History Series / PennAndTellerFoolUs

* ObligatoryJoke: When a female danger act Misty Lee has Creator/LouieAnderson on stage to help her with her fake knife routine, she is down to her final two, one real and one fake. She places one blade against hs chest and one over the wooden board she is dropping the blades onto. She comments if Louie picked the wrong blade, there would be no more "WesternAnimation/LifeWithLouie" and he adds they would need to take him out in "{{Series/Baskets}}".

''Creator/PennAndTeller: Fool Us'' is a magic competition show that first ran on Creator/{{ITV}} before being picked up by Creator/TheCW. It is currently hosted by Brooke Burke (Season 10-present) and previously hosted by Creator/JonathanRoss (Seasons 1 & 2) and Creator/AlysonHannigan (Seasons 3-9).

The show's premise is simple: magicians come onto the show and perform a trick in front of the eponymous duo. Penn & Teller then have to figure out how the trick was performed. If they are fooled, the magician then gets to perform their act as an opener to Penn & Teller's long-running Las Vegas stage show.

** Adrián Carratalá's trick involved picking out a woman from the audience, asking to borrow a ring she was wearing and making it disappear. He has planted a ring box on top of a small ladder on the stage, and when he opens the ring box... it's empty, with Adrián himself noting that if the ring had been there, that would have been too obvious. [[spoiler: The ring is actually tied to Adrián's shoe lace.]][[spoiler: He then disprove's Penn's theory that he had a reel system set up in his clothes to pull the ring down to his shoe by ripping off his tearaway suit to show he had nothing hidden on him.]]

* {{Determinator}}: Shin Lim. He had to give up playing classical piano at the highest level in college due to developing carpal tunnel syndrome, so he turned to magic and ended up fooling Penn & Teller during his first appearance, after only seven years of practice. Then he suffered an injury that severed the tendons in his left thumb (incredibly bad for a card magician who doesn't have the benefit of dialogue to distract the audience), but went back on the show even though he still didn't have full sensation back in his thumb. [[spoiler: He fooled them again, and they were so certain he would, Penn did a card force trick for Shin that resulted in him drawing a card which read "You fooled us!"]]

** Season 7 episode 2 had Penn perform a trick to try and fool Teller, [[spoiler: which he did]].

%% * GettingCrapPastThe Radar: Due to overwhelming and persistent misuse, please check the trope page to make sure your example fits the current definition.

** In Shawn Farquhar's second appearance, a "memory trick" where Farquhar pretends to read lines from a blank Sherlock Holmes book to answer questions about it, Penn notes that Farquhar clearly was leading the audience to believe that there had been a book switch, because it was the obvious way of doing the trick. But he knew that Farquhar knew that was the obvious way of doing the trick, and therefore, he wouldn't do the trick that way, because it was too obvious, and thus wouldn't fool Penn and Teller. He even hypothesized that Farquhar might even have another book hidden away on his person somewhere, but it was blank, too. (Farquhar [[WordOfGod later admitted]] that he did not, but he did have a sign secreted on his person that said "NOPE!") He then went on to guess it actually was a memory trick, but that Farquhar had been using some tricks to force particular pages that he had memorized sections of. [[spoiler: He was wrong; Farquhar used [[TakeAThirdOption yet another different technique]].]]
** Kostya Kimlat performs a famous trick that Penn and Teller had themselves performed. Kimlat knew they knew every method for doing the trick. To the audience, his trick is normal, but every step of his trick is actually done in a specific way to disprove each and every known method of doing the trick. Because Penn and Teller are looking for the known ways of doing the trick, [[spoiler: they miss his novel method for doing the trick,]] which is much more technically difficult than every other way of doing the trick.

* LatexPerfection: [[spoiler: Chris Dugdale's trick involves him disguised as a bald African-American man with a full-head silicone mask and gloves and sunglasses, posing as a "random audience member."]]

''Creator/PennAndTeller: Fool Us'' is a magic competition show that first ran on Creator/{{ITV}} before being picked up by Creator/TheCW. It was originally hosted by Creator/JonathanRoss (Seasons 1 & 2) and is currently hosted by Creator/AlysonHannigan (Seasons 3-present).

* ReformedCriminal: Magician [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdWhT_qG5Kg Aiden Sinclair]] is an admitted former criminal and conman. However, years ago a chance encounter with Penn himself on the streets of Vegas when Aiden used a fake accent and backstory, and Penn was nothing but kind to him and never suspected the man before him was a conman. This rocked Aiden to his core, and soon after he turned himself in. He served five years in prison and came out as a magician and works with at-risk children to help steer them away from the path he chose.

