We have done a few restorations. We cut a live snake in half on Saturday Night Live and restored it. Lorne Michaels said we got more complaints then they had gotten on anything else ever. Some people wrote that they knew cutting a snake was a trick, but it “might give sick people ideas.” Wow. Jamy Ian Swiss, a wonderful magician who’s worked with us now and again, gave us an idea. He said that the burned and destroyed handkerchief trick was a fine technical trick, but didn’t mean anything. He said he thought that if we did it with an American flag, it would mean something. Jamy gave sick people an idea.
At the turn of this century, Teller and I had just come back from doing a series of shows where we explored street magic in Egypt, China and India. The idea for the show, which came from our Canadian producers, was that we’d see “real magicians” in these countries—magicians who performed for locals and not the posers who performed for tourists. This put us in Sally Struthers hell. We weren’t living the hell. We were fine. Although we got sick and miserable, we were in five-star hotels eating canned food. We brought tuna fish, crackers and bottled water with us, and that’s all we ate. We had no complaints for ourselves, but we had a picture window on hell.
Magicians in India can be part of the “untouchable” caste, the Dalit, and we went, in our gray suits, to meet them in their slums in Shadipur. These slums were worse by far than those depicted in Slumdog Millionaire, and in contrast we were slumdog zillionaires. Holy fuck: polio, flies, raw sewage, tortured animals, leprosy, and we were asking to see the “Cups and Balls.” The images in that day will live in my nightmares forever. Among the wretched magicians were also wretched puppet people, jugglers and animal trainers.
The animal trainers had fallen on hard times, so they had animals that they couldn’t afford to tend to properly (if they ever could). There were emaciated monkeys and bears running around. The bears were the worst. I’m not a pet guy. Maybe I care too much about animals to be a pet guy, I don’t know, but I don’t like to have them sucking up to me. I like them at a distance. I have a lot of empathy and compassion for animals, but I don’t like them being put above people. I hate when the dog is okay in a disaster movie and everyone cheers. Who cares about dogs during a disaster? But the bears in Shadipur still suffer in my nightmares. The bears were starving; you could see their bear ribs. They wore collars, or maybe rings through their noses. I didn’t want to look closely enough and I don’t really want to remember. They were chained to the ground, on a short chain that didn’t allow them to stand up. It wasn’t that they couldn’t stand up on their rear legs like stuffed bears frozen in attack mode at a natural history museum or circus bears wearing hats; they couldn’t even stand up on all fours. They couldn’t straighten their legs or their necks. They were perpetually bent over. It’s hard to read that, but imagine seeing it live, all around. We couldn’t complain to the owners, because the owners were starving, so who cares about the fucking bears? My nightmares do.
My old friend Wheeler is a geologist. Geologists are always the first to die in fifties and sixties monster movies. In movies, it’s a very dangerous profession. In reality, the biggest danger to geologists is bears. Wheeler put himself through college as a male stripper. I named him “Mark St. Helens” after the volcano that was active at that time and he made a lot of money adding cock value to a can of whipped cream. One summer Wheels kept his clothes on, took a pay cut, and worked for the American Geological Survey. He was assigned to Alaska. A bunch of college students walking around in the wilderness of Alaska have to be ready for bears. They all carried .44 Magnums. Wheeler sent me a copy of the booklet he’d gotten on how to avoid being eaten by a bear. They were instructed to keep making noise, taking turns talking and singing. Wheeler is from New Jersey, so he sang Springsteen. They were told that bears didn’t want to attack people, but that bears were very nearsighted so they would run at a person to find out what they were. The tasty ex-stripper college students were told to point the .44 Magnums right at the bear’s heart, stand straight up facing the bear and to talk loudly, so the bear could identify them as people and not rivals. The pamphlet said that when people are attacked by a bear, while they’re shitting themselves, they often can’t think of anything to say, so everyone was advised to memorize something and practice saying it while holding the gun out. When the real bear situation showed up, you’d have your routine all rehearsed. Since I had given Wheeler his stripper name, he figured I was his word man and could write him something. Let’s see: You’re holding a .44 Magnum pointed at a bear and you have to talk. I bet you guessed what I suggested:
“I know what you’re thinking, bear. ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth, bear, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow a bear’s head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, bear?”
The untouchable bears of Shadipur were no physical threat to me, but they did damage to my heart. There Penn & Teller were, wearing our matching gray suits—flies covering our faces, our boots in sewage, suffering children and tortured bears at our feet, pouring bottles of Purell on our hands more like Lady Macbeths of shit—doing a Canadian comedy show. Teller thought some of the magic in India was okay, he was happy seeing some mango tree thing and some diving duck, but I can’t remember one pleasant moment. The TV show came out okay—and you think The Celebrity Apprentice has fanciful editing. At the time we were there, they were still throwing widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres, and it was the bears that freaked me.
Egypt was no better. The women dress like Batman, and the air was so dirty I felt like I was chain-smoking Camel Straights. I felt like a fucking bear. We went to see the pyramids. The Pizza Hut right near the Sphinx disgusted the Canadian crew, but the pizza smelled like freedom to me. When we went to see the thousands-of-years-old wall paintings of the “Cups and Balls” in a cave, we were escorted by soldiers with machine guns. This is comedy.
