Bar Tricks - the Fun of Fooling Drunks

No doubt, you already saw this small collection of Bar Tricks. I was wondering if it might have caught your conceptual eye enough to make you want to look for more such. Perhaps you clicked your way to Bartender Magic or that inspiring collection of Easy Bar Tricks and the surprisingly large gathering of bar trick videos from Metacafe.

Bar tricks. There's a unique fun flavor if ever there was one. It's a kind of folk magic, I guess, where you need to be just drunk enough to think you can't be fooled, or foolish enough to think you can really fool anybody. Something casual, informal about how these tricks are performed for sometimes an audience of one.

And sometimes for the entire bar, by accomplished bar magicians, raising the bar, as bar-magician Doc Eason describes, to the level of public performance. "Every crowd is different," writes Eason, "as are their reactions... so the freshness of the crowd makes a difference... I absolutely love doing the card under glass... I don't think there is a stronger bar trick... I can make even the most jaded critic come around with that routine... oh, I will cut and paste the routine so I may not do the whole thing start to finish... but this gets their attention in a way that few other tricks do."

There's something fun about fooling drunks. Because for drunks, there's something fun about getting fooled. Especially when you're getting fooled by someone who is very good at what he is pretending to do, and even more especially when you know that you are too drunk to tell.

So even if you do get fooled, unless you were foolish enough to bet a lot of money, it doesn't really count. You were drunk. Your judgment was affected. You were not really taken in, not really fooled, not really gullible.

It's that taste of fun you get when you let yourself get fooled. It's like the taste of Half-Belief, only spicier.

Fooled Fun. Which reminds me: Happy April Fooled Day! All year around!

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith