Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No!

by Jillette, Penn

  ALL THEATER, MOVIES, LITERATURE, AND ART can be broken down into any number of plots you want. Pick an integer and someone has broken all basic plots down to that number. You can even do that Joseph Campbell monomyth jive: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” That thinking gave us the New Testament and Star Wars, and a few good things too. Plots are either infinite, with every tiny detail changing the whole thing, or it all breaks down to one plot, and that one plot is always “Things happen.” I watched the Joseph Campbell interviews and read The Hero with a Thousand Faces and all I could think of was the Bob Dylan line “At dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreams, with no attempt to shovel a glimpse into the ditch of what each one means.” Campbell spends all this time abstracting plots to meet his taxonomy, and then never gives us a hint of what it tells us about being human. He’s really just saying, “things happen” and then labeling them anyway he wants.

  Even the 1964 black-and-white silent movie Empire by Andy Warhol has things happen. It’s just a single shot of the Empire State Building. They shot slightly over six hours of raw footage, then slowed down the film so it ran over eight hours. The camera doesn’t move, nothing really happens. Empire State Building window lights do go off and on, and during the three reel changes you can see Andy’s reflection and the cinematographer’s before they turn the lights out in the room they’re shooting in. It breaks the fourth wall of, in this case, the Time-Life Building where the camera was set up. I loved Andy. His last on-camera appearance was in our Showtime movie Penn & Teller’s Invisible Thread. The plot of our movie was that aliens came to earth and were going to destroy all humanity unless we could prove we were unique in the universe. Andy and a bunch of others were gathered to make the case for humanity, and P&T were brought in to entertain them while they waited. After everyone else failed, we, in our cheesy way, tried to snow the aliens with a trick claiming we were using “invisible thread,” and that was unique. The aliens realized that nowhere in the universe were there creatures who would lie about something that stupid, so Penn & Teller saved the world. I sat in our greenroom area while Amazing Randi told Andy that he shouldn’t trust crystals but should go to a real doctor. I thought Randi was pushing pretty hard against an eccentric genius on an issue that didn’t really matter. If Randi had pushed harder and if the rest of us had supported Randi, if we hadn’t respected Andy’s nutty ideas so much, would Andy have lived longer? No way of knowing.

  Andy was certainly a hero and had several faces of his own, most of them wig-wearing ones. He certainly ventured forth from Pittsburgh, the world of common day, into a region of supernatural wonder, Manhattan in the sixties. Fabulous forces were certainly encountered and Andy won many a decisive victory—producing The Velvet Underground’s record against record company wishes to name one stunning peripheral one. He came back from this mysterious adventure to have the Andy Warhol Museum built after his death (should we have pushed with Randi more?), in Pittsburgh and that sure is a boon to his fellow men and women. Joseph Campbell’s jive is an example of this: if something explains everything, it explains nothing. If a disease has too many mysterious symptoms, it’s probably not a real disease.

  Stage magic is the idiot little brother of real theater, and there is also one mono-plot in stage magic: A loser without friends in the world of common day discovers there is no supernatural wonder, but he’s willing to lie about that. Mundane forces, like needing to get a job, are encountered and he grows out of it. If our loser sticks with magic past adolescence, the loser stays in his little dream world, playing shitty gigs and annoying women.

  That’s the one plot, but there are a few basic effects actions in stage magic:

  Animation—inanimate object moving, or a person levitating

  Production—making something appear

  Vanish—guess

  Transformation—something turns into something else

  Penetration—something goes into something else, sexy by definition

  Teleportation—moving an object to impossible location

  Escape—get out of something

  Prediction—you’ll figure it out

  Restoration—you fuck something up and magically fix it

  A transformation is really just a vanish and an appearance of something else. A penetration is just a half vanish, followed by a half appearance. An escape is a vanish, and an appearance outside gimmicked chains and a box with a trapdoor. If you want to be a real asshole about it, and I always do, a vanish is just an appearance of empty space where something was. Everything is a production, but the list is still useful in organizing magic shows. We open our Penn & Teller show with an object in an impossible location: We borrow a cell phone from an audience member, vanish it, and it appears again inside a dead fish. Then we produce a lot of metal objects and a live person out of nowhere while adhering to the TSA red tape. Teller animates a ball; we transform one person into another; and we perform our “Bullet Catch”: signed bullets appear in impossible locations—each other’s mouths.

  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 wer
e 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.