I was watching an interview with Penn and Teller in which they talked about one of my favourite routines of theirs, Polyester in Excelsis Deo more commonly known as The Magic of Polyester and which I always thought was called Man of the (Synthetic) Cloth.
I guess if anything this is because magic tricks don’t actually need names unless you’re going to publish it and want people to be able to find it easily to buy it. Penn and Teller don’t publish their work so this never comes up I guess. I’ll probably talk about the publishing mindset at some point in the future. But this isn’t about that.
The interview is this one they did with the times. Here’s the video, the quote I want to call your attention to is at 25:20
In case you don’t want to watch I’ve transcribed it:
“We were talking about wouldn’t it be great to do a really cheesy trick and attribute it to God. That is present a really cheesy trick as if it was a genuine miracle.”
[…]
“That idea just floated around fr years and years and years and saw something like 20 years ago I stumbled across and old piece of magic called the turban trick and we adapted that and improved it and modified it and turned it into the piece, so now the miracle that Teller the saviour performs is the healing of a piece of polyester.”
“And I should tell you this is the nice secret about that when you see the show you’ll see this polyester… and the polyester didn’t look good enough for us so you’re actually watching beautiful china silk being called polyester, just to make it appear more cheesy”
And in case you don’t want to read that whole thing it boils down to 4 facts.
Teller:
- Wanted to do a cheesy trick with polyester
- Polyester didn’t look good enough
- So they secretly used china silk
- And just called it polyester
This interview sprang to mind when I was looking for a suitable fabric to make a new egg bag¹ and came across this:
No further evidence.
¹ Yes I’m making my own egg bag. No I won’t explain why. Yet.