Agree or Disagree?
- Thread starter 010rusty
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He certainly didn’t fool me. It was a fun surprise that made me second think my assumption of the method but I still figured it out. (I mean no disrespect to Jay, he is in my opinion one of the best creators of all time.)
Alright, before anyone jumps on the attack train in response to my reply, just hear me out fully.
Do I think that what Jay said in his video "HOW I SECRETLY FOOLED PENN AND TELLER" is true? Yes actually I do. If you go watch the section of the performance he says to have made the "con within a con", he does all these moves which seem just natural enough to be the moves he wants them to look like, but they're jerky in a weird way that makes them look unnatural to magicians. And I may just be seeing things, but if you go back and watch the part where he says he "ditches" the pieces but doesn't, he does this strange move after bringing his hand back, as if he loaded it back. Now, had he ditched it like he said, why would he load it back?
Penn later does acknowledge that, yes, Jay did indeed do what he said and thus "fooled them" with that part. (I'm only referring to the T&R part of the performance, I know he's said stuff about the other parts and I personally call BS on those, they made no sense).
But let's take a step back real quick:
If you go and perform to a spectator, and at the end of the trick they start saying that they saw you palm off their card and hide it in your pocket when you didn't do that at all, do you still count it as fooling them? I see that as a failed presentation, and thus not really fooling anyone. And that's exactly what Sankey did. He did a trick, made everyone think he did something else, and thus lost the idea of fooling them. It's like going bowling with your friends and getting a strike but in the wrong lane, and it just makes no sense.
Penn actually goes on video saying that (and I'm paraphrasing here) "hey, we've got guys that have performed age old tricks but showed us that there was something else in the trick that made it a unique method. In doing so, they kept it entertaining, and fooled them", which P&T loved. On the other hand, Jay shows up with a billion different tricks, fakes one of them, and then later says "hey I fooled you". [Here's the whole video].
And I do like a lot of Jay's work, but if he genuinely wanted to remain humble and show respect for P&T by simply accepting that he didn't fool them, why on earth would he make a video after it aired just to show that he did it? It's just an arrogant and frankly a childish move at the culmination of some sort of publicity stunt. Which is what it was. A crazy publicity stunt. It may not have been at the time of the performance, but when he put out the video, the amount of publicity Jay got from that was astounding. Notice how that video, and many comments that Jay had in response to people talking about it, linked to his shop where he was selling the routine. It was probably just the fact that he made a DVD called "Fooler" which shows the TnR he used to "fool" them, and then used this whole thing as a marketing ploy to get it to sell. Honestly, what sells better "The trick I performed on P&T that didn't fool them but they liked it" or "The trick I performed on P&T which completely fooled them and they don't even know it". In my opinion, literally any step in that process is just absolute BS.
So did he truly fool them? No. He didn't.
Do I think that what Jay said in his video "HOW I SECRETLY FOOLED PENN AND TELLER" is true? Yes actually I do. If you go watch the section of the performance he says to have made the "con within a con", he does all these moves which seem just natural enough to be the moves he wants them to look like, but they're jerky in a weird way that makes them look unnatural to magicians. And I may just be seeing things, but if you go back and watch the part where he says he "ditches" the pieces but doesn't, he does this strange move after bringing his hand back, as if he loaded it back. Now, had he ditched it like he said, why would he load it back?
Penn later does acknowledge that, yes, Jay did indeed do what he said and thus "fooled them" with that part. (I'm only referring to the T&R part of the performance, I know he's said stuff about the other parts and I personally call BS on those, they made no sense).
But let's take a step back real quick:
If you go and perform to a spectator, and at the end of the trick they start saying that they saw you palm off their card and hide it in your pocket when you didn't do that at all, do you still count it as fooling them? I see that as a failed presentation, and thus not really fooling anyone. And that's exactly what Sankey did. He did a trick, made everyone think he did something else, and thus lost the idea of fooling them. It's like going bowling with your friends and getting a strike but in the wrong lane, and it just makes no sense.
