20 Questions: Penn and Teller

They call themselves magicians for people who hate the genre. Vogue described their act as "a very clever mélange of performance art, rock irony, confrontational comedy and genuine magic," while The New York Times found a hint of "Pinteresque sadomasochism" in their work. We sent New York free-lancer Laura Fissinger to meet Penn Jillette, 32, the duo's larger half, who does most of the talking on stage, and the smaller, single-named Teller, 39. "They offered me tea, which is all they drink," she reports, "and as I was leaving, Teller said, 'Hey, this wasn't so bad. You actually had some good questions and apologized for the bad ones.' "

1.

[Q] Playboy: Most people see magic as one of the corniest branches of show business. How do you distance yourselves from the David Copperfields and Doug Hennings?

[A] Penn: Some of the differences are superficial, such as the fact that we don't feature women in embarrassing costumes or bad music or bad haircuts. That's really important, since there's been no one in magic since Houdini who could be considered in tune with his time. With other magicians, there's this feeling that they're kids who are always trying to please Mom and not functioning with the other kids. Most important, we don't insult people. The implied insult of magic is "I know something you don't; therefore, I'm better."

2.

[Q] Playboy: How did you two meet?

[A] Penn: Teller was pretending to be blind, selling pencils and chattering in Latin. I had hair down my back and wore make-up and fingernail polish. I was juggling and riding a unicycle in a classical show in Amherst, Massachusetts. Teller had been living on his own a lot longer. I was 19, he was 26.

[A] Teller: I had some income, so I was able to buy him dinner.

3.

[Q] Playboy: Tell us about that dinner. Was it magic?

[A] Penn: I had been a very, very bad student and the most obnoxious of all assholes--a smart rabble rouser. It was weird, teaming up with someone who was a fucking high school teacher! Every time I heard that certain tone of voice, I'd want to fucking throw Teller out of the car.

[A] Teller: When I was a teacher, there were students who tortured me in class, made it impossible for the class to function, never did the proper homework, whom I very often failed, who were really completely unpleasant people except that I liked them, because they had guts. There's no one I've ever met who can fight with me as well as Penn or who can outargue me as well. That's what I always enjoyed about those students. They were more than a match for me. Penn has always been the same kind of challenge.

[A] Penn: He's right. I could squash him like a bug.

[A] Teller: But I'd make sure it was on TV and that I had a share of the profits.

4.

[Q] Playboy: Is teaching good training for a life of tricking people?

[A] Teller: The first three years of teaching are--for anyone--absolute, pure, unmitigated hell. No one but high school students will tell you in such unvarnished terms who you really are. So, as a life experience, I'd say that teaching is perfectly serviceable. [Laughs] Actually, I was very happy as a Latin teacher. I wrote some Latin readers at that time and put in lots of violence and humor and scares--much the same thing I do nowadays, except in a different world.

5.

[Q] Playboy: Has Teller always been the teacher and Penn the student?

[A] Teller: Hardly. Penn has been a wonderful education for me concerning the things that happened after, let's say, 1750 [both laugh]. I was a classics major in high school, and I studied Latin and Greek at Amherst. Through Penn, I found out that there was a whole wonderful world out there--I like Iggy Pop very much now. And I believe that before Penn knew me, he didn't use the article an to precede a word beginning with an H whose emphasis is on the second syllable. So you can see we've benefited from each other.

6.

[Q] Playboy: Do magicians have groupies?

[A] Penn: If there are magicians' groupies, they're fucking David Copperfield. I guess the question could be translated to "As repulsive as you two are, are there people who get turned on by you during your live show?" Yes, there are people who like us from seeing the show.

7.

[Q] Playboy: Describe some of your encounters with these fans.

[A] Penn: There was one incident that happened in San Francisco several years ago. There was a button on my lapel from the show we were in at that time. I was walking down the street and this kid and his mother chased me. The kid said he really wanted an autograph. I didn't have a pen. The mother went through her purse and she didn't have one, either. The kid looked heartbroken. So I reached up to my lapel, pulled off the button, opened it, went [he pantomimes gouging his index finger] like that and then [he squeezes his finger hard] wrote Penn across a piece of paper. The mother was so appalled, but the kid looked at me just the way I would have looked at a guy who did that. It was great.

[A] Teller: I was driving across Arizona alone, and I picked up a person who looked as murderous as a pirate. He did not kill me. This I was very grateful for, so I expressed my gratitude in the following way: He asked to be dropped off at the hostel in the next town. Before he got out of the car, I said, "Do you want to see one of my tricks?" I had a piece of newspaper on the floor of the car. I took it and rolled it up and made it disappear and then produced it again, put it in his hand and said, "Now take this piece of paper and go stand in front of the car. I'm going to turn the headlights off and drive away. Then I want you to open your hand--the newspaper will be gone, but make sure you look carefully at what's there." It was a $20 bill. I've done this with bums a couple of times. What I like about it is the story that they're going to tell that nobody will believe. "This guy walked up to me on the street, picked up a piece of trash and turned it into money! Just watch out for this little guy with the receding hairline."

8.

[Q] Playboy: Do fans ever offer you unsolicited advice?

[A] Teller: It happened today. A gentleman walked up to me and said, "Would you mind if I made a suggestion to you?" Some (continued on page 171)Penn and Teller(continued from page 121) obnoxious possibilities raced through my mind, but I said OK. And he said, "When the knife goes through Penn's hand and he holds it up and you see the blood streaking down from it, there isn't any blood on the tip of the knife. That clued me in right away that it wasn't quite real." And I thought, This is the most intelligent thing anyone's ever said to me about the show.

9.

[Q] Playboy: What's the dumbest thing people say to you?

