Wellington-based performance trio Laser Kiwi have successfully fooled magicians Penn & Teller during an appearance on their television show.
Penn & Teller: Fool Us has contestants perform a magic trick, and then the duo try to guess how they did it.
Only about 10-15% of contestants manage to fool Penn & Teller.
Here’s Laser Kiwi on the show, which aired in the US this week:
The trio, who have been working together for about 10 years and call themselves “the world’s only surreal sketch circus”, entertained the live studio audience as the cameras rolled, with a jar of olives, a martini, 162 dominoes and some “big prop magic”.
Penn Jillette then told the trio that he and Raymond Teller had both loved the act, particularly how it combined goofiness with “a trick that is really complex”.
After the US magicians watched the Kiwis’ act, they submitted their guesses on how the magic tricks were done — and these were sent to the show’s judges to decide whether the pair had been fooled or had worked it out. The judges deemed the trio had indeed got their tricks past Penn & Teller.
One third of Laser Kiwi, Degge Jarvie, told RNZ’s Morning Report that magic was something new for the friends, who have toured the world as a comedy and circus act.
They designed a new magic trick for the act, working it up over the kitchen counter in an Airbnb, and integrated it with elements from the hour-long comedy routine they were currently touring.
They were quietly hopeful the magic would get by Penn and Teller’s eagle eyes, Jarvie said they were “fairly confident — we’ve met a lot of magicians in our time, and they seemed to think that we’d fooled them, so I honestly went in probably 50:50”.
The trio were named after an infamous 2015 flag design that was floated as part of a referendum on the New Zealand national flag referendum.
Jarvie said, since appearing into the show, Laser Kiwi have noticed an uptick in emails interested in seeing about booking them. However, he thought they would stay focused on comedy for now, rather than jumping to magic showmanship.
rnz.co.nz
