The last couple of days at the fair I’ve been doing my trick that uses a giant foam hand as part of my preshow. It’s a counting trick that uses math. While I honestly don’t think these types of tricks are really amazing to an audience, they are fun little things. Anyone who puts a second of thought into the trick will come to the conclusion that it’s just a sequence that has you end up at the same spot all of the time.
Here’s my running the routine…also a quick note, the audience isn’t mic’d and the camera is in the way back at the sound booth, so you really can’t hear the audience:
I think the foam hand makes it more visual and look like something is happening onstage. You lose the “propless” advantage of using just your fingers, but you gain it playing a bit bigger with the prop. The foam hands, don’t weigh anything and pack down, so they don’t take up more room in your case.
The addition of the foam hand with just the pointer finger out adds a bit of a punctuation to the trick. The reveal of the finger is the ta-dah moment of the trick, which I think the previous versions I’ve seen lacked.