I've been around professional magicians for much of my life. I don't do much magic these days for the same reason that after I started being around people like Jack Kirby and Sergio Aragonés, I stopped doing a lot of drawing. Why do something like that if the person next to you can do it a thousand times better? But I love magic and I know an awful lot about it.
Every so often, I've found myself in a roomful of magicians when one person was performing. Magicians love watching other magicians even though, 95% of the time, they know how it's done. They love seeing how well someone else does it. They love the unique twists and turns another magician may put on an old trick or how they apply well-known (among magicians) principles in another context.
Sometimes, a trick is even more amazing when you know how it's done because you know how difficult a certain move is to do. It's like how a baseball pitcher might watch another pitcher and really appreciate how that guy puts a certain spin on the ball.
And every so often, magicians love when they don't know how it's done. Magicians love being fooled more than any non-magicians do…because it's such a rare occurrence. 5% may be high.
Our clip today is from a recent Penn & Teller's Fool Us — a show that is somewhat controversial among professional magicians. Some love the attention it brings to the art form…and it has certainly boosted the careers of those who've gone on and done well on the program. And by "done well," I don't necessarily mean they fooled Penn and Teller. They may just have been so interesting and appealing (and maybe funny) that they gained fans and followers.
But other magicians think the show places too much emphasis on how tricks are done, reducing them to puzzles to be solved and inviting YouTube "reveals" and such. Not being a professional magician, I have no real opinion on that. If I was one, my feeling about it might have something to do with whether I could get on the show and, if so, how well it went. I think though that all magicians are excited when they see someone do a trick they can't figure out.
The magician in this clip is Dani DaOrtiz. He's from Spain, he's very famous for card magic…and he's amazing. On a few magician forums I'm on, seasoned pros are admitting they're watching the video over and over and asking, "How the hell did he do that?" Like me, they can figure out some of what he did but not all of what he did. They're all reacting like Teller does here, clearly baffled. And Teller's a hard guy to baffle…