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{{trope|wppage=Sawing a woman in half}}
[[File:
{{quote|''"Sawing a lady in half is easy. Sawing a lady in half and then joining her up together again is less easy, but can be done with practice."''|'''Dirk Gently''', ''[[Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency]]''}}
Then, if nothing ''unseemly'' has happened at this point, the magician pushes away the two halves of the table, possibly rotates them around (but carefully not showing the sawn ends to the audience) and moves them together again. And then the woman steps out of the reunited box, all in one piece, to the relief and applause of the audience.
Modern variants of the trick often skip the saw and use the rectangular blades instead, which are shoved in side by side. This has the advantage of allowing the magician to show the "cut" ends to the audience. Because it's a [[Discredited Trope]] by now (the secret has been explained on countless occasions), a Stage Magician who tries this is pretty much required to have some kind of special or unique variation if he wants to be taken seriously.
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Sometimes, the second rectangular blade can get stuck and the magician will pull on the head of the assistant, causing the blade to fall. This is used as a joke on several occasions. Since the bottom half of the box has wiggling feet, expect [[Foot Focus]] at times.
The reasons for its notoriety are explained in detail
{{examples}}▼
Despite the modern variant called [[w:Zig Zag Girl|the Zig-Zag Girl]], this is rarely a [[Zig-Zagging Trope]].
▲{{examples}}
== [[Advertising]] ==
* Done in an M&M's commercial with Red as the magician and Yellow as the (unwilling) assistant.
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* Done in ''[[Cat Soup]]'' only that the magician {{spoiler|actually kills the woman and chops her into pieces before putting her together and reviving her with true magic}}.
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* In the film ''[[Houdini]]'' ([[Very Loosely Based on a True Story|based very loosely]] on the life of Harry Houdini) Harry brings a "saw a woman in half" kit home, wakes his wife, and makes her get in. A [[Jump Cut]] happens as he's sawing, so he didn't do any "trick"; he just sawed, and she was OK.
* Attempted by the protagonists at the end of ''[[Road To|Road to Zanzibar]]''.
{{quote|
'''[[Bob Hope]]''': If I don't, one of us is going back half fare. }}
* In ''Follow the Boys'', [[Orson Welles]] saws an upright [[Marlene Dietrich]] in half through a small box, and her legs run off.
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* The [[Robert Bloch]] short story "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" has a retarded young homeless man used cruelly by a magician's assistant (also the magician's wife, who's cheating on him and wants him out of the way<ref>the story was written in a time before easy divorce</ref>). She convinces him that the magic is real sorcery and the magician sold his soul to Satan, so there's no moral qualm about killing him. After the murder the young man decides to see if the magical power is still there in the magician's wand and decides to test it using the woman and the magician's buzzsaw finale... Adapted into an infamous episode of ''[[Alfred Hitchcock Presents]]'' (see below).
== [[Live
* The ''[[Penn
** For UK tropers, this version of the trick appeared on ''Penn & Teller: Fool Us''.
** Penn and Teller have also performed the traditional version of the trick underwater for a magic special.
* Parodied in ''[[Monty Python's Flying Circus]]''. "Last week I showed you how to saw a woman in half. This week I'll be showing you how to saw a woman in three pieces and hide the body."
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* Mentioned and used on ''[[Arrested Development (TV series)|Arrested Development]].'' In this case, Gob explains how the trick works to his brother... [[Did I Just Say That Out Loud?|and a nearby kid overhears it]].
* The live-action version of ''[[The Flash]]'' has [[Mark Hamill]] playing an [[Ax Crazy]] version of one of the more prominent [[Rogues Gallery|Rogues]], the Trickster. Before adopting the Trickster identity, James Jesse (in the identity of a magician) kidnaps a woman and attempts to saw her in half...with a chainsaw.
{{quote|
* Spoofed by Ernie Kovacs in a 1950s appearance as Matzoh Heppelwhite, the inept magician. He asks the visible model whether she is ready, and she chirpily responds, "Ready!"
* In ''[[CSI New York]]'', a serial murderer magician, played by Criss Angel, commits his crimes in mockery of magic tricks. He kills one of his victims by sawing her in half for real.
* This was Fran and Gracie's talent performance for the mother/daughter pageant in ''[[The Nanny]]''. Due to a bad initial run (Fran was stuck for hours), they changed it to a puppet show.
* ''[[Byker Grove]]'' has two girls get sawn in half on the same box with the girl's feet sticking right beside the other girl's head.
* Happens for real with Trish by her brother in the [[Austin and Ally]] episode "Club Owners & Quinceaneras".
== [[Newspaper Comics]] ==
* Played for Laughs in a ''[[Garfield]]'' strip, where Jon holds up a kitty munchie and tells Garfield to do a trick; Garfield quickly puts on a magician's hat and cape and prepares to perform this trick on Odie.