In China we were a couple hundred klicks out of Beijing. We visited a village where our translator told us we were the first Americans they’d ever seen. At 6'7'' and 3 bucks, I’m big in the USA, but in China I was supernatural. They screamed when they saw me. They asked if I was Michael Jordan. It was freezing cold. We went to a magic and circus school. It was like an old Albert Brooks routine of people learning comedy spit takes. They were all being taught the exact same linking rings routine. The big artistic cultural difference was how they dealt with originality. Any magician who had come up with some little change or wrinkle to a classic routine would pretend that the wrinkle went back centuries. He would lie and say he was just doing what his teachers had taught him. We’re American magicians and we want to take individual credit for everything. If Teller and I could convince you that we invented the idea of playing cards, we would.
Near Wuqiao there was a magic theme park, but it was all gray and cold. It was housed in a huge stadium-like building, with no color and no heat. It was the middle of the winter, and even indoors, in these big cavernous rooms, we could see our breath. There were freezing performing area caves and no patrons. No one was there but our crew carrying in video equipment and the Chinese performers, in skimpy costumes huddled together for warmth in broom closets. These caves were theme rooms, like cheesy honeymoon suites for honeymoon couples being punished for capital offenses. The performers would come in, in spandex and top hats, play “Putting on the Ritz” on a tiny boombox and do back-palming card productions and vanishes with frozen fingers in the cold dark in front of a painted skyline of New York City. Those Indian bears didn’t have it that bad. It felt like the result of some sort of central planning that hadn’t quite planned for nobody wanting to see back-palming in the dark, in the winter, in the geographical center of nowhere. What the fuck were we doing?
Because of China’s centrally planned one-child policy, infant girls were being abandoned and the ones who won the lottery were
being delivered into American families. So our fancy-ass hotel was full of American couples waiting for an adopted daughter for their family. Lots of strollers and diaper bags. The unwanted infant girls might be raised as Christians or yuppies, but it was better than being left to die in China. With the Indian women on the funeral pyres, the Egyptian women dressed like Batman, and the poor little Chinese girls, Teller and I were cracking. We just couldn’t get over how wrong all of this was. We would rant about it in our warm comfortable bus to our female Canadian boss. And these particular Canadians, these kinda PBS Canadians, dismissed us by saying we were “typical Americans.” We didn’t understand cultural differences. The same women who would rant about the sexism of Baywatch were telling us to try to understand why abandoning infant girls was okay. They put a Canadian flag up in the windows of our bus so that the locals wouldn’t think we were Americans. We weren’t ashamed of being Americans, but they were ashamed of us being Americans.
Our young translator had lived his life equally in Beijing and Toronto. We had a lot of time to talk on the bus. He explained that the word they were using for Caucasians was a pejorative, kind of a translation of “white devils.” I said, “So, they’re that racist?” He explained that it wasn’t racism, that it was racial pride. So, the KKK has racial pride? Nope, that was different, and an American couldn’t understand what it was like to be proud of your race without being racist. I said, “Yeah, we’re racist in the USA, there’s no doubt about that, but we’re working on it. We really are.” I proposed an experiment. I suggested that he get twenty randomly selected Caucasian Americans together and invite them all out to supper with me at a T.G.I. Friday’s, or someplace that the world thinks is just too American. I said that I would tell a story about—let’s make it really awful—driving, and I would say that a “chink” cut me off in traffic. I was willing to bet him a large amount of money, and a larger amount of pride, that someone in our randomly selected group of Americans would either take issue with that racist word right there, or would take me aside later and say they didn’t appreciate it. They’d make it a teachable moment. They would bust my ass.
I wanted to make sure that the bet included people talking to me in private later. Sacha Baron Cohen, a brilliant comedian and an amazing actor, claimed in a rare interview as himself that his Borat character illuminated the anti-Semitism of Americans because those who weren’t plants (or as some TV magicians call them, “friendlies”) didn’t bust his foreign character on his outrageous attacks. I don’t believe it proved any such thing. I think it proved how far human beings from anywhere would bend over and spread them to make someone from another country seem a little less awkward. Penn & Teller would fall for any of Sacha’s gags. Once, a couple of young Japanese women came to Vegas because, we were told, they were big Penn & Teller fans. High school–aged Japanese women are not our usual demographic, but they had a camera crew and they claimed they had won a contest or something. They interviewed us backstage and had us do a little trick for them. They gave us ornate fans and hats and said stuff that just confused the fuck out of us. We played along with everything. If they had had us say that Jesus was our lord (and they might have, I was just repeating Japanese words that we didn’t understand), we would have gone along with it, just to make it a little more comfortable. We weren’t thinking about what we were saying; we were trying to make them feel comfortable in our country. That’s all Borat documented, but it sure was funny.
