God, No!

by Penn Jillette

  Then she brought the crazy. It bloomed fast. I hadn’t even gotten back to my room when there was a four-page fax (it was way back then) at the desk of the hotel. Handwritten, small, psycho R. Crumb’s–brother writing, telling me about our future together and what I had to do now. She was making demands. She was halfway to “I will not be ignored” bunny boiling, and I had hardly even stopped fucking her. Oh, my word.

  I decided to be honest. I’d never tried that with crazy before. After reading the fax, I called her up and asked her out to lunch. We went to a soul food restaurant, and over hot links, ribs, and pulled pork, I decided to just tell her the truth as I saw it:

  “People think you’re crazier than a shithouse rat. You are the sexiest woman I’ve ever seen. You told me last night that last Halloween you had a Kill Bill outfit that you filled out better than Uma and still no date. Do you realize how much fucking crazy that is? When I arrived in town, I was told where the closest Denny’s was, and that you were too crazy to fuck. Those were the two pieces of information the local crew thought I needed. Do you understand that?”

  She gave no reaction, but I kept trying. “How can I get you to understand this? Here we go. You read a lot. You see a lot of movies. You watch TV. You write movie scripts and you’ve written short stories. I’ve brought this fax with me that you sent to my hotel. Imagine we’re in a movie or a book. Imagine this is a story. Imagine you aren’t you. You don’t even know you. ‘You’ isn’t even real. ‘You’ is a character in this story, okay? And this hack magician comes to town and fucks this incredibly sexy, hot, smart, cool woman. And when he gets back to his hotel, he finds this fax waiting for him.”

  I handed her the fax she had sent me that morning.

  “So, you’re reading the book, and then there’s this fax from a woman that our hero has fucked once. He fucked her once! And you read this fax from her in the book, okay? Now, just reading the book, just trying to understand the book, would you think that the author wanted you to believe that the woman who sent the fax to the hack magician was crazy? You understand stories, right? You understand that there are people in stories whom the reader is supposed to think are crazy, right? You need to know certain characters are crazy to understand the book, right? And you know how authors let you know that you’re supposed to think that a character is crazy? They make you think that with crazy shit the character writes, says, and does. So, you write this fax to me, and you’re about to send it, and then you think, ‘If I read this fax in a movie, would I think that the person who wrote this fax was supposed to be crazy?’ And if the answer is yes, you just throw the fax away, you never send it, and no one knows you’re fucking nuts. Okay?”

  It seemed I was really onto something. I went on. “We all think crazy shit all the time. All our heads are full of crazy fucking whack-job shit, so before we say something, we just have to think to ourselves, ‘If a character in a movie said what I’m about to say, would I think that character was supposed to be crazy?’ And if the answer is yes, you just say something else. It’s that easy. And then you won’t be too crazy to fuck.”

  It didn’t work. Even though I knew she was crazy, I fucked her a few more times, and she got crazier and crazier, and it didn’t go well. It ended up very badly, but . . . I got to leave town.

  A few days later I was sitting on the plane next to Robbie. I was pretty proud of the “If this would seem crazy if you read it in a book, don’t say it” theory of living one’s life.

  Robbie listened to the whole story and said, “Penn, if you were reading a book, and one of the characters said exactly what you said to that poor incredibly hot woman, would you think the guy saying that was supposed to be crazy?”

  “Brick House”

  —Commodores

  It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Stupidity

  I repeat: “I fuck Jesus hard through the hand holes and cream on his crown of thorns.” You say that in certain rooms and you’ll piss some people off. I said it to a socially conservative Christian woman during a commercial break on Politically Incorrect. When we came back on the air, she was in pro-wrestling mode. She was in full flipped-out Andy Kaufman mode, attacking me like a nut. I had made sure that no one but her, not even Bill Maher, heard me say it, so she seemed really to have lost it for no reason. I had said my crazy thing quietly, off air, and her reaction was loud, on air. She looked like a fucked-up crackhead and I looked measured, tolerant, and sane. It was just a cheesy TV trick that you can pull on amateurs. Hey, what can I say, I’m a professional.

  Talking about raping the pain of the son of god can get you a strong reaction, but nowhere near as strong as you can get from environmentalists without even trying. James Randi is a skeptic and is Penn & Teller’s inspiration. Randi is our hero, our mentor, and our friend. The Amazing Randi taught us to use our fake magic powers for good. Psychics use tricks to lie to people; Randi uses tricks to tell the truth. About every year in Vegas, the James Randi Educational Foundation holds “The Amazing Meeting” and gathers as many like-thinking people as you can get from a group of people who want to question every time people think alike. They invite speakers as smart, famous, and groovy as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Trey Parker, and Matt Stone. We all fill up a big Vegas ballroom. There’s lots of real science stuff with real scientists questioning things that a lot of people on TV take for granted, like ESP, UFOs, faith healing, and creationism. It’s a party.

