God, No!

by Penn Jillette

  I’ve never said that. Fuck you and your stupid trick, I don’t care.

  On the walk to the elevator David took Teller and me aside, separately, and confided in us that the hunger thing he did in England was “real.” When he was doing the starving trick in that Plexi box by the Tower Bridge in London in 2003 for forty-four days, he claimed he was really hungry for a long time. I’m not a cynic, I’m a skeptic—I try to question information but not motives. But when it comes to David Blaine, I question motives.

  Before David took me aside, and I saw him take Teller aside, it never crossed my mind to ask if David had been really starving in the box. I took it like I take most tricks, for the ideas, and I found these particular ideas repulsive.

  In the bullet trick in our show, Teller and I point real guns in each other’s real faces and pull the real trigger. It’s a horrific image, but at the end, we’re fine. That’s the beauty of the trick—we’re okay at the end. Lots of people get guns fired into their faces, but they’re not okay after. In the fantasy of theater, we conquer the pain, suffering, and death.

  When Paul McCartney went to see David Blaine starving in the box over the Thames, Sir Paul called him “this stupid cunt.” David wasn’t getting fatter in the box. Fatter without food could be a good trick. Blaine was hungry in the box, and being hungry when one doesn’t eat isn’t a good trick. It isn’t a trick at all. There are people all over the world doing this hunger trick against their will, so who cares about the cunt in the box? In 1981 Bobby Sands starved himself to death in prison in an attempt to get the English government to treat IRA members in jail as political prisoners. Bobby Sands got emaciated and died for a cause he believed in. David Blaine got publicity with mocking children throwing food at him and getting called a cunt by the cute Beatle. Getting called a cunt by the Sir Beatle is the only part I thought was pretty boss.

  David was getting fed water while he was cunting in the box, and the water could have had glucose in it, I suppose. If Teller and I were doing it, we wouldn’t have been happy with a little sugar water; we would have been sneaking in steak dinners and Twinkies and getting fat. I don’t know how my getting fat is a good trick, I do it all the time, but getting fat while starving would at least be unexpected. It would be wish fulfillment for starving people.

  I was so busy thinking about what a shitty trick it was that I didn’t think much about the gaff. The instant that David took me aside, put a hand on my shoulder, made eye contact, and told me and then Teller, with utmost sincerity, that he’d really been starving himself, I knew there was a G on the joint. Why talk to both me and Teller if you’re not going to lie to us? But it doesn’t matter. If you ask whether he “did it for real or not,” you’re missing the point.

  David Blaine and Criss Angel did an odd thing. They became famous as magicians and then claimed to be doing things for real. Criss did a lot of sit-ups and then stuck fishhooks in his tits and wanted people to know he was really doing it. “You know, the steamroller thing and the card tricks were lies, but the fishhooks in my tits, why would I lie about that?”

  I started out as a juggler, and jugglers do things for real. There are some juggling tricks that are gaffed, but no juggler I know is comfortable using them. Jugglers like to tell the truth. I do things in the Penn & Teller show that are for real and I do stuff where I’m lying my ass off, and the audience knows the difference. I want them to be able to tell the difference. I like the audience to know when I’m telling the truth and when I’m lying. But David and Criss went into this area that wasn’t juggling and wasn’t magic. Some of their stuff was the kind of thing that morning DJs used to do (“I’ll do four days on the air with no sleep and no disco!”), and before DJs, flagpole sitters. David Blaine even did one gag that was exactly flagpole sitting. The only idea of these stunts is desperation.

  Before David did his “buried alive” gag in NYC, his people called Teller and me and asked if we could help with the trick. We were taking a break around that time and some of our crew guys went to NYC to help build a box for David Blaine to lie in and shit all over himself. Our crew assumed they’d be sneaking him out of the box, but David wanted to really stay in the box doing nothing and living in his own stink. This is how he got to be a star. If doing nothing for over a week is the mark of a superstar, my brother-in-law should be Elvis Gaga. The hard part of David’s stunt was keeping the press far enough away from him when he got out of the box that they wouldn’t gag from his smell. Being marinated in your own buried personal Porta Potty for a week is not sexy.

