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Magic through the eyes of Penn Jillette
By Len Butcher/Las Vegas Review Journal.
Penn, whose real name is Penn Jillette, met his future partner through a mutual friend in Trenton, New Jersey. "I was a student in high school and Teller was a high school teacher at a different school." Neither were performing at the time, although Teller had been doing magic since he was 5. "After I graduated, I did some juggling with Ringling Brothers Circus, stuff like that, and moved to New York City. Teller would come up from Trenton to buy me dinner, as I didn't have any money, and we would get into a discussion on magic."

Early on in these discussions, says Penn, "Teller made the insane comment that magic was essentially an intellectual art form. His point was that it automatically deals with irony. If you don't say, 'Let's go on a magical journey,' if you don't claim real powers, if you actually deal with the tricks, then you're really doing a show.

"Every trick is a mini-show in which what you are feeling, and what you're knowing, collide head on. That is one of the strongest feelings you can get in art. It's like the feeling you get on a roller coaster where you feel like you're going to die, but intellectually, you know it must be safe or the insurance rates would be too high. Those two things hitting — when your viscera, when your animal reactions, collide head on with your intellect, it becomes the most wonderful feeling of the most intense irony you can get."

That conversation continued as an intellectual conversation and became more and more important to the pair. "Each week we'd meet, talk about it and then decided to give demonstrations to the conversation and that conversation continues today — the demonstrations are our show. Our show completely grew out of ideas."

When they decided to team up and do a magic show, Penn said that they expected "our whole life to play in theaters with about 200 seats. We thought we were weird enough and outside the norm enough, that we would play that size venues." Success came quickly. They were soon making a living "playing little theatres in San Francisco and Philadelphia and plenty of people, 200 a day, were coming to see us and we were very happy." In 1986 they got a big break when they performed on Saturday Night Live, which led to the team performing on and off Broadway. "It turns out we were just about an order of magnitude off our predictions, because we found out that there were 2,000 people a day, not only 200, who wanted to see us."

The switch to much larger venues was difficult at first, admits Penn. "It takes an incredible amount of thought. When you go to a bigger theater, you have more money to use and you want to use the space you have, but how do you do it? When we're playing a beautiful theater like our theater at the Rio, the money allows us to have a crew that we can support and who can help us put stuff together and make props more beautiful and allow for more rehearsal.

"It's funny, because most of our friends expected that in some sort of way, going from a small to big theater, would somehow water us down and it would be a less intense experience. But just the opposite happened. As you give us more money and power, we get crazier and more intense, which is not the way everybody goes, but fortunately, it worked out that way for us. As we get older, we get meaner.

"We also found out a very important thing that we didn't know, which is that intimacy doesn't have to do with size. We thought the reason people felt we were talking directly to them was that we were in a small place and they were close to us. It turns out that sincerity scales perfectly. Just watch Springsteen when he performs, and see the incredible intimacy he has with his audiences, which are huge."

As for keeping the show fresh, Penn says, "Teller uses a real nice analogy. Doing a show like ours, you don't get to learn anything. It's like every time you wrote a song, you had to invent and build the instrument you were going to play it on. We have to learn everything from scratch with each new trick and it's a very, very slow process. Some people do things that are odd and surprising in order to be odd and surprising. Stravinsky didn't use the techniques he did because he was trying to shock. He used them very clearly because that was the way to say what he wanted to say.

"We never say, 'Let's do this because it will be weird or crazy.' We do stuff exactly the way we feel it should be done to express it, and then it comes off weird. That gives you a different kind of depth and a different kind of power. So to come up with new stuff, we basically just do what we've been doing for almost thirty years, and that's sit in a room and say, 'What would we like so see on stage if we came to a show?' "

The road to their success eventually led to Las Vegas, a place where Penn didn't think would become their home. "Teller was pushing for it because he wanted to live someplace warmer, and we were deeply New York City. We were on the road a lot, and I didn't expect us to take a full-time gig because I love being on the road. But with the security at airports so depressing and unpleasant, it was no longer fun to be in an airport every day. I really like living here though. It has lots of space and is a very varied community."

He also has very definite opinions on the entertainment here. "I was talking to a reporter from the LA Times recently and he said he thought the entertainment here sucked. I told him that was just a f—ing lie. Let's go by population, Show me a city with a population of Vegas that has more good shows, and you won't find one in the country.

"Blue Man Group is a wonderful, smart, well done, terrific show, and that's here every night. And it happens to be one of the most popular shows in Las Vegas. Add to that Mac King in the afternoon, who does the finest magic show in the world — period. For magic quality, for comedy, for entertainment, you can't touch Mac King.

"You also have coming through here to perform some of the most important artistic forces of our time. We get all these acts, so the fact that we have this horrible, schlock image is going away."

Penn says that in the '60s, "Vegas was incredibly cool. You had the greatest entertainers in the world working here — people like Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Keely Smith and Sam Butera, to name a few, just rocking it out and it was a great place to be.

"Then came the '70s, '80s and '90s, a very long period where it was just people trying to live off the corpses of those entertainers who were no longer doing it. We somehow came up with the idea that if you couldn't actually have those people here, then have people doing impressions and it became this wax museum thing."

Penn's personal opinions, spoken publicly, have caused controversy, but he doesn't believe it has affected him professionally. "I think that the United States really believes deeply in the marketplace of ideas. I believe the Jeffersonian theories of how a country should be run, that there should be dialogue and that the best answer for bad speeches is more speech and not less. I believe that that is so deeply American that you have it in every sense.

"For example, I'm an atheist, but I will go see a Christian perform. I will even go see a Christian perform if the content is essentially Christian. If Garth Brooks does two or three songs about Christianity, I want to hear his point of view even though I disagree with it. I don't think that the only thing the American public goes for is cheerleading. I don't think that you go see every single act because you agree with that person on every single issue.

"As a matter of fact, I am often seeking out entertainers and speakers who have a different belief than mine, because the purpose of art is to get a glimpse into another human being's soul. And I believe that's what most people believe. So if my opinions happen to be different than some people's on a deeper American level, I think they're really the same and I think that many people come to our show who disagree with us on all sorts of things. One of the things we celebrate, and I don't know why we forget it every once in a while, is our diversity."

Oh, in case you're wondering, the reason Teller doesn't speak in the act predates the pair's working together. "He was working silently when I met him." says Penn, "so when we joined forces, we maintained the integrity of the two separate acts."

You can catch Penn & Teller Saturdays thru Wednesdays at 9 p.m. in the Penn & Teller Theater at the Rio. Tickets are $75 and $85.
reviewjournal.com — eNeon Only in Las Vegas  Chuck Rounds' Las Vegas Entertainment News
January 2008