So at the T.G.I. Friday’s, when the test “chink” was thrown out, I’d want our subjects to be able to take me aside in private afterward to express their concerns. Our translator agreed that Americans would bust one another. I then asked if twenty Chinese people chosen at random to go to… Panda Express (see, that’s a joke about Americans not knowing anything about China, it’s not a racist joke) and hearing “white devil” would object in public or private. He said no way. It was racial pride. But Americans were racist even though they were trying not to be. I was sitting next to my friend Sarah Silverman when she used the word “chink” on Conan’s show. It was a joke, and the joke, considering Sarah’s character, was not racist at all, but everyone still ripped another asshole into her very attractive ass. Our Canadian producers would probably think that that comment on Sarah’s ass is sexist, but the abandoning of infant girls in China was a cultural difference that typical Americans didn’t understand. I’ve got your cultural differences hanging ready to knock you out with my American thighs.
The trips to Egypt, China and India each took a little over two weeks. Teller and I were so uncomfortable. I’m embarrassed by us eating canned food and washing our hands every ten minutes. We were so scared of these foreign countries. The people we were working with weren’t. They had done documentaries on Ebola and had gone into hot zones to shoot. They said Penn & Teller were more of a pain in the ass than Ebola. I tried to get some women to dance topless for us in China, and I ended up uncovering some sort of Chinese-Russian prostitution slavery ring that the Canadians did their next documentary on. If there was something about other countries to not be understood, I think I’m the man to not understand it. It was an awful time for me. While I was watching all this misery, my mom was dying back home and I felt alone and cut loose in the world. I was not at my best. I was confused enough that maybe if there really was a difference between racial pride and racism, I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t learn to say even one sentence in Mandarin and I tried.
We came back from overseas in time for my mom to die. What a treat. World travel was supposed to broaden us, give us more understanding of the world, but it didn’t feel that way. I couldn’t stop thinking about the hotel full of Americans adopting baby girls, the women dressed like Batman, the stinking poverty, and those fucking tortured bears. It felt like our country of stupid fucking situation comedies and Dunkin’ Donuts was a paradise island floating in a nightmare world.
That’s when we decided to burn the American flag. We wrote a bit for the live show in Vegas that we call “Flag” or “Flag Burning.” The idea was that we’d take the American flag down from a flagpole fold it properly, wrap it in the Bill of Rights and then burn it. Then we’d restore it. Then we’d show how the trick was done. We’d do the trick again with what we call the Chinese Bill of Rights (clear acetate with nothing on it). We’d show how the flag was switched out and it was flash paper that was burned. We’d end with vanishing the flag in another burst of fire while I recited a verse from “The Star-Spangled Banner.” We’d end with the flag magically appearing back on the flagpole. We found the only verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that didn’t mention god, and even though it was pretty pro-war, we used that.
When we were working on the flag burning, our crew became pretty freaked out. They had not signed up to be part of a show that burned the flag. I told them that the patter was all about the Bill of Rights and freedom, and it was going to be patriotic. I was on G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show and I told Gordon that we were going to burn a flag and he was going to cheer. He attended our show and he did cheer the flag. I’m not sure that Liddy is our best example of a patriot, but at least he thinks he is. Our crew was proud.
Then the terrorist attacks happened on September 11, 2001, and all of a sudden our burning of the flag got much too patriotic for our taste. The burning of the flag was ignored and all of a sudden the trick was just waving the flag. This bit that was supposed to be about our complicated reaction to being American overseas became this rah-rah-rah pro-American thing. It was getting the biggest reaction in our show, but it wasn’t the right reaction. There was too much applause and cheering. We were afraid maybe they weren’t cheering for our ideas; maybe they were just cheering for the flag. What had we become? We cut it from our show for a while.
Things calmed down and we put “Flag Burning” back in. At the time, Lawrence O’Donnell was writing for that liberal-porn show The West Wing. He loved our flag burning and asked to use it as the B story on an episode. We did it. We play
ed our real selves and did the trick in their fake White House. The story was about some controversy around the president burning the flag, and we gave some of my lines from the bit to Martin Sheen, the pornographically liberal president. People seemed to love it, and then they started saying it was nice of The West Wing writers to let us use that bit in our live show. That’s socialism, I guess.
We’ve been doing the “Flag Burning” since the end of the last century. We’ve settled into it. People don’t just cheer for the flag anymore, and they gasp a little when we first burn the flag. Our audience seems to understand it. But I don’t know if I really understand it anymore.
It celebrates the First Amendment. It’s about the enjoyment and privilege of living in a country where we can burn the flag in protest. I get that part. Part of my patter while we perform the trick includes me saying that Teller and I consider ourselves patriotic. When we wrote that, it was true, but I don’t know if it is anymore.
One of the things I love about the USA is that it’s built on an idea. Other countries were built on everyone having the same heritage, the same ancestry, but this country was built by neophiles who wanted to get away. Wanted to live an idea. No matter how long you live in Italy, you’re not really Italian, but once you become a U.S. citizen, you’re an American. I’ve talked a lot about how the USA was the first country built on technology. The idea of freedom of the press is based on the printing press, freedom of speech and freedom of and from religion. All that is groovy, but…
Every Day is an Atheist Holiday! Page 23