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Let's Get Cracking! with Robert Dante
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Hand is Still Quicker Than the Eye

websitebuilder • January 1, 2025

Sometimes a trick works too well.

In San Diego, a card-cutting trick that I executed perfectly horrified the audience.


My assistant wore long sleeves. She held a rubber hand inside one sleeve. I had stapled a playing card to the fingers so it looked like she was holding the card to be cut by my whip.


I portrayed the Arrogant Asshole, the one who never makes a mistake. I was the Punch to her Judy. I set my distance, did a few warm up cracks, then targeted the card. As the crack occurred on the card, she’d been told to drop the rubber hand so it looked as if I had amputated it.


The trick worked — too well. Instead of laughter, the room’s temperature dropped 40 degrees in a flash, even though she immediately poked her hand out of the sleeve to show that she was okay.


It was a flop-sweat experience, because once you lose your audience, you cannot get them back, no matter how brilliant or funny the rest of the routine is.


Lesson learned: Don’t mess with your audience.

Wyoming Scene in a Bar

By Robert Dante • January 1, 2025
We’d been hired to do a bullwhip show for a Founder’s Day celebration in a small town in Wyoming. The performing area was marked out with hay bales, and the cowboys sat on them. They were so close that I did not need to use a sound system to be heard. Afterward, everyone went to the local bar to get drinks. It was a low, wide building with a garage door on one wall. It was open for the cooling effect and the sounds of the cicadas. The juke box was stacked with classics from Ernest Tubbs and Hank Williams. `We were standing at the bar and a small woman in jeans and a fringed shirt and wearing a huge cowboy hat rode a horse into the center of the bar and sat there. The bartender said to us, “Don’t worry, they come in here a lot.” The horse ambled over to the bar and started nuzzling my assistant Mary, who returned the affection with pats and caresses while the bar tender gave the rider a can of beer. She seemed already a little woozy to me. “Are you okay for riding?” I asked. “No problem! The horse knows the way home!” she replied brightly.
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