* IncrediblyLamePun: Hannigan frequently includes one in her patter when introducing and dismissing a host, as well as

* BeggarWithASignboard: Piff the Magic Dragon's intro video includes a shot of him levitating his canine sidekick in the street behind a carboard sign reading "World's First Levitating Chihuahua -- Will Float For Food".

** The intro video for Dyno Staats, SteamPunk Science Magician, shows him getting out of a [[Film/BackToTheFuture DeLorean]], and during his act he refers to "[[Franchise/StarWars kyber]] and [[Franchise/StarTrek dilithium]] energies".

*** In his first act, he uses a well-known trick that Penn and Teller themselves used on the Today Show just a few months before his appearance on the show. He knows that Penn and Teller know every method for doing the trick (of which there are several). To solve this problem, he simply invents yet another novel method for doing the trick, much more technically difficult than almost all of the standard methods, that Penn and Teller have never seen before, and then does the trick in such a way to sequentially prove that he isn't using any known method of doing the trick. At the end of the act, Penn asks to see the cards (in order to check if it's a stripper deck, shaved to be narrower at one end), to which Kimlat readily agrees, disproving the last possible known method. Penn gets increasingly exasperated as the trick goes on and he catxhes onto the fact that Kimlat is sequentially disproveing each known method right in front of him.

*** In his first act, he uses a well-known trick that Penn and Teller themselves used on the Today Show just a few months before his appearance on the show. He knows that Penn and Teller know every method for doing the trick (of which there are several). To solve this problem, he simply invents yet another novel method for doing the trick, much more technically difficult than almost all of the standard methods, that Penn and Teller have never seen before, and then does the trick in such a way to sequentially prove that he isn't using any known method of doing the trick. At the end of the act, Penn asks to see the cards (in order to check if it's a stripper deck, shaved to be narrower at one end), to which Kimlat readily agrees, disproving the last possible known method.

* FunWithAcronyms: Winners get a Fooled Us trophy...with the F and U initials in a MUCH larger font than the other letters.

* AwesomeMcCoolName: Mike Super. In his intro, he "admits" that it's actually a stage name and his real name is "Johnny von Awesome".

*** In his second appearance, [[spoiler: his trick is exposed by Penn as not being a trick involving any kind of sneaky sleights or swaps, and that he does legitimately reach into the falling cascade of cards and pluck out the right one at the right moment, counting the cards as they fall. Either he's very protective of his particular method, and is willing to forgo a second victory for the sake of it and simply agree Penn had outed him, or he is simply that impressive at handling cards which is in itself a marvel, and his entire 'fool' is that there is no fool. According to Kimlat's youtube channel, it is the latter, and even shows how it is done.]]

* CallBack: When he returns for his second attempt to fool Penn and Teller, Shawn Farquahar remarks that the phrase "deja vu" comes to mind, calling back to a joke he made on his first appearance. He took it UpToEleven in his third appearance, as he took elements of the tricks he did in his previous appearances and melded them into a larger trick.

* AndNowForSomethingCompletelyDifferent:
** The Season 6 premiere flipped the script somewhat and had Penn & Teller perform their end-of-show trick in front of David Copperfield to see if they could fool him.
** Season 7 episode 2 had Penn perform a trick to try and fool Teller, [[spoiler:he did]].

%% * GettingCrapPastThe Radar: Due to overwhelming and persistent misuse, GCPTR is on-page examples only until 01 June 2021. If you are reading this in the future, please check the trope page to make sure your example fits the current definition.

* NakedPeopleAreFunny: Vinny Grasso takes the "nothing up my sleeve" bit to its logical conclusion, and performs his trick in the nude (with a screen covering his sensitive bits). Many jokes are made of this, both by Vinny and by Allyson. Penn & Teller thought that he was using the nudity as an excuse to have the screen, which hid the method he used to perform the trick, though this turned out not to be the case.
* NeverHeardThatOneBefore: Magicians who call [[TheVoiceless Teller]] up as an audience volunteer are often unable to resist making a joke like "Pick a card, but don't say what it is yet", which always gets an exaggeratedly weary facial expression from Teller. One magician asked Teller from across the stage to yell out a number to choose, and Teller responded with his middle finger.

* SkunkStripe: Dyno Staats.

*** In his first act, he uses a well-known trick that Penn and Teller themselves used on the Today Show just a few months before his appearance on the show. He knows that Penn and Teller know every method for doing the trick (of which there are several). To solve this problem, he simply invents yet another novel method for doing the trick, much more technically difficult than almost all of the standard methods, that Penn and Teller have never seen before, and then does the trick in such a way to sequentially prove that he isn't using any known method of doing the trick. At the end of the act, Penn asks to see the cards (in order to check if they are marked), to which Kimlat readily agrees, disproving the last possible known method.