Awesome / Penn & Teller: Fool Us

Anytime an act is able to fool Penn & Teller, one of the most respected magic acts in the industry, is worthy of an entry on this page. Some notable examples are:

• Mathieu Bich, who not only managed to fool the duo with his "Spreadwave" card trick, but also anticipated how they would say he did the trick. Teller immediately leapt up to give a standing ovation.
• Shawn Farquhar, a Canadian magician who specializes in close-up magic, and the first magician to fool Penn & Teller twice.
  • In his first appearance, he performs a magic trick inside Penn's hands, by putting a shuffled deck of cards back into new deck order inside a sealed box, and fools the duo.
  • In his second appearance, he reads extended passages out of a book that is revealed to be completely blank. Penn first jokingly/angrily berates Shawn for coming back onto the show before declaring that it was probably a memory trick. Penn's expression when he finds out that it's something else entirely is an Eye Take for the ages. And, when giving Shawn the trophy, Penn, acknowledging Shawn's skills, declares that Shawn will never be allowed back onto the show.
    Penn: You. Rat. Bastard!
• Kostya Kimlat, who fooled them with the exact same card trick they performed on the Today Show two months prior, using a totally different method of the trick that they could not solve. Halfway through, they realize what he's up to; Penn gets slowly agitated ("I'm gonna break your hands...") while Teller is practially giggling.
  • Doubles as a Funny Moment, as when Penn delivers the verdict, he reveals that he fooled him, to which the trophy starts to descend and the 'Fooler' alert blares on the screen; only to then tell them to return the trophy to the rafters and to stop applauding. Cue this rant:
    Penn: You fooled me! You know for a fact, that it's hard to say the word 'big' without covering it with 'dumb'. You fooled the big, dumb guy. That doesn't mean jack! Two thirds of the people on here fool the big dumb guy - when you bring that thing down, when you say "Fooler Fooler Fooler", is when you fool Teller. And Teller handled the cards, and he looked at it, and he thought about it, AND YOU FOOLED HIM!
  • In his next appearance he doesn't fool them, but only because there's actually no trick at all. As he demonstrated on a talk show appearance afterward, he is genuinely able to snatch a specific card from a falling deck after years of practice.
• Mahdi Gilbert, who was born without hands and feet, performs sleight of hand that is so incredibly smooth that Penn's guess is completely off the mark.
• As awesome as it is when Penn is the one to declare an act has fooled them, it's even better when Teller is the one to do so. When Suzanne's Band-Aid trick concludes and he steps up to show her a picture detailing their thoughts, she denies its accuracy; after examining the Band-Aids himself, he wordlessly mouths "Fooled" to Penn to wild applause.
  • After Wayne Hoffman performs, the pair come up to inspect the table and cloth used in his act; when they find nothing, Teller cocks a finger up to the ceiling and beckons the Fool Us trophy down.
  • Richard Turner, a "card mechanic" who only has minimal peripheral vision, shows off his card manipulation skills, which are so smooth that Teller tries to give him the trophy before the actual trick because knows he'll never be able to catch the moves. Once the trick itself is completed, Penn & Teller don't give Alyson the chance to do her usual short interview and immediately give Richard the trophy because he is just that good.
  • Emily Victoria is especially impressive, considering she's only been a stage magician and mentalist for about a year. After completing her routine, Penn and Teller examine her person for some kind of wire that would have given her the necessary information to accomplish the trick. When they find nothing, Teller writes a message to Emily stating that she'd fooled them.
• Shin Lim's card routines. Both of them.
  • His first appearance is a double subversion. The boys caught several of the moves he made but couldn't figure out how they all came together for the final effect.
  Penn: And, as Teller said, we don't even know how you managed to vanish the *** marker!
  • Lim's second appearance is made even more awesome considering he had surgery on his thumb months prior and risked having the trick be ruined on-stage. Penn came ready this time and revealed that they'd been fooled by mocking Shin's dramatic style with a prepared deck of cards.
• Adrián Carratalá makes an even more dramatic reveal that he’d predicted how they would assume his ring flight trick was done. Upon their guess that he was using trick clothing to get the ring onto his shoelace, he strips down to reveal he’s actually wearing tear-away clothes, with "Too obvious as well" written on his undershirt.
• Penn and Teller actually get up the guts to try to fool another magician themselves, none other than the man they describe as the world's greatest living magician, David Copperfield. The result: Copperfield figured out almost everything involved in the trick, but there's just one part he couldn't, which is enough to declare they did it.
• Spanish magician Jandro set the record for being the show's fastest fooler. Penn & Teller only deliberated for a few seconds after he had performed his routine (a card in a locked box protected by several other security measures being the same card that was freely chosen by the duo and not a force) before Penn had them bring the trophy down.
