On Penn & Teller
Although they have an ongoing, highly successful show at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas, we mostly know Penn and Teller today as the hosts of a televised hour of magic in which performers present their tricks and illusions to the duo (and to the television audience), in the hopes of “fooling” them as to how the effect is achieved. The show is aptly called “Penn & Teller: Fool Us.”
It’s all a bit shlocky, of course, as it’s clearly a made-for-television event. The performer on stage does his or her trick, as P&T sit as the only two members of the in-person audience. (There was an actual, live audience before Covid.) After the trick, as the hostess of the show chats with the performer, P&T discuss their ideas, out of audio range. Then, in a somewhat “coded” language that will mean nothing to the lay audience watching on television — so as not to give the secret away — but will contain clues for the artist (and any magicians watching), Penn relates to the performer his and Teller’s ideas as to how the trick was accomplished. (Teller doesn’t speak, in keeping with his persona as the silent partner.)
Can anyone actually fool Penn and Teller — a pair of deeply skilled, experienced, and knowledgeable magicians? As it turns out, yes, and that’s what makes the show interesting. It is a breaking, if you will, of the “Magician’s Bane”: the idea that because magicians supposedly know all the secrets, they can never have the experience of wonder and astonishment that is typically reserved for their audiences. Which is why when that happens — when they are fooled, by some principle or method of which they were not aware — it is occasion for unbridled joy, both for the televised audience at large, and, not least, for Penn and Teller themselves.
It is just this combination of serious magic and camp (the winner’s trophy is titled “FU” … for “Fool Us”) that gives the show a sense of charm and fun, in keeping with P&T’s slightly naughty reputation — somewhat burnished and polished these days — of being the “Bad Boys of Magic.”
That reputation started innocuously enough, some fifty years ago, as Penn Jilette and Raymond Teller teamed up with a musician friend named Weir Chrisemer to form the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society. In this partnership, they used musical, vaudevillian, and carnival skills to realize “a great range of funny and frightening ideas,” eventually developing a large repertoire of unusual theatrical effects, which they performed in local theaters and at county fairs around Massachussetts. In 1977, they began touring, beginning in Philadelphia, with stops in Atlanta, Minneapolis, and other cities, before landing in San Francisco in 1979, where they began a three-year run at the Phoenix Theater of Magic on Broadway, in North Beach.
To a young enthusiast just beginning his life in magic at that time, seeing Penn and Teller (and Weir Chrisemer) at the Phoenix Theater during those years was one of the more distinctive memories of my magical journey. From Penn juggling plungers and swords to Chrisemer’s background piano to Teller’s haunting trick “Shadows” (which he performs to this day), the result was a spellbinding experience that might be expressed today as a pure “WTF?” moment — something that just hadn’t been seen before by contemporary audiences. (Similar to the sensation — also around that time — of seeing a young Steve Martin doing his stand-up routine in a white suit and an arrow through his head.) The somewhat seedy North Beach neighborhood of the Phoenix at the time did nothing to take away from the overall atmosphere of the surreal experience, by the way.
Today, decades later, Penn and Teller are still not above eating goldfish, dropping cockroaches on live TV (Hello David Letterman) or “exposing” tricks — which they do in a way that still fools you. Because that, after all, is their real motto: “Fool You.”