Hey guys, I was just talking to a few friends and the subject of doing pranks to 'show-off' magicians or just plain butthole magicians came up.

Here are a few of them:

After someone shows you a card effect, ask if you can show them one. Take their deck, cull out the Aces, go to your pocket for a marker, leaving the aces and do your singed card trick. At the end cop off another 5 cards or so and walkway.

Before someone goes to show someone a card effect, switch out there deck for a doublebacked, blank, or force deck.

Steal all their flash paper and replace it with tissue paper.

Ask to see their coins and do an effect...at the end switch it out for a similar look coin and walk away with theirs.

Close to the above: Do a coin effect, at the end.. classic palm their shell and walk away.'

Before they show an effect to someone Faro half the deck face up and half the deck face down without them knowing. Sit back and wait.

Switch their chop cup for a regular cup.

Put some wax on the ball that is in their chop cup. This will keep the ball at the top of the cup!

Glue their sponge balls together.

Take their linking ring set and solder the gap together.

Heat up a TT and stretch it out.

Cut their pulls in half.

Switch out magnetic coins for regular coins.

Tape their folding coin together.

While they are performing take their card box and cut the bottom open so when the put the cards back they come out the other end.

That is all for know! Feel Free to add on!

Chris

How about...

- short a couple of cards in their deck to hose up their riffle force

- "rearrange" the card pairs in their invisible deck

This may be slightly off topic but it really annoys me when a magician is demoing or performing an effect for another magician & the magician purposely tries to screw it up for the performer. I know you're thinking no sense of humor but think how often you have witnessed this & do you think a musician or dancer would do something similar

I agree that it is wrong to "mess" with a performer when they are working, however I see no problem in ribbing friends in the privacy of one's own home (or magic club, when appropriate).

Fred Cook used this one for years. He would hold a half dollar in his hands whenver someone was performing a coin trick requiring lapping.

When the lap was made, he would drop his coin on the (non carpeted) floor. Of course the performer would hear this and his initial reaction is always to look in the lap.

Interestingly, when one looks in the lap, it is natural to spread one's knees for some reason. This has the added effect of causing whatever WAS in the lap to hit the floor.

Now, go play nice kids.

As you hand someone a chop cup to check out, zap the side of it with a Joy Buzzer. Karrel Fox did this to me, years ago. I almost jumped out of my skin!

Do the Nate Leipzig Knife Sharpening on a Plate routine from Encyclopedia of Impromptu Magic, but trigger a Funken Ring as you touch the knife to the "spinning" plate. Freaks magicians out, completely.

Switch in a glued together deck as you allow a brother magus to "borrow" your deck.

Milt Kort used to do the dropped coin bit whenever he knew someone was sleeving. Did it to some pretty heavy hitters in the biz, too!

Just some things I have observed over the decades...

Lee Darrow, C.Ht.

Here's one that may be legend and one that I saw.

I've heard that Jay Marshall was performing and a few magic friends stopped by backstage before the show to let him know they were there. (Or it could have been Jay doing the visiting.) Anyway, during the show the performer begins doing the Linking Rings. He rubs two rings together and nothing happens. There are eight rings but no key, his friends had switched in a solid ring. The performer was stunned for several seconds before he realized what had happened.

At our local shop one of the guys was demoing the Ball and Vase when everyone started laughing. It seems that someone had put a blue ball into a set with a red false ball. Not only did the ball reappear in the vase, it had changed color too.

Ah, good times.

I agree not to mess with a performer in a performance situation but you could take the force card and then switch it

In theatre it is called "Corpsing" if I spelled it right and when used without blowing the show it is fantastic.
Example: Romeo and Juliet (since everyone knows it) Mercurio says " Romeo your fly is open" without anyone hearing it would be very funny to the performers/actors but would ruin the show if it was said aloud.
Have some fun.

On a loose aside - I was in a stage production as a principle, and I had to hand out buisnes cards on stage to other characters. On the final night, I wrote some of the most hillarious things possible.

No one laughed.

Just to annoy one of my friends, I swapped all the labels around on his decks so he didn't know what was what. Later that evening he showed his close friends how he had improved only for everything to unfold in disaster. He realised he'd been had, and saw the funny side.

If you mess with a working performer you derserve a smack.