I don’t know how a lot of the tricks in our show are done. We did one of our non-performance shows called 35 Years of Bullshit (the number of years changes, but the Bullshit stays the same) with, I think, Stephen Fry, interviewing us onstage in London. For these appearances Teller talks and answers the questions. Teller is an engaging and articulate conversationalist, and when we do a “Teller will talk” show, I really don’t have much to do. People have heard me enough. They all want to hear Teller for a change. But during this appearance, I went off on a jag, talking about how the tricks are done. I was explaining a moment in the first trick we did on Letterman. In it, Teller tries to do a classic of magic, a card stab, and as part of the act I’m being such a dick that my hand gets in the way and the knife goes through my hand. Teller has the correct card impaled stigmata-like to my palm as the blood flows. We named the bit “Handstab” and that name stuck with us and our crew before we realized that naming the tricks mattered. Now we try to name tricks with names that don’t give away the big surprise endings. We learn slowly.
In London that evening, I was explaining how Teller switches the real knife for the fake knife and I load the blood into my palm with the right card. I had explained my part and I was explaining Teller’s part—the real knife has a hook on it and Teller hangs it on the back on his pants as his hand was coming up to meet mine with the fake knife. Teller spoke up and corrected me. We hadn’t done it with a hooked knife in years and years; we now used a magnet setup in his back pocket. I didn’t know. No one had mentioned to me that it changed, I never checked, I never noticed, and I never asked.
My lack of concern for how tricks are done is partly why Teller chose me as his performing partner in 1975. I had just gotten out of high school. I don’t like to use the word “graduated,” because my exit from high school was messy, but I got out. The teachers told me in high school that these school years were the best years of my life and I’d look back on them with fondness and regret that I didn’t enjoy them more. I never have. For the first few years that I was out of high school, while I was hitchhiking around, living on the streets and juggling for food, I used to take some of my scarce money and send a postcard to my principal and guidance counselor, with a picture of some exotic location and a message saying something about everything about the road being way better than high school. They needed to teach the children that the real world is wonderful. What’s the use of teaching preparation for regret?
After a few months of bumming around, I went to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in Florida. That was a couple of months. Clown College was the first time in my life that I worked hard. I was already a great juggler and I could ride a unicycle, but I learned tightwire walking, and back flips, and falls, and I was in remedial makeup. Makeup makeup. It was the first time I met really funny people. It was the first time I’d exercised and trained. It was the first time anyone had ever taught me something that I was interested in. It was the first time I’d ever seen people take comedy seriously.
I met Teller while I was in high school, but he was still teaching high school (different schools). I went into a stereo store in my hometown. I’d saved up my money from juggling and doing odd jobs, and I was going to buy a good stereo. The salesman was Wier Chrisemer. In a few years, I would form the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society with Wier and Teller. Teller is seven years older than me, and he’d graduated college while I was still in high school. I got to talking with Wier that day in the audio store. I told him I was a juggler and demonstrated in the shop with whatever was around. It’s not hard to get me to do tricks. He said maybe he could use me in his college classical music parody group called the Othmar Schoeck Memorial Society for the Preservation of Unusual and Disgusting Music. Wier asked if I could read music well enough to play bass drum on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony while juggling, hitting the drum with the clubs. He had written comedy words to the symphony about eating and was going to have the vocalists served supper by the chorus, but he thought a little juggling would make it more absurd. I said I could read music well enough while juggling to do that. We started brainstorming on other ideas and he asked if I could juggle plungers and I said I could juggle anything I could hold that wasn’t attached. I told him I also rode a unicycle. He asked if I could ride in on a unicycle, juggling the plumbers’ helpers while he played Aram Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance on xylophone. Easy. Could he then stand against a board and have me throw the plungers around him and have them stick in a parody of a knife-throwing act? I said I had never done that, but I loved to practice and I would learn it for him. It took a stupid lot of practice, Vaseline on the plumbers’ helpers and a very