  • When Jandro performed for the second time on the show, his routine involved the prediction of a freely selected card printed on a Lego brick that had to be pried free from a Lego portrait of Teller. Once again, Penn had the trophy brought down before Allyson could begin her post-trick interview.
  • Jandro's third trophy has him ask the producers to have Penn and Teller guess a number between 0 to 1000 inside a sealed envelope and then he has an entire domino effect with a message saying exactly what number it is (with a Bait-and-Switch for good measure). Penn, knowing Jandro is an honest man, knows that there's no way Jandro even opened the envelope or even just tried to pull out a trick that allows him to know the number inside the envelope as Penn knows that it would be too easy for magicians and Jandro never goes for the easy route. Teller figures that Jandro hid Spanish children in the blocks with Penn retorting that there's no way Jandro be that crazy to do that, so both are just flabbergasted on how he even guessed the correct number.
  • Jandro's fourth trophy has him pull what is possibly the craziest disappearing track in impossible conditions. His trick involves making two (toys) Statues of Liberty disappear by having three people stand in front of a platform with two air traffic controllers at the back watching and a Spanish version of Penn and Teller at the front all in in an airplane runway at daylight. He then drops the canvas down, locks it in place, and then starts removing the covers, revealing no one was inside. Penn tries to guess that there are mirrors and that there is a hole underneath the runway, only for Jandro to pull the I Know You Know I Know trope by claiming that he's not gonna think the way he'll normally think for this trick. He then makes Penn and Teller open an envelope in front of them that outright tells how the method is done. Penn and Teller are just shocked at the method that they end being stunned before laughing and complimenting just how crazy Jandro's trick is that they have no choice but to give Jandro his fourth trophy.
  • Jandro's fifth trophy, on top of him helping with all of Penn and Teller's tricks for that season, has him doing a trick in reverse. He does this by having a particular "lucky" coin out of a whole batch of different currencies picked by Penn as the end, then having Alyson pick the exact same coin from her batch of currencies without even being aware of it. In the middle of all of that, he fires two confetti cannons to celebrate the "ending." Penn and Teller just wish he had a third one.
• Australian magician Helen Coghlan becoming the show's first three-time fooler. Special notice to her having Penn & Teller personally inspect the box she used for the trick WHILE helping her assemble the box as well as after the trick itself.
• Ondrej Psenicka becomes the show's second three-time fooler with Penn explaining that while Penn and Teller figured out that Alyson was actually forced rather than free to have the audience choose and knew that the third part was just Ondrej repeating those phrases (with Ondrej verifying that he did it more than 2000 times for 22 hours), they ultimately couldn't figure out the big card trick and thought it was double sided.
  Penn: God damn you to hell.
• Mentalist Keith Kong manages to fool the two by only knowing that while they know Keith actually forced Alyson to choose "Old MacDonald", they don't know how he even pulled it off especially after examining the paper.
• Ryan Hayashi's Coin Matrix performance was so impressive and hilariously over the top. His performance during the act impressed the duo so much with how well he performed that they just enjoyed the performance and didn't catch his last few set of tricks.
• The Evasons (a husband and wife mentalist team), who did not fool Penn and Teller... but Penn says that he's still impressed, because he and Teller took four years to do a much simpler version of the trick where they could only identify a deck of cards, and the Evasons were able to do far more than that.^{how they did it...} Both Evasons have memorized a series of code words that correspond to various objects, like "Can you identify this now, Tess?" actually means "eyeglasses case." And they do this for everything including serial numbers.
• Lea Kyle fooling Penn & Teller with quick-change. Using clothes that she made herself, no less.
  Penn: Now, we've been doing this show for seven years, and quick-change does not seem like magic to us. We know the basics of quick-change. But... this isn't a quick-change act. This is a magic act.
• Dani DaOrtiz demonstrated card manipulation that was so smooth and fast that he could make cards appear right under Teller's nose without Teller noticing and also showed off that he could keep complete control of a deck even while seeming to haphazardly tossing cards around. Plus, Donny Osmond, a Las Vegas veteran, was on stage and ready to play it up an amazed audience member before becoming awed and DaOrtiz's skills and started reacting genuinely. On his podcast, Penn later declared DaOrtiz to be the greatest card magician alive, surpassing Juan Tamariz — a renowned magician and DaOrtiz's mentor.
• Penn's daughter Moxie comes on the show in the season 10 premiere after lying to him about being overseas when she was really practicing her trick. Teller shakes her hand for fooling them that way. And then she fools them with the last part of her trick!

---