the cards.
Penn will get the oh-so-foolish marks to pick a card from a deck. The remaining cards are quickly fanned and shown the the camera, and then the bit I loved.
I loved it, because I wanted to believe in computers, they were magical wonderful machines. I had one (an Acorn Electron) and I could make it do, well, stuff, I typed in incantations of special words and invoked a response. I totally bought into the computer part, I was always telling people that computers would be able to do great things, and now, here, was a demonstration of that. Boy Penn & Teller got computers, I got computers, it’s almost like we could hang out and talk about computers.
In this trick, the computer would take a screen shot of the fanned cards, analysis the image recognising each of the cards in turn and, here’s the great bit, deduce the missing card, the one the “marks” in the street picked.
This, is did perfectly.
Teller then typed the card into the second computer which displayed it on a large advertising screen above and behind the people on the street, so that Penn could see it and therefore tell them what the card was.
I was so down with this, we, all of us, knew how the thing was done, together we had tricked the two people in the street.
Until the very last moment, and then this happened.
Penn had asked them their names, Teller typed it into the display, which was then shown above their heads, just like this…
….and at that moment, my perception of magic changed forever.
The big switch-a-roo
I’m sure most people already know what’s going on, you probably have it figured out already, I mean it’s so obvious really. However remember I was magic tricks naive, I took things a face value, I trusted those guys. We were on the same side, right?
That sign is old, made up of bulbs, not these super modern screens with millions of pixels, but a limited number of pixels/bulbs across and down, it’s a low resolution screen. Or in other words you can only fit so many letters on it.
And I asked myself, what are the chances that out of all the people on the street, Penn ended up with a pair that had short names?
Roger & Laura, too long.
Padmavati & Steve, too long.
Bob & Martin, too long.
Andrew & Felicity, too long.
Mary & Sue, too long.
No, none of that, but Sue and Ian. Two three letter names, what are the chances of that? Well not high enough for me. And then it unravelled, I could feel my mind playing the whole trick backwards, and then even further back to all the TV magic shows I’d seen.
If the two people had to have short names, then they couldn’t have been just anyone. If they weren’t just anyone then there’s no reason to try and fool them, all that (now apparently fake) stuff with the computer wasn’t to trick them so who was it tricking?
Us.
This wasn’t part of the deal, I bought into the whole we were going to trick them part, the inside knowledge, the collusion. I thought Penn & Teller were being straight up with me, letting me in on the trick, after all that’s what they do isn’t it, show you how things are done?
I had been tricked. The magicians had lied, not the lying that we all agreed to do together to make the trick work “the card is lost in the deck”, but out and out, bare faced, lying lying.
And this made me very happy.
I thought back even further, if that had been a lie, then what else?
A trick, of sorts I remembered from the Paul Daniels Magic Show, a master of memory trick, in which he had memorised each audience members’ name, 100s of people. He explained it as a “visualization and word association technique” by creating word pictures, the crazier the better you can remember a great number of things. The example in this case was looking at a man wearing glasses called Ash. You mentally build up an image of the man with a volcano growing out of his head, dripping lava and billowing ash out that comes to rest along the top of his glasses. Once you have that image, you can easily remember his name. And then you do this for each person in turn. Watching it was impressive.
But as feasible as the explanation for how it was done was, it didn’t mean he wasn’t “cheating”. I’d heard a little about visualising images to help memory before, there are books on the subject and so on, but just because it’s a real thing, doesn’t mean that’s how it was done, but enough for me to buy into at the time.
I then applied this thinking to other tricks I remembered, is the trick itself a trick? At which point I discovered a new joy in magic, a new dimension to explore, an extra layer on-top of the layers that I thought I knew about. The meta-trick, a trick wrapped inside a trick.
A good few years later along came Derren Brown, wonderful fantastic entertainment. Many of the tricks explained to us upfront with perfectly reasonable psychological explanations. But were we being let in on the trick, or being tricked?
I certainly had no better understanding of how the magic tricks were being done, no magic insight to the moves, slights, gaffs or trick construction. But instead a greater appreciation of the art and the setup than I had before.
And it was this one trick by Penn & Teller, the World’s Most Expensive Card Trick, shown on Channel 4. That very evening was the moment that shifted everything about magic for me, made me fall in love with it more, made me think about it a little more, and made me once more enjoy being tricked by charlatans, cheats and liars.
Update: The US version & an interview extract
@hugovk uploaded the US version of this trick to vimeo.
Penn & Teller: The World’s Most Expensive Card Trick from Hugo on Vimeo.
And also pointed me to this interview on WiReD from back in the day: A completely unredeeming profile of Penn Jillette, wired magician, Umaphile, little girl trapped in a fat man’s body. Which includes this extract…
Teller quotes Arthur C. Clarke, who noted, “A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Eight years ago, Penn & Teller devised a trick that illustrated Clarke’s Law, Teller says. You might recall this number – the World’s Most Expensive Card Trick – done before millions of people on Saturday Night Live.
While the Saturday Night audience watched Teller sit on stage surrounded by computer equipment, Penn was out in Times Square, “by a newsstand,” Teller recalls. “Penn had two passersby select one card from the pack and remove it. He then fanned the cards so the TV camera could get a glimpse of the 51 others. I apparently captured the fan on my computer scan, and took a still frame to determine which card was missing. I turned to a second terminal and typed in Four of Diamonds. The terminal transferred it to the giant Spectacolor screen in Times Square: Penn just looked over the bystanders’ shoulders, and there it was.”
“All that elaborate rigamarole could have just as easily been done by a standard palming of the card,” he adds. In fact, the trick was done like this: The “bystanders” were really two actors. And the answer was always going to be the Four of Diamonds; that was the card that the actors had been instructed to select. But what everyone saw was an incredible stunt done by powerful, mystical computers.
“The subject of that trick was how close to magic being able to manipulate a lot of technology is,” Teller says.
Which still feels true today.
