@Chrispydelic 490350 wrote:

I guess knowing a little magic myself (mainly close up illusions and conjuring) I can only see it from the performer’s side. It’s hard to not see the performance as an illusion and all of the fun comes from trying to work out how it was done rather than suspending my disbelief! I mean come on, that tan-line gag is SO blinking obvious! It’s EASY to perform illusions when you have stooges!

strangely enough I was interested in this too, especially as a modern take on the old (and probably not very PC) stereotypes of Oriental chaps who did these kinds of magic tricks. In the 70s it was usually some old white guy dressed up in a caricature of a Chinese from about 1902 (in spite of it being already 80 years out of date stereotype) but I wondered if there could be a opening for a modern Asian wideboy type doing this. [1]

But as I researched it more much of the act woudl be built upon deceiving people by a variety of means, and getting them to divulge personal info without knowing, not dissimilar to how the Police get people to confess to stuff and tabloid journalists getting info. its a thin like between light entertainment and outright deceipt and hard to know when to stop, hence why I decided it was too ethically questionable a career path to consider following. (that Pakistani dude from wolverhampton who worked for the papers and managed to persuade multiple dumb celebs he was a Arab sheikh did make me laugh though but I think even he got busted for some phone hacking or similar dodgu stuff).

[1] there is, except you normally end up reading about them on metpol press releases rather than radio times 😉