smooth board, but I learned it. He was skeptical of bringing a high school student into his fancy tight-ass college comedy, so he assigned me Watt by Samuel Beckett (still one of my favorite books) to read. He told me to come back in a week when I picked up my turntable and tell him what was funny about the book to show I understood it, and if I impressed him, I could work for free at a time when I was already getting paid to do juggling shows. I had never met anyone with that advanced a sense of humor and I was thrilled. I worked and did the show. His friend from college, Teller, drove back up to Amherst College for the show and pretended to be blind and sold pencils out front while reciting poetry he’d written in Latin about the conception of Othmar Schoeck in the womb. After that show, Teller and I got to talking. We’ve never stopped. Bob Dylan talked, wrote and sang about hitchhiking and hopping trains, so I did it to be like him. But while he mostly talked, wrote and sang about it, I really did hop trains and hitchhike around. All over the country. I was homeless, with $500 sewn into my knapsack and a loving home I could go back to any time I chose. I called my mom and dad collect every day I was gone. I talked to my mom and dad every day that our lives overlapped. Either in person or on the phone. They supported me while I hitchhiked, hopped trains, and got all Woody Guthrie on America’s ass. I have a lot of stories from that time. The closer you come to death, the better the story. I have stories about great sex, but also stories about having guns pulled on me. I have a story about having a gun pulled on me and great sex in the same night (different people, of course). I told none of that to my mom and dad in the daily phone calls. Now that I have children, I consider my parents to be superhuman in their love of me. They loved me enough to let me live my life while they worried themselves sick. I don’t think I can possibly love my children that much, but I am trying.
I took a break from living on the streets to go to Clown College and then went to New York and practiced juggling a lot. I lived in an apartment with a girlfriend and Michael Moschen, MacArthur Genius juggler and my next-door neighbor from when we were children. He doesn’t like me saying this, but I taught Mike to juggle. Put that in your genius dance belt and pose. We lived together in the city, ate peanut butter and jelly, and practiced our juggling eight hours a day, six days a week. We just juggled. I knew Teller by then. He’d drive into the city from New Jersey and take me out to a real restaurant. I began to associate Teller with food.
During those great meals, we had a lot of long talks about art. Teller’s idea was that magic was essentially an intellectual art form. It was a hard case to make with the magic that was popular then. Teller contended that magic could have built-in irony and the collision of the visceral and the intellect at breakneck speed. All I want out of art and life is for my guts and my brains to collide. It’s the feeling of being on a roller coaster, my guts knowing I’m going to die and my brain explaining that if they killed too many people, the insurance rates would be too high. That’s magic. The audience knows that Teller cutting the shadow of that rose won’t make the real petals fall, but they do fall, motherfucker, they do fall.
One of the fucking clowns in my class in Florida, Jeff Siegel, still a good friend, started booking acts for the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. His idea was to bring in people who had a lot of experience street performing, and figured it was easier to put those people in tights tha
n to teach a guy already in tights to be funny. I was hired to do my juggling street show with wooden balls and striped tights. I threw in a few “ye oldes” and we were done.
With a full stomach, I started to listen and I got excited about Teller’s ideas. When Jeff called a year later about the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, I asked him if I could bring a magician along. Jeff drove a hard bargain: I would have to take a big cut in my pay that Jeff could pay Teller. I said okay. I owed Teller some suppers.
Teller had been preoccupied with magic since he was a child. He put himself through Amherst College by doing magic shows at frat parties (and the diamond miners in Zimbabwe think they got it tough). When we first met, I watched Teller in a New Jersey library basement performing for about thirty people. He wasn’t doing “Shadows” then, but I watched him silently pluck one hundred needles out of an apple and swallow them with an audience member this close to him. He swallowed some thread and after that audience member gave him a full mouth examination with a dentist’s mirror and flashlight, Teller brought the shimmering needles back up all threaded. It was creepy, beautiful, classy, amazing, and all silent. It’s a trick he still does today.
I called up Teller and told him I had a magician gig for him. I asked him if he wanted to put together a street show and do it with me in Minnesota. We could get a car and drive out there together.
