One thing that unites geeks around the world is that we love to solve problems. Our hyper-flexible minds latch on to challenge, whether it be in a video game, with a tricky Lego build or programming an app. That’s why one of the most lowkey brain-bending shows on TV is Penn & Teller: Fool Us, starting its sixth season on Monday, June 17, on the CW. If you haven’t watched it, the premise is simple: guest magicians show a trick to the duo, who then have to figure out how it’s done without telling the viewing audience. Even if you don’t dig illusions, it’ll have your mind racing looking for the methods behind the magic. The show has a bunch of people putting clips up on YouTube, so we wanted to share our 11 favorite acts from previous seasons.
Shin Lim
Vancouver-born close-up magician Shin Lim flabbergasted both the crowd and Penn & Teller in his second season appearance. On the surface, the act seems simple — he has an audience member choose a card, sign it, and then makes it appear from his mouth. But then things start escalating, getting more and more complex and unlikely as his deft sleight of hand manipulates that card, a second, and then the full deck in ways you have to see to believe. Like Teller, Lim doesn’t speak during his act, which means he has even fewer ways to distract you from whatever it is he’s doing. I’ve watched this trick a dozen times or more and am no closer to understanding it than I was the first time. Lim would go on to wow the judges on America’s Got Talent.
Steven Brundage
Magic is about misdirection and lies most of the time, but sometimes it’s just about incredible physical and mental dexterity. Steven Brundage is a master of the Rubik’s cube, using the six-sided color puzzle in a number of brain-bending ways to fool Penn & Teller. We’re pretty sure that there’s very little in the way of actual trickery in his performance, just incredible memory, finger speed and timing. The bit where he puts a scrambled cube in Teller’s hand and then secretly takes his solved cube and replicates the pattern on all six sides of Teller’s is unbelievable.
Javi Benitez
When Penn Jillette says you did some of the best sleight of hand he’s ever seen, that’s high praise. Javi Benitez is a Spanish magician who has been learning the craft since he was a child, and his card handling is nearly supernatural. The routine he does for Penn and Teller involves a handful of seemingly blank playing cards that shift and transform in amazing ways — first to a quartet of jokers, then to queens, artistic patterns, aces and finally back to blank again. It’s a virtuosic performance that will have you pausing the video over and over to look for clues on how it’s done.
Suzanne
Minneapolis-born magician Suzanne was the first woman to get the prestigious close-up magician of the year award from the Magic Castle, and she shows her chops in this incredibly tight trick. She uses host Jonathan Ross in the act, which involves placing a Band-Aid on his hand, another on her forehead, and somehow swapping the Sharpie inscription on each of them. It’s a deceptively simple trick that manages to bemuse Penn and Teller, who can’t see through the technique even after examining her props up close. This one proves that sometimes it’s the ones without all the pomp and circumstance that are the most perplexing.
Shawn Farquhar
Fourth-generation Canadian magician Shawn Farquhar is a repeat performer on the show as well as a former World Champion of card magic. He’s a relentlessly creative trick designer, and his first appearance on the show has him starting with a freshly opened pack of cards, having Penn pick one at random, sign it, shuffle the deck, and then trap it between his hands. While it’s there, Farquhar somehow manages to reassemble the deck in its original order, put Penn’s card back in it upside down, and then put the deck back inside a sealed box. It’s one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen and it drives Penn absolutely nuts.
John Archer
Bald-headed, fast-talking John Archer introduces himself as a “comedy magician” when he takes the stage, but behind all the laughs he’s got an incredible trick that befuddles the duo. He comes on with five envelopes, one of which contains a 100£ bill in it. He then goes to four audience members and lets each of them pick one of their choice. So he has a four out of five chance of losing his money, right? Wrong, somehow – he manages to patter and bamboozle all four people into somehow picking wrong envelopes and walks away not only with his hundred quid, but also a coveted fooler trophy. And he gets a ton of laughs in the process, which is a bonus.
Alexandra Duvivier
French second-generation magician Alexandra Duvivier was born into the business, although her father didn’t want her to follow in his footsteps. She performs an illusion that he came up with that’s absolutely mindboggling, where she claims to have done the entire trick ahead of time to save five minutes, predicting five cards that would appear face up in a deck with all the other cards face down. Then she repeats the whole thing, only “accidentally” screws it up so the deck winds up in a huge messy pile on the table. Would you be surprised if we told you that by some miracle she manages to reassemble the deck with the same five cards upwards inside a canvas bag? Probably not, because it’s a magic show, but the boys have no idea how it was done.
Jean-Pierre Parent
Closing a woman inside a box and sawing her in half or performing other feats of cruelty to her is a long-heralded magic act, but Canadian cruise ship magician Jean-Pierre Parent puts a very weird twist on it by having the whole thing open to Penn & Teller as he compresses Alyson Hannigan into the size of a carry-on bag using a custom-built mechanism. It’s quite a performance, especially due to his unwitting assistant’s reactions, and Penn guesses that there’s some advanced technology involved in the setup only to be shot down by Parent.
Ryan Hayashi
Coin magic is a very rich tradition, from simple bar tricks to insanely complex routines like the one Ryan Hayashi pulled in Season 5. With just a pocketful of change and four playing cards, he manipulates and maneuvers four coins around a table in a seamless and mystifying manner. It’s wild how simple this looks – quarters just appearing and disappearing – but as he repeats it over and over, adding new wrinkles and modifications each time and accompanying it with a hilariously over-the-top monologue. Teller’s facial expressions as he pulls this off are priceless.
Siegfried Tieber
Ecuadorian magician Siegfried Tieber is currently based in Los Angeles and he’s on this list not just for his ridiculous card trick, which somehow manages to isolate a pair of selected cards in two separate stacks after the deck’s been shuffled and cut by both Penn and Teller, but also for his delivery. His heavy accent and bulging eyes give him a sort of Borat vibe, which he leans into heavily. It’s a seriously entertaining trick, and he wins a trophy because there are a ton of different ways it could be performed and Penn didn’t manage to suss out the method in a few guesses.
Kostya Kimlat
Repeat contestants are some of the most infuriating to Penn and Teller. They really don’t like it when somebody manages to pull the wool over their eyes. One of the most insufferable foolers is Ukranian-American magician and motivational speaker Kostya Kimlat, who returned to the show with a trick he’s been working on since he was eighteen. Unlike a bunch of the other tricks in this article, Penn and Teller guessed how it was done, but don’t let that turn you off. “How it was done” involves a ludicrous amount of physical and technical skill, as he reached into a cascade of cards to pull out a single chosen one — a feat that would be impossible to any but the most gifted card manipulators.
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