If you are a smoker, one of the most annoying things that can happen to you is lighting your cigarette from the wrong end.
You can be drunk, stupid, or a combination of the two.
But what’s more annoying is having a cigarette that has dedicated the entirety of its own existence to not getting lit up.
Unfortunately for Mario Lopez, a magician, this is exactly his problem.
The show starts with a scruffy Mario fishing out a cigarette from his pocket. The white roll and the brown filter are a dead giveaway that it might be your usual reds.
As he leans down to light up his cigarette, Mario stops midway and stares at the stick in obvious confusion – he was just about to burn the wrong end of the stick.
He quickly recomposes himself, shrugs off the embarrassment, then flips the cigarette so he could bite on the butt. Seemed easy enough, but when he tries to light it up again, the same thing happens – the cigarette seemed to flip on its own.
Mario is stubborn, though. He had to get that puff no matter what. So, he holds up the stick then walks around it to get to the “correct” side, then secures it with his lips.
Finally, he can get that nicotine fix, and – now, his lighter is not working.
It’s all upside down! No problem, he just had to flip it to the right side so now – the cigarette stick is all topsy turvy once more.
But how is he doing it? You can slow the video down up to 2 or 4 times its original speed or download the frame-by-frame play, and you’d still end up with nothing.
The cigarette changes its position so fast that you will literally miss it if you were not looking close enough.
And even if you watched carefully, most of the frames will only show you a blur, which is an exact representation of his movements.
That’s because the sleight-of-hand is deceptively fast. It’s designed to trick the audience through manual dexterity, like palming cards, false card cuts, slipping cards off from your sleeves, or the quick switcheroo, among other things.
However, this complex charade of the dexterous manipulation is only made alive by Mario’s theatric performance.
When he was a child, he watched his friend put a lit cigarette into his fist and made it disappear. This would be the trick that would pull him into the world of magic.
Since then, he has won awards for his routines and has also performed on different shows and on the streets.
In the end, he finally gets it right, the cigarette butt snugly secured on his lips and his lighter upright and ready to go. But will he really?
Watch the whole video to witness this seemingly simple but deceptive trick!
SHARE this with your friends and family and see if they can catch the magician in the act.