  David is a magician who did card tricks and camera tricks, and now he wants his stunts to be taken as real. But “real” doesn’t mean anything in this context. Even if there’s no G on the joint, even if he “really does it,” he’s still not really doing it. It’s still showbiz and not science. “Do you think David Blaine really held his breath that long on Oprah?” I don’t care. I don’t want the question asked.

  A magic trick has to be good enough as a magic trick that when you know there’s a G on it, it’s still interesting. It still needs to mean something. I love people who have passion and obsession. I love that there are crazy sons of bitches who want to do free diving and go as long as they can without air just to see if they can do it. I love that pure obsession. But I don’t care about dilettantes on Oprah. Once there are lights all over, and hype and hoopla, it’s no longer science to me. It’s no longer humanity.

  When David pops up in the silver wetsuit with the queen of daytime TV looking amazed, it is by definition a trick. It’s a stunt—and to ask if he really did it is to not understand that art is supposed to be different from reality. And that’s the cool part about art.

  These are all artistic differences, not moral differences. David is a very good person. I like him. We’re not close, but I consider him a friend. The next time I see David, I wonder if he’ll walk me to the elevator, put his hands on my shoulders, look me in the eye, and say, “I really wasn’t breathing, bro.”

  That’ll prove it.

  “Too Many People”

  —Paul McCartney

  King of the Ex-Jews

  After every show, Teller and I meet the audience. We stand in the lobby and talk to anyone who wants to talk to us about anything. We are happy to sign autographs, but that’s not why we’re out there. It’s really just habit. When we started out, at fairs, renaissance festivals, and little shit hole theaters, there was either no backstage or the backstage was so unpleasant it was better to be out with the audience. No one wanted our autographs, but some people wanted to talk to us, and we’d chat.

  We continued to meet the audience Off-Broadway, and then, when it was time to go to Broadway, some thought we would stop hanging out, but we didn’t. We don’t really know how to sit backstage after a show. We relax and come down by talking to the folks who just watched our show.

  We still play places that are small enough that we can meet everyone who would want to talk to us in an hour or so, and what the fuck else have we got to do? Since it’s over a thousand people, and we’ve been controversial now and again on TV, we now have security guards near us, and they’re ready to protect us from anyone who would want to hurt us, but what they really do is tell people where the restrooms are.

  Meeting our audiences, or at least the members of the audience who would like to meet us, makes us different from other entertainers. We aren’t scared of our audiences. We’ve learned that the crowds that other entertainers might hate—the quiet crowds—include many people who are loving the show. I love quiet crowds now; I don’t see them as lacking enthusiasm, I see them as paying attention.

  We’ve learned that a joke that didn’t get a loud laugh might be someone’s favorite line. I’ve learned that even when you’re the first clumsy motherfucker thrown off Dancing with the Stars, you might still have connected in an honest way with some people in that huge faceless TV audience. Teller usually has a few spoken lines in every show, but people like to consider him silent. T
hey like to play it that way. We don’t have to pretend that Teller never talks. It’s just a show and we know it and they know it. After the show Teller talks to anyone who might want to talk to him. An audience member will chat with Teller for a few minutes, but when that audience member gets back home, he’ll explain to his friends that Teller never talks. We’re all in the show together.

  I’ve been known to go out to eat with people I meet after the show, and I have lifelong friends whom I first met in conversation after the show.

  One magical night after the show, the reason I got into show business paid off. An attractive woman waited around until everyone else was gone and told me she’d seen an advance DVD of the first few shows of the first season of Bullshit! at a Skeptics Society meeting. She was very complimentary and said she’d been talking about our show with the Amazing Randi and Richard Dawkins. Randi is my mentor, and Dawkins is an idol of mine whom, at the time, I’d never met. She chatted me up a little more and invited me out for coffee.

  It’s coming up on ten years later and now I’m that fan-girl’s husband, and we have two wonderful children together. I’m not afraid of stalkers; I married one.

