Kiwi performance trio Laser Kiwi appeared on the television show Penn & Teller: Fool Us with an act featuring olives, martinis and giant stabbing toothpicks. Photo / Penn & Teller: Fool Us
From Morning Report for RNZ
Wellington-based performance trio Laser Kiwi have successfully fooled magicians Penn & Teller during an appearance on their television show.
Penn & Teller: Fool Us has its contestants perform a magic trick, and then the duo try to guess how they did it.
Only about 10 to 15% of all contestants manage to fool Penn & Teller.
Here’s Laser Kiwi on the show, which aired in the US this week:
The trio, who have been working together for about 10 years and call themselves “the world’s only surreal sketch circus”, entertained the live studio audience as the cameras rolled, with a jar of olives, a martini, 162 dominoes and some “big prop magic”.
Penn Jillette then told the trio that he and Raymond Teller had both loved the act, particularly how it combined goofiness with “a trick that is really complex”.
After the US magicians watched the Kiwis' act, they submitted their guesses for how the magic tricks were done - which were sent to the show’s judges to decide whether the pair had been fooled or had worked it out. The judges deemed that Laser Kiwi had indeed got their tricks past Penn & Teller.
One of Laser Kiwi, Degge Jarvie, told Morning Report that magic was something new for the friends, who have toured the world as a comedy and circus act.
They designed a new magic trick for the act, working it up over the kitchen counter in an Airbnb, and integrated it with elements from the hour-long comedy routine they are currently touring.
They were quietly hopeful the magic would get past Penn and Teller’s eagle eyes, Jarvie said. “Fairly confident - we’ve met a lot of magicians in our time and they seemed to think that we’d fooled them, so I honestly went in probably 50/50.”
Laser Kiwi were named for the infamous design that was floated as part of the 2015 New Zealand flag referendum.
Since appearing on Fool Us, the group had noticed an uptick in emails interested in booking them, Jarvie said.
However, he thinks they’ll stay focused on comedy for now, rather than moving into magic showmanship.
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