{{quote|'''Jon:''' Can't you ever be normal?
'''Garfield:''' What, you've seen this one?}}
== Music ==
* [[Warren Zevon]]'s
{{quote|
''But you won't want to look in the box when I'm through
''I can make love disappear
''For my next trick I'll need a volunteer }}
== [[Theatre]] ==
* In ''[[The Magic Show]]'', the character Charmin is cut in half in the standard fashion, and her bottom half is promptly misplaced. She spends most of the rest of the musical as a recumbent torso on a wheeled table, trying to find her legs.
== [[Video Games]] ==
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== [[Web Comics]] ==
* Riff from ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]'' tries this using inter-dimensional portals to make the trick work. [
* ''Sanity Circus'' has Bee, who early in her circus career was doing "the ol' Sawed-in-Half trick, with real magic to make it more interesting". But [[Inept Mage|screwed up the magic]]. So she stuck with some [[Invisible Anatomy]] [https://www.sanitycircus.com/sanity-circus/chapter-4-page-16 like this] ever after.
== [[Web Original]] ==
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== [[Western Animation]] ==
* Used hilariously in the ''[[Looney Tunes]]'' short "Show Biz Bugs", in which Daffy Duck is not intimidated by the whole scenario because he thinks it's all a trick (in fact, he even ''describes the trick's mechanics to the audience'' in the process). [[Rule of Funny|Cue Daffy's upper body detaching from his lower body.]] "It's a good thing I have Blue Cross."
** Another [[Warner Bros]]. cartoon had Egghead (a precursor to Elmer Fudd) going on about how fake the trick was as he volunteered for it. At the end of the trick, Egghead jumps out and walks away... with his upper and lower halves going in opposite directions.
* When [[Garfield and Friends|Garfield and Jon]] visit a magic shop, the shop owner's dog, Merlin, chases Garfield while Jon is looking for a trick. At one point, Merlin is tricked into entering such a box, and Garfield sets to sawing the box in half. Sure enough, despite fretting on the part of Merlin, the box and Merlin are halved without injury to the latter.
* ''[[The Mask (animation)|The Mask]]'': The Mask gets sawn, even having the guts to walk out of the box in two.
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* In ''[[Futurama]]'', where Bender tries to become a magician, he saws Zoidberg in half with human feet sticking out of the opposite end where upon he opens the case, and reveals that he has not been really sawn in half, much to Bender's detriment, and to the disapointment of the rest of the crew.
* Used by ''[[Teen Titans (animation)|Teen Titans]]'' villain Mumbo in his barrage of magic tricks-turned-deadly. He actually calls for a lovely assistant from the audience and yanks Starfire down with a cane. As he prepares to perform the "trick", he adds:
{{quote|
* Invoked in an episode of ''[[Animaniacs]]'', where the Warners end up in Transylvania, which of course means an encounter with a vampire. Toward the end of the short, he's sealed himself in his coffin, and Wakko uses a ''[[Chainsaw Good|chainsaw]]'' to get him out. After Wakko cuts the coffin in half, the vampire's head pokes out of one half, and his feet from the other. Embarrassed, Wakko quickly slaps the halves back together.
* The plot of an episode of ''[[
* Is done to Barney Rubble on ''[[The Flintstones]]'' while he's hypnotized. The magician doing the trick shows Fred (and the audience) how it's
* An episode of ''[[Ruby Gloom]]'' had Skull Boy doing this to Iris. She spends most of the rest of the episode in two halves because Skull Boy gets amnesia and forgets the combination for the lock.
* In an episode of ''[[The Smurfs]]'', King Jerard was holding auditions for a new court magician [[Evil Chancellor| (to replace the one he threw in jail in a previous episode)]]; the applicant shown ("the Amazing Manfred") did this trick during his interview, but wasn't able to put his assistant back together. Naturally, he didn't get the job, and as he was kicked out, his angry — and still cut in two — assistant told him she was quitting.
== [[Real Life]] ==
* [[wikipedia:P.T. Selbit|P.T. Selbit]] is credited as the first magician to saw a woman in half.
** The page picture is a classic "thin model" sawing.
* Legless performer Johnny Eck (who was also one of the most memorable characters in ''[[Freaks]]'') participated in a variant of this act where his nearly identical twin brother (''who had legs'') would be the ringer called up for the
** [[Criss Angel]] has since done a variant of the same trick with a legless woman. And himself.
* [[David Copperfield (illusionist)|David Copperfield]] did a version where he cut himself in half with a giant circular saw. The trick was set-up as an escape stunt gone
* In the 1960s magician [[w:Robert Hardin|Robert Hardin]] invented [[w:Zig Zag Girl|the Zig Zag Girl]], a variation in which the subject is in a vertical box and sliced into three parts.
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