  Every year Penn & Teller are honored to be invited. We don’t wear our matching gray suits and Teller doesn’t stay in his silent character. Teller chats up a storm. It’s not a gig, it’s hanging out with a thousand friends. A couple years ago, during our loose Q & A, someone asked us about global warming. Teller and I were both silent onstage for a bit too long, and then I said I didn’t know. I elaborated on “I don’t know” quite a bit. I said that Al Gore was an asshole (that’s scientifically provable, right?), that I really wanted to doubt anything he was hyping, but when all was said and done, all I wanted to say was that I didn’t know. I also emphasized that really smart friends, who knew a lot more than me, were convinced of “climate change” (marketers have changed the brand name from “global warming” to “climate change,” having learned from Goldman Sachs that if you bet against yourself and have the government to bail you out with other people’s money, you’re golden). I ended my long-winded rambling (I most often have a silent partner) very clearly with “I don’t know.” I did that because . . . I don’t know. Teller chimed in with something about Al Gore’s selling of “indulgences” being bullshit and then said he didn’t know either. P & T don’t know jack shit about global warming; next question.

  The next day I heard that one of the nonfamous, nongroovy nonscientists, Sharon Begley, had used me as an example of someone who lets his emotions make him believe things that are wrong. Okay. People who aren’t used to public speaking get excited and go off half-cocked. Hell, I’m used to public speaking and I go off half-cocked even when I’m not excited. I live half-cocked. Cut her some slack.

  Later I was asked about some Newsweek blog she wrote. Reading it bugged me more than hearing about it. She ends with: “But here was Penn, a great friend to the skeptic community, basically saying, don’t bother me with scientific evidence, I’m going to make up my mind about global warming based on my disdain for Al Gore . . . Which just goes to show, not even the most hard-nosed empiricists and skeptics are immune from the power of emotion to make us believe stupid things.” Here is Penn, a great friend to your ass, basically saying, fuck you in the neck, Sharon.

  Is there no ignorance allowed on this one subject? I took my children to see WALL-E. This wonderful family entertainment opens with the given that mankind destroyed Earth. You can’t turn on the TV without seeing us hating ourselves for what we’ve done to the planet and preaching the end of the world. Maybe they’re right, but is there no room for “maybe”? There’s a lot of evidence, but GW contains a lot of complicated points that are moral and practical
and cannot be answered by evidence.

  To be fair (and it’s always important to be fair when one is being mean-spirited, obscene, sanctimonious, and self-righteous), “I don’t know” can be a very bad answer when it is disingenuous. You can’t answer “I don’t know if that happened” to the attempted genocide of the Jews in World War II. But the climate of the whole world is much more complicated. I’m not a scientist, and I haven’t dedicated my life to studying weather. I’m trying to learn what I can, using the tools I have, and while I’m working on it, isn’t it okay to say “I don’t know”?

  I mean, at least in front of a bunch of friendly skeptics?

  I wrote a version of the above, in more L.A. Times language, for the L.A. Times right after it happened. The business with Sharon the cunt really bummed me. “Climate change” was a magic subject in Sharon’s world. Was it a taboo in the skeptics’ world, where I’d talked onstage about fucking Jesus, son of Mary, in all his holes and gotten a laugh, even from Christian skeptics? (Yup, there’s such a thing as a Christian skeptic—ESP is too weird for them, but they’re fine with zombie saviors.)

  A year went by, and Penn & Teller were at the next TAM with The Amazing Randi, doing another Q & A, and we got asked the same fucking question. This is what I said this time:

  “I tried saying before that I didn’t know. And when you say you don’t know, that’s a jive answer, because if someone says ‘Did the holocaust happen?’ and you answer ‘I don’t know,’ that’s absolutely a lie. And I tried to say it about global warming. I tried honestly to say that I don’t know without saying there isn’t evidence there. I really sincerely don’t know! It certainly seems like the evidence that—But you shouldn’t be listening to me, I’m the least-qualified person to talk about this. This is why we haven’t done a Bullshit! show about global warming—because we want to do stuff that we think there’s a very good chance that we’re correct about. And there is almost no chance we’d be correct about global warming.

  “The only thing I’m trying to say is, if there is global warming, which there probably is, that doesn’t necessarily mean we caused it.

  “And if we caused it, which we probably did, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we can stop it. Randi and I can take a tractor trailer to the top of a hill and put it in neutral, and we can start pushing it, but as it goes down the hill, we can’t necessarily stop it just because we started it.

  “So if people can stop it, which they probably can, that doesn’t mean that the way to stop it is by stopping carbon emissions—which it probably is.

  “And if it is happening, and we did start it, and we can stop it, and the way to do that is with carbon emissions, it does not necessarily mean that the answer is socialism.

  “But it may very well be. I don’t know, and I mean I really, deeply don’t know. Not some skinhead Nazi ‘I don’t know about the holocaust’ thing, but just really, I don’t fuckin’ know!”

  I should talk about global warming only during commercial breaks.

  “(Tropical) Heat Wave”

  —James White and the Blacks

  The Bible’s Tenth Commandment

  Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house; thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to thy neighbor.

  “I just want to believe in god.”

  “I just want to believe I’m Bob Dylan, but it’ll be healthier for both of us if we