[A] Teller: I have the cross to bear of having to listen to people refer to some of the things I do on stage as mime--in spite of the fact that I punctuate the first half of our live show with speech and talk rather profusely during the second half. I would also say that I have an extraordinary loathing for people who come up to me and say the name Harpo Marx. Harpo seems to be essentially a very happy presence. If people can't discern that I am essentially a malevolent presence, I don't know where they are.

10.

[Q] Playboy: Do you still enjoy going by one name, despite the fact that it has been branded an affectation?

[A] Teller: For some reason, people stopped using any other name for me 15 or 20 years ago, and I went along with the tide. I like Latinate words, and I'm inclined to do undesired etymologies at the drop of a Latinate. But I don't know if that's exactly an affectation. It's sort of a hobby.

11.

[Q] Playboy: Where do you get all the Bibles you use in your show?

[A] Penn: We always steal Bibles from motel rooms. We think that if Gideon has a legal right to put Bibles in motel rooms, we have a legal right to take them out. Every time we do it, there's one Bible fewer in a motel room that somebody might not be bothered by.

12.

[Q] Playboy: It's not uncommon for showbiz partnerships to work beautifully on stage and self-destruct behind the scenes. What happens when you two are alone?

[A] Penn: This is an arranged marriage. Teller and I did not start out as friends or feeling enchanted with each other. What we started out with was a tremendous amount of mutual respect. We gambled that we could do better stuff together than we could do separately. When you're in love with somebody, the first time you don't quite like him or her, that's a horrible feeling. Whereas, if you make a promise just to spend time with somebody, every time you get along it's a revelation. Teller and I do fight--about all sorts of things--but nobody will ever see it. And now that we can afford separate residences, we lead very separate lives.

13.

[Q] Playboy: What advice would you have given the young Penn and Teller when they started out 13 years ago?

[A] Penn: It would be this: You work on the relationship all the time, and you cling to that relationship. I should also say that we agree on religion, drugs and money--they're crutches that cripple people. They're very important things on which to agree--religion, drugs and money.

[A] Teller: No, no and yes. [Both laugh]

14.

[Q] Playboy: We know we're not supposed to ask for the secret behind each and every trick, but we'd love to know more about the classic bit you did on Late Night with David Letterman in which literally hundreds of cockroaches crawled out from under a magician's top hat.

[A] Teller: The first time we had to handle roaches was really quite terrifying. So we sat around in a little room at the Museum of Natural History and practiced handling them with the guy who wrangled roaches for the movie Creepshow. American cockroaches--the kind you have in your kitchen--move very fast. If we had done this trick with them, they would have scampered away before the camera even had a chance to get a shot. We very carefully selected certain exotic breeds of cockroaches for their slowness and their disgusting looks.

15.

[Q] Playboy: Was Letterman as rattled as he looked when the roaches started wandering all over everything?

[A] Penn: What bothered Dave the most was that they were on our bodies. There's something about someone coming toward you in a suit covered with cockroaches that's repulsive. Dave had asked us to surprise him. When we did this trick, he fell to pieces.

16.

[Q] Playboy: Does fire-eating ruin your sense of taste?

[A] Penn: No. It's unpleasant in terms of taste, but I'm used to it. Occasionally, you get one or two belches afterward that are very chemical. It's impossible to describe--it's a feeling you don't ever get in your mouth normally. There really is no damage done to me. What eating fire does to my liver is less than what happens to someone who drinks an occasional beer.

17.

[Q] Playboy: Success, of course, has made you famous. Does that make you at all uncomfortable?

[A] Penn: You either buy into the system or stay out of it. If you take it seriously and then they say bad stuff, you have to take that seriously, too. There's going to be a project coming up one of these days for which all these people who really like us now are going to hate us. It happens to everybody. It's going to hit Springsteen eventually, though he's one who seems bulletproof. But when it happens, he'll get hit hard.

18.

[Q] Playboy: Has Hollywood tried to seduce you two into films?

[A] Teller: Once a week, some ludicrous script--

[A] Penn: Most of which were written for Chevy Chase and John Belushi, but they decided we could do it instead--

[A] Teller: Because there are two of us.[Laughs]

[A] Penn: Everybody else does stuff about sex, drugs and politics. We have a passing interest in sex and a loathing for drugs and politics. So the idea that someone would do a whole movie on any of these things--I mean, Woody Allen does entire movies about getting laid! Who the fuck cares? Albert Brooks should be given all the credit Woody Allen is given, and more. Woody Allen says, "Oh, here I am, baring my soul. Isn't that sexy how I bare my soul?" Brooks just says, "Boy, here it is!" Brooks is brutal.

19.

[Q] Playboy: Is there anyone besides Brooks you admire?

[A] Penn: The Amazing Randi. He's my friend, and he's also one of the two people in my life whom I've ever truly idolized. John Lennon and the Amazing Randi. And for the same reason. Randi is the perfect voice of common sense in the way he's dedicated his life to exposing fraudulent psychics and faith healers. We're hitting a time in our culture where superstition is almost as prevalent as it was during the Dark Ages. That's something a lot of people don't realize. Pat Robertson has stopped doing "healings" because he thought his ass was going to get busted. But, hey, they're on video tape--and they're fake.

[A] Teller: Randi always looks at things like Socrates, but he has the antidote to the hemlock in his back pocket.

20.

[Q] Playboy: How do your families react to the bizarreness of your act?

[A] Teller: My parents were rebels and rugged individualists all the way through--they're old bohemians. To see their son making a living at something that is so completely his own way of doing things makes them very happy. When we got our Emmy certificates [for Penn & Teller Go Public on PBS], we made sure we got extra ones printed up for them.

[A] Penn: We have the best parents in the world, all four of them. That's an odd thing to say for people who have nothing but bad to say about everybody else, isn't it? [Both laugh] Please let us say something nice about how wonderful our parents are in this interview.

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