Arts, Comedy, Music & Film

Magic, puzzles & curiosities

Magic, puzzles & curiosities sits within Arts, Comedy, Music & Film. Watch for the relationship between a finished performance, its craft, and the cultural context around it. This selection contains 34 catalog videos from 32 distinct channels. The examples below offer specific entry points into the subject, with their own vocabulary and scope, rather than a prescribed sequence of lessons.

Recurring catalog topics include card magic, magic, penn and teller, perception, practical effects and rube goldberg. These tags describe overlapping directions within the collection; an individual video may connect several of them. Recorded formats include comedy, commentary, demo, documentary, explainer, interview, lecture, music and other. Use those differences to choose between approaches to the subject and to compare how different contributors frame related questions.

“The man with 1,000 Klein Bottles UNDER his house - Numberphile”, listed under Numberphile, is cataloged as interview. Numberphile visits Cliff Stoll, the man behind ACME Klein Bottles, and sees how he stores a thousand glass Klein bottles in a crawlspace under his house. A remote-controlled forklift fetches them.

“Dani DaOrtiz at Fool US 2022 (the act that Penn and Teller didn’t even try to…”, listed under dani daortiz, is cataloged as demo. A ten-minute card-magic act by Dani DaOrtiz performed on Penn & Teller: Fool Us in 2022. It is built on timing, misdirection and psychology, and the method defeated the show's hosts.