  One night after the show a man in his thirties came over and asked me for an autograph. As I signed his copy of my novel, Sock, he told me that he had been an Orthodox Jew, and now he was an atheist and he wanted to thank me for helping him make that change. He said that listening to my radio show had had a very big effect on him. He was considerate and didn’t want to monopolize my time when others were waiting for me, so he didn’t say much more, just took his autograph and left.

  When the crowd had cleared out, he was hovering. He was waiting like guys who want me to do a quick video ID for their podcast, women who want me to sign a breast or two, and weasels who want to ask me to do a show or a charity event that our manager turned down.

  This ex-Orthodox ex-Jew was waiting for me where my future wife had stood to ask me out. He was polite and nervous as he told his story. I’m not going to write his name. As you read on, you’ll understand why he wouldn’t want it published. You wouldn’t believe his name anyway; it’s a joke Jewish name and you’d think I made it up, so I will make it up. I’ll call him Atheist Boy, or AB for short.

  AB was a freshly born atheist. His family were all still Orthodox. He had a lucrative job at a big retail company and many of the people he worked with, as well as his bosses, were Orthodox Jews.

  I hadn’t given him the doubts in his religion, nor had I given him any theology, but somehow, listening to my radio show had given him some sort of inspiration to say he was an atheist. I have no idea how I’d had this kind of effect on him. I’m from Goyfield, Massachusetts. We had two students in our whole high school class who took the Jewish days off from school. The father of one of those children owned the Howard Johnson where I washed dishes (I also washed dishes at the Franklin County Public Hospital, as well as Famous Bill’s Restaurant—I got around), and I’d had some contact with him, but just as a rich guy, not as a person. My cohost on my radio show was Michael Goudeau, and he’s a coon-ass from Louisiana. We were about as culturally non-Jewish as we could be. I’ve been told that the definition of goyishe kop (non-Jew thinking) is buying a boat. Goudeau and I, together, are a big old leaky cigarette boat. We both knew our Lenny Bruce and the Yiddish of the comedy business, but we sure weren’t anything for an ex-Orthodox Jew to identify with.

  I thanked AB and started to walk away, but he had more to say. He had spent his whole life kosher, he said. He’d never eaten pork, or bacon, or shellfish. No milk and meat together. Never. He had flown out to Vegas on business and was taking some extra time to see our show and to think about his theology. On the plane they had offered a lousy microwaved cheeseburger but he couldn’t bring himself to eat it. He couldn’t do it. Here he paused. I’ve gotten laid after my shows. I met my wife after a show. I know about forced awkward preintimacy.

  (Before this tale gets all heavy and touching and shit, I would like to give you the best pickup line anyone ever used on me after a show. Yes, my wife praising Bullshit! and dropping “Randi” and “Dawkins” was great and it worked, but, with all love and respect to my wife, another woman creamed her on the immediate sexual pickup front. Remember, this is the Penn & Teller Show, and I’m Penn. I say “My name is Penn Jillette and this is my partner Teller” as the first and last line of every show. And behind me while I’m in the lobby after the show, there are big pictures of me with my name in huge block letters right over my head. After one show I was out in the lobby talking and signing autographs, and a woman hung back and waited for people to clear out. When they were gone, she walked over, cocked her head at a questioning angle, and said very clearly and directly, “Fuck me if I’m wrong, but is your name Debbie?”)

  All the sexual pickups I’ve heard were much less intimate and vulnerable than what AB was about to say. He quietly asked me if he could eat his first non-kosher food with me. He wanted me to join him for a bacon cheeseburger. He said it would mean a lot to him. That’s a lot harder to say than “fuck me.” I was so moved. I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t know how to describe the feeling. I was certainly honored. I certainly felt unworthy. But it was more than that. I invited him backstage and said, “Yeah, c’mon back, meet the guys, and we’ll watch you eat.”