Penn actually goes on video saying that (and I'm paraphrasing here) "hey, we've got guys that have performed age old tricks but showed us that there was something else in the trick that made it a unique method. In doing so, they kept it entertaining, and fooled them", which P&T loved. On the other hand, Jay shows up with a billion different tricks, fakes one of them, and then later says "hey I fooled you". [Here's the whole video].
And I do like a lot of Jay's work, but if he genuinely wanted to remain humble and show respect for P&T by simply accepting that he didn't fool them, why on earth would he make a video after it aired just to show that he did it? It's just an arrogant and frankly a childish move at the culmination of some sort of publicity stunt. Which is what it was. A crazy publicity stunt. It may not have been at the time of the performance, but when he put out the video, the amount of publicity Jay got from that was astounding. Notice how that video, and many comments that Jay had in response to people talking about it, linked to his shop where he was selling the routine. It was probably just the fact that he made a DVD called "Fooler" which shows the TnR he used to "fool" them, and then used this whole thing as a marketing ploy to get it to sell. Honestly, what sells better "The trick I performed on P&T that didn't fool them but they liked it" or "The trick I performed on P&T which completely fooled them and they don't even know it". In my opinion, literally any step in that process is just absolute BS.
So did he truly fool them? No. He didn't.
^^^pretty much that feeling^^^
Jay is leaning heavily on the rhetoric here with what constitutes "fooling". The show doesn't publicly state a concrete definition here and some magicians mess around with it skewing things in their favor, Jay is not alone here. However where other magicians have tried to use scalpel like precision carving out a part of the definition they want to exploit Jay instead used a more blunt rock approach to bludgeon the definition.
Jays performance and actions after reveal more of a "gotcha" moment rather than a fooler in the sense that they are unable to reconstruct the trick. Certainly this instance is not one that elicits astonishment or introduces a new methods or reveal any clever thinking as some other foolers have done.
So sure he fooled as far as the show is concerned but in a very 'meh' fashion that certainly misses the point. This is an issue that was bound to arise with the premise of the show.
You pretty much echoed my thoughts on this topic. I love Jay Sankey. I have and perform a lot of his material, and I think he is an incredibly nice person. But this whole "Fooled P&T" thing is so unnecessary. He's a respected and prolific magician/magic creator; he's got nothing to prove to us.
From what I understand, anyone who goes on P&T had to divulge their method to Thompson. That way, if P&T guessed wrong, there was no question at all about them being wrong and someone couldn't lie.
So if Sankey really did what he claims he did, he would have had to lie to Thompson about what method he was using.
I think the whole thing was pure publicity stunt in an attempt to keep himself relevant due to how much he relies on selling products to magicians. Sankey is the embodiment of the contemporary magic market - magicians creating tricks purely to sell to other magicians.
So if Sankey really did what he claims he did, he would have had to lie to Thompson about what method he was using.
I think the whole thing was pure publicity stunt in an attempt to keep himself relevant due to how much he relies on selling products to magicians. Sankey is the embodiment of the contemporary magic market - magicians creating tricks purely to sell to other magicians.
At the end of the video, he actually put these two slides (these are straight screenshots of his video)
So he did lie to Johnny Thompson and the other producers too, if what he's claiming is true
The thing I hate is not necessarily the act itself, how much publicity he got off of it. And beyond that, he called Penn a "rude bully" after Penn's response (which to be fair, was kinda mean, but you can totally see why he would blunt about it), as if Penn was attacking him for no reason whatsoever. And then he drops a link to the trick where he's selling it. He makes it look like P&T are the bad guys just for self promotion, and its upsetting because a ton of those 124 replies are saying they've lost respect for Penn for this.
And then at the end he says "I really wish magicians would stop talking about it. So dull and meaningless". But he's the one who brought it up in the first place. It's like if someone went to an art museum, stole a very valuable painting, told someone about it a month later, sold it to a different museum, and then said "I wish people would stop talking about how I stole that painting".