“When?”
“It starts in August.”
“Perfect!”
“And it goes through October.”
“Oh, I have to be back to teaching by then.”
I said, “Okay, I thought you were a magician, not a schoolteacher,” and I hung up. It probably wasn’t really that precise a conversation, but that’s the way it’s become over the years of telling it.
He called back a few hours later and said he’d take a leave of absence from teaching and do the gig. This was a really hard decision for Teller. He had just gotten tenure, and he was a great teacher. I can’t imagine a better teacher. While I was still in high school, I went to visit him and sat in on one of his high school Latin classes. He was getting New Jersey public school students excited about Latin. Beat that.
It was a conspiracy between the Viet Cong and the American military industrial complex that made Teller a teacher. He was the right age for Apocalypse Then. In the draft lottery he was number 3. Penn & Teller are very different from each other, but neither of us would do well in the military. “Bombs bursting in air, man, not my thing,” as Tony Bennett allegedly said. I was too tall to go in and too young to be drafted, but Teller with his number 3 was on his way to Saigon, shit. He got a school deferment to go to college and then a teaching deferment. My aboriginal American name for Teller is “Terrier-with-a-Slipper.” All our pluses are our minuses and Teller does not give up. His tenacity is infuriating, and I’ve built a very good life on it. He doesn’t give up. Was it hard for a guy with a classics degree to get a teaching job in a public school in the late sixties? Sure enough. Would you have bet against Teller doing it? You would have lost.
Without the best and the brightest forcing us into an immoral, undeclared and unconstitutional war, Teller might have gone right into magic and now there would be a Teller Theater in Vegas, and I’d be in prison where I belong. Teller killed time to avoid killing people, and had time to meet me; it looks like I was the one who got him into professional magic, but the truth is that Uncle Sam just delayed the inevitable and I wound up with the best performing partner in the world.
I was with Teller on his first free school day in autumn since he had been five years old. We were driving and eating doughnuts, far away from our homes, on a Monday at eleven a.m. in September. Every year before that he would have been in class, either teaching or studenting. I was an old pro at playing hooky. I hadn’t gone to school much of my junior year, I missed almost all of my senior year, and I’d been out for a couple years living on the streets, but still, the air smells sweeter and time stands still any day you’re in the world and everyone else is working or in school.
Teller and I drove together from the East Coast to Minnesota to do our Renaissance Festival shows. We were together twenty-four hours a day. We ate together and shared Motel 6 rooms together. If one of us got laid, the other had to walk around the parking lot to give some privacy. And this was before iPhones. In the car I played Teller Lou Reed and the Shaggs and he played me Bach and Bernard Herrmann, and we talked. It was some of the best times of our lives. All that would become the Penn & Teller style we talked about in that car. We talked mostly about lying to people for a living while being honest. To be able to lie for art, and tell the truth for morality. It was heavy talk. It was pretentious. There was no humility; we were young so we had to try for the best show in the world. We were going to do something brand-new in magic and in entertainment. There were no hope or desire to be famous or rich—we weren’t that crazy—but we were going to do some stuff onstage that we loved. We weren’t going to be greasy guys in tuxes with birds torturing women in front of Mylar to bad small-dick rip-off Motown music. We were going to speak our hearts while doing tricks. Some of the specific ideas talked about on those drives weren’t realized until thirty-five years later, and we’re still working on others. The results of those theoretical conversations can be found in all the Penn & Teller shows. Our career is just an appendix to those conversations.
