PO'ed

[billydkid]

It really pisses me off that mentalists won't tell how they do their most interesting tricks. My guess is that part of the reason is that the explanations are so mundane (ex. the participants are shills - which they often are and which, for my two cents, renders the trick pointless) that telling would cause everyone to lose interest. I have always felt that for any mentalist or illusionist trick to be legitimate only the performer proper should be an actor in the presentation and anything that uses the audience under false pretenses is BS. If the presenter is not doing something that requires some remarkable skill, what is the point. The slight of hand guys - those are the guys I admire. I'm sorry, this shouldn't be under paranormal, but what the hey. I started out wanting to talk about fake paranormal vs. people who present the illusion of paranormal, but are honest about it - but that fizzled out in my brain.

 

[JLam]

Most (not all, but most) true mentalists do not claim to have paranormal powers. The really well known ones (keeping in mind that even a famous mentalist can make a room full of ordinary people say "Who?") just present their act with no explanation, or sometimes an explicit explanation that "I am not doing anything paranormal."

As far as shills go, a few (very few) effects require shills, but most do not. Take a look at guys like Richard Osterlind, Max Maven, Derren Brown and Banachek. These guys are the top of the heap in the world of mentalism and they rarely, if ever, use shills. If you'd like to learn more about how some of these things are done, you should buy some of their books and learn.

Why would you want them to expose their methods? How is that different from a sleight of hand guy exposing his methods? Did you know that many mentalism effects rely on sleight of hand as well?

Just some things to think about.

 

[Soapy Sam]

"(keeping in mind that even a famous mentalist can make a room full of ordinary people say "Who?") "jlam4911...(snip)

Yeah. I'ts amazing. How do they DO that? Mind control?

 

[Brown]

I was once privileged to have Mr. Randi himself explain a mentalism trick to me. Damn, was the explanation mundane.

That is not to say that I would be able to do the trick myself. The trick requires a bit of practice and a lot of chutzpah. It's the practice that makes the trick work, but it's the chutzpah that makes the trick stunning.

The first time I saw a true mentalist perform, he was trying to show how simple trickery could appear to be ESP. He succeeded, as far as the audience was concerned. He made a remarkable prediction which was 100 percent correct, and the audience had no idea how he did it. I was just as baffled as everyone else.

But now I know techniques for performing that very trick. Not only that, I could perform the trick myself, which means that it is super easy to do. (That is not to say that I know how this particular mentalist performed the trick, but I have a pretty good idea.)

By the way, it's not really fair to divide performers into sleight-of-hand specialist and mentalists. In fact, many baffling mentalist tricks use sleight-of-hand.