Helge Thun

Stand-up card magic, signed duplicates, and money magic from one of Germany’s funniest sleight of hand artists.

After Henry Harrius, Sleight School’s next live online seminar comes from Germany.

Join Helge Thun for a live, intimate session where he unpacks the routines and thinking behind thirty-plus years of performing. He’s played comedy club stages and sat across the table from people. His material works in both places.

That’s what makes Helge rare. On stage he’s fast, loud, and very funny. Up close he’s precise and quietly devastating. You get both in this seminar.

The champion who wandered off, and came back.

Helge won the German Championship in card magic at 18. Six more national titles followed, plus international prizes, including a FISM card magic award in Lausanne in 1991 with an act he built with Thomas Fraps.

Then he spent about twenty years in German comedy. Improv theater. A comedy duo, Helge und das Udo, that ran for two decades. A German team title in poetry slam. Three stage formats he created himself. The whole time, he kept quietly building tricks.

He’s also a longtime member of the Flicking Fingers, the German collective whose 1997 FISM lecture and The Book (Don’t Forget to Point) introduced a lot of us to what German close-up magic could be.

The book that let the secret out.

For years Helge kept his Duplicate Principle to himself. Then Vanishing Inc. published Evidence of a Well Spent Life, his first full-length book in English, with a foreword by Guy Hollingworth. In it he finally explains a practical way to duplicate a spectator’s actual signature. No forging. It’s a worker’s book, full of routines built for real stages, with essays on humor as deception and on how to treat the people you invite up.

Next comes coins. More Evidence of a Well Spent Life is due from Vanishing Inc. in a few months. Helge starts with a question: up to the 1920s, the best coin magician in the world worked on stage. So why has nearly all coin magic since then been close-up?

Just before publishing his second book on coin magic for parlor and stage (as soon as a certain David Williamson has written the foreword), he will give an exclusive sneak preview lecture for Sleight School. Ever wanted to perform coin routines that play big for stage audiences? Without electronic tables, cameras or a miser’s dream bucket? Then get yourself a head start before everyone else can read the book. You will even learn a few new moves on the way which you might want to incorporate into your existing coin routines right away. And you probably will. Exclusive on Sleight School. Just don’t tell Andi and Josh about it (please).

Helge has done his homework. He’s studied the old masters closely enough to find what the rest of us skipped. He’s also spent thirty years in front of real audiences as a comedian, an improviser, and a magician. Most of us get one of those educations. Helge got all three, and he’s bringing what he learned to Sleight School.