| I'm not OP, but there's a few rules being broken there that I can think of: - At the end of the trick, there's a reveal that wraps things up. In the case of escapes, it would be showing the magician safe and not actually drowned or eaten by sharks, etc. - The "volunteer" is just there to be a surrogate for the audience, to verify some things, they're not _really_ involved in the trick - You must hide that the volunteer is a plant when they are (they're not always). They couldn't do a lot of that stuff to some random person, so this rule is broken. - The magician would generally not talk about eg how Houdini would have done that trick (even if I think they're intentionally mis-stating how Houdini would have done it, for most tricks there'd be absolutely no reason to use picks, you'd use a key or a faked lock or a faked locking mechanism, because why not). It's an anti-trick because they're doing everything the wrong way around. The volunteer is the one that does the dangerous part, the magician isn't doing anything, the volunteer is obviously not a volunteer, the "trick" doesn't actually visibly show anything magical happening (visually, you just watched a murder essentially, no escape ... you only know it's an escape because they _probably_ didn't really just murder somebody for a show), and they "told" you how the trick was being done. All against the basic rules of magic. Perfect for Penn and Teller, they love playing meta games and having fun with the rules of magic. |
I think that's only a gradual realization on the part of the audience, or at least, only intended to be.