Welcome to The Great WHYY April Fools Magic Trick

April Fools Day will soon be upon us, and what better way to celebrate than to pull an amazing card trick on one of your friends! Let us teach you how....

Here's what the trick looks like...

You hand your friend an ordinary deck of cards. They shuffle the deck and seal one of the cards inside of an envelope. You then tell them to hang on to the envelope, and you'll finish the trick later. Several days or hours pass (depending on when you do the trick). Then one evening, while your friend is tuned to WHYY, a friendly person pops up asking if by any chance they happen to have a mysterious envelope. The friendly WHYY person has one too. He opens his, tells your friend to open their's, and voila the cards match!

Now, here's how it works...

This trick is based on a magic technique known as a card force. In a card force, the person thinks they're picking a card at random, but actually, you have complete control over which card is chosen. Magicians have a zillion different card forces -- the one we're going to teach you here was popularized by magicians Penn and Teller.

A brief pause here while the web staff of WHYY declares how much they love Penn and Teller. We think they're great performers, great writers, and great people. They also first taught us this card force on one of their TV specials. (Since about a zillion people saw that show, we don't think we're taking any food out of their mouths here.) By the way, this card trick and lots of other great tricks you can pull on friends and total strangers are all contained in their wonderful book Penn and Teller's How To Play in Traffic. We love this book so much that we're offering it for sale in our online bookstore. While we're at it, we also urge you to watch their cable TV show, Penn and Teller's Sin City Spectacular, and to listen to their recent interview on Fresh Air. And, of course, see them in person if you ever get the chance. Their touring schedule is on their website, www.sincity.com. Anyway, back to the card trick...

Decide where you want to do the trick (maybe you've invited a friend over to your house, maybe you want to do the trick on your boss in their office, maybe at a restaurant, use your imagination). Wherever you decide to do it, before your friend arrives, get a regular deck of cards, and remove the Queen of Spades. That's the card you're going to force your friend to pick. Have an envelope nearby, and hide the Queen of Spades underneath the envelope. Also make sure you have a pen nearby. Now, when your friend shows up, give him the deck of cards, have them shuffle the deck and start dealing cards face down on the table until they feel the urge to stop. Make sure they realize that it's totally up to them as to when they stop.

While they're doing that, you say "Hmm, I need an envelope for this," and rummage around until you "find" the envelope. Pick it up casually, making sure you're ALSO holding the facedown Queen of Spades underneath. Pick up the pen too. When your friend is done dealing, hand them the pen and ask them if they know the exact time.

Giving them the pen and asking for the time distracts your friend just enough for him not to pay a lot of attention to you when you casually drop the envelope and the Queen of Spades on top of the pile of cards. You realize what's just happened here, right? The Queen of Spades is now on top of the pile. As soon as your friend tells you the time, you say "write the date and time here on this envelope. Now take the last card that you dealt and without looking at it and without showing it to me, seal it inside the envelope."

Penn and Teller stress that it's important not to rush any of this...the more casual you are, the better you'll pull this off. They don't realize that THIS is the moment where you're pulling a fast one on them. After they seal up the card, you tell them, "Put the envelope somewhere safe, maybe in your wallet, and I'll finish the trick later."

OK, now it's time for the magic! For this trick to work, it's absolutely essential that your friend is either watching WHYY-TV12 or listening to WHYY-91FM just before 8 PM on Thursday, April 1st. You get one shot at this, so don't blow it! At just before 8 o'clock, we're going to broadcast special announcements on both TV12 and 91FM revealing the mystery card. To the majority of our audience, the announcement will make no sense, but your friend will be amazed!

Once the trick is over, we hope you'll drop us a line at webmaster@whyy.org and let us know how it went. And of course, you'll want to get Penn and Teller's book, right?