  I walked him back and left him in the Monkey Room with Jonesy, the monster jazz piano player in our show, while I changed my clothes. By the time I got back to AB, Teller was in the Monkey Room, along with a friend of ours from the MIT Media Lab who had come backstage after seeing the show. Zeke was also there. Zeke is one of the guys who sets up all the magic for us. There are places in the show where our lives are in Zeke’s hands. He’s the youngest guy on our stage crew, but he’s been around for a while now. I brought Zeke to the P & T crew. Zeke had been adopted when he was in high school by a distant relative of his who is a friend of mine. Zeke was living with this relative in Branson and not doing well there as a punk atheist. No one does well in Branson, it’s a shit hole. When his guardian would come visit me in Vegas, I’d talk atheism with the boy, and finally my friend said, “You’re helping turn him into an atheist and making Branson hell for him, so let him move in with you.” Zeke had just graduated from high school, so he moved into the Slammer and lived with me. I didn’t take care of him at all, just gave him a room and let him eat my food. He played video games and watched TV and my friends thought it was sexy to have a good-looking young boy around the house eating Top Ramen in his underwear (how the Top Ramen got into his underwear, you don’t want to know). He finally started working with the Penn & Teller show sweeping floors at the shop, and now he’s worked his way up to a serious magic guy. I like Zeke. I recapped AB’s story for everyone in the Monkey Room. I lightened it up a little bit, since it was still a bit too intense and honest for me to really deal with.

  When I finished, I said, “Okay, AB, have at it,” and offered him my dinner, salmon and spinach, which turned out to be pretty much kosher. I figured we must have something that wasn’t and pointed him to our sandwich and fruit plate.

  It was turkey sandwiches, cheese, and pineapple and banana. AB was disappointed. Yeah, technically it wasn’t really kosher, because the turkeys probably hadn’t been slaughtered with the “correct” procedure, but it also wasn’t obscene. He’d tasted versions of all of this stuff. This wasn’t the real forbidden-sin food. If he was going to lose his virginity, he wanted to really get fucked.

  “So, we’re looking for bacon, right?” I asked.

  “Yup.”

  “So, Jonesy, shall we just call room service? I mean, they have good bacon and eggs. How long will that take?”

  The Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, has great bacon and eggs, and their room service is swift, but we didn’t want to wait around even that long. We wanted to watch virgin AB get fucked by the swine now.

  The steakhouse at the Rio was open all night, and the steakhouse had i
t all. We decided we’d take him out. Zeke is a punk and Zeke speaks his mind. “Listen, motherfucker,” he told AB, “if I go along, you’re going to eat all the fucking shit and I’m going to watch you do it. If we go, and you like pussy out on us or something, I’ll kick your fucking ass and shove the bacon down your throat and up your Jew ass. Got it?”

  AB agreed, and Penn, Teller, Jonesy, Zeke, our MIT buddy, and AB headed to the All-American Bar and Grille. We were laughing and joking, but it was a heavy event. AB was trembling with nervousness. He said later that a lot of his excitement and nervousness was being out with Penn & Teller, but that didn’t enter into it. This was a change in his life. This was some sort of improvised atheist baptism.

  Before I tell you the rest of AB’s story, I need to tell you about another big atheist baptism I hosted. A few years earlier, Joe Rogan of Fear Factor and Doug Stanhope of The Aristocrats had told me about their favorite performance artist. It was a whack job who went by the name Extreme Elvis. Extreme Elvis is a fat Elvis impersonator with a very small cock. We all know he has a cashew dick, because he performs naked onstage and will often piss on the audience. He has the Elvis sideburns, and the Elvis hair, and a big fat belly, and a little dick, and he sings wonderfully. Most Elvis impersonators fall down on the voice. Elvis could sing his ass off and Extreme Elvis can sing for real. Extreme Elvis doesn’t do many shows, because people don’t book a naked needle-dick fat guy who pisses in public, and if they do, the police often enter into the situation and stop the show. He can’t really do a full show unless he’s playing at a private party, and what kind of asshole is going to pay a fat, badly hung, naked, pissing Elvis impersonator to come into his private home?