When we got to Minnesota, we didn’t do an act together. We each did our separate shows and then would meet back in the employee area in the hay behind the trees to reset our props, count our money and roll our quarters. My show was a very long crowd gathering. I would explain to a few passersby that I was going to do “absolutely nothing” and when I signaled them, they were going to scream, yell and applaud. When other strangers heard this and ran over to see what was happening, the original “crowd” could all turn and laugh at them for rushing over to see nothing. We’d do it again and again until there were a couple hundred people watching me do nothing. It got funny. With my audience in place, I would juggle balls, while commenting in a disparaging way about the routine, explaining, in different ways, that I bothered to do all this practicing, so they could at least bother to watch it. I moved from balls to very big and really sharp knives (I was a juggler, not a magician—I didn’t fake much). First I would juggle the knives with an apple. I would eat the apple while juggling and spit all over myself (slightly less of a hackneyed trick at that time, and much more interesting when juggling knives along with the apple). I went to all knives, and then got a “volunteer” from the audience, put an opaque bag over her head, stood behind her, and juggled the knives around her. I’d return her to the crowd and then put the same hood over my head and juggle the knives blindfolded. That was the big finish and then I would do my money pitch. I said I’d do a magic trick and change the executioner’s hood into a change purse, snap my fingers and claim it was done. I then said to prove I had been successful, I would need money from all of them. I then did a list of reasons they should give me money and excuses that I would not accept. There was lots of talk about my size, and my aggression, so it was mostly threats. The money speech was the longest (and most important) part of my act. I had forgotten it, but just this week, I mentioned to Teller I was writing this, and he performed my whole speech from memory. It’s his favorite thing I’ve ever written.
After all this loud, insane, aggression, I ended my show with a very quiet “thank you” and then moved into the crowd to collect my pay. The ball and knife juggling were part of the Penn & Teller show even into the first Broadway show, but the crowd and money gathering fell away. Resetting my props meant dumping money out of my blindfold/bag and grabbing a new apple. Teller had all this niggling magic shit to do, so I just watched him. I don’t want to give the impression of starving artists here, but we were working hard for showbiz. I always have to add “for showbiz,” because no one in showbiz works as hard as anyone with a real job.
Springsteen does a three-hour concert with people
cheering for him, while people work at a desk for eight hours just taking shit from assholes. We were doing eight shows a day, and that’s a ten-hour day with a lot of time to talk and roll quarters and it was only weekends. Even when we were “working,” we were getting paid for doing what we would have done for free. We were doing what we had to do. If writing or going into showbiz is a choice, you shouldn’t choose it. Morally and politically I’m a capitalist, but money was not my motivation for getting into showbiz. I didn’t really think I had a chance of making my living in showbiz, and when that started to happen, I was shocked. I still can’t believe it.
I have a commie friend, a good friend, a famous friend, a political friend, who when he admitted to me privately, after he’d admitted on TV publicly, that he was a socialist explained to me the real reason. He believed that big salaries paid to hard workers were just society wasting money. “Hardworking assholes like Bill Gates are going to work no matter what you pay them. They like to work. Look at you, you’re not anything compared with Bill Gates and yet you’d do your little shows even if you were being paid 1/100th of what you get paid. You’d do the same quality show and work just as hard for a subsistence wage. It’s bullshit that money is the motivator for people who really work hard. Hardworking people have a mental illness that helps all of us, and we should exploit that. They don’t really work for the money, so let’s give them a lot less. Take that money and give it to the lazy fucks like me who don’t really want to work. Then take the rest of the money and use it to motivate the people in the middle, who do need incentive.” It’s the best argument for socialism I’ve ever heard. I would do our show for next to nothing.
In Minnesota, Teller and I were trying to get better, and how much money we made was a good measure of how well our shows had gone. Somewhere we have the booklet in which we kept track of every penny we made. If you’re with the IRS, that booklet might be hard for us to find. There we were in leather tops, tights and dance belts resetting our shows and counting our money. I was sitting across from Teller, both of us sitting on the ground, while Teller reset all his magic tricks. After a few weeks working, Teller asked me to take a look at his brilliant “Needles” routine. He wanted my eye and some pointers on how to make the trick better. How he could be a little more deceptive. I said, “Sure, but it’s already deceiving me, so you’ll have to tell me how it’s done before I can help you conceal how it’s done.” Teller was stunned. I had sat and watched him set up all his tricks and I still didn’t know how they were done? I never paid any attention. I didn’t care. I liked the way it looked onstage, and I wasn’t interested in the mechanics.
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