Scam School Review: And For My Next Trick

You know when you were a kid and you could be genuinely awed by the uncle who could pull a quarter from your ear or guess the card that you’d chosen from a full deck?

This is sort of the feeling you’ll get when you tune in to Scam School. The weekly episodes give viewers an inside look at some new (and old) street cons.

The best part is that Brian Brushwood, the Guinness-toting host, gives you all the knowledge you need to perform these tiny but memorable tricks yourself. All you need are the tools you’ll find at a bar: napkins, matches, pint glasses, and straws.

In the five- to ten-minute videos, the spiky-haired Brushwood will teach you to turn yourself into a human jack-o-lantern, demonstrate superhuman strength, and make a match jump off the palm of someone else’s hand.

Some of the tricks are groan-worthy. There’s no magic in balancing a frosty brew on your buddy’s two thumbs, for example, but you might earn yourself a punch in the nose when he realizes the only way he can extricate himself is to tip the glass. Ha ha! Be sure to pick someone smaller and slower than you are when performing it.

That said, they’re generally neat little tricks, and I’m willing to bet they’re endlessly popular for anyone who’s loaded up on an alcoholic beverage (or six). Brushwood, a pro magician in who tours the college circuit, has a genial delivery. The bar setting, where he uses real volunteers to showcase his tricks, is a winner as well.

Not all the tricks in the podcast are particularly original (you can find the thumb trick here, for example), but you’ll have a tough time finding a better collection in a single place.

Mostly, he offers the tricks up as a way to win yourself a free beer, but even if you don’t have a frosty mug on the line, you can still impress your friends. If they just find the shenanigans exasperating, well, magician or not, you might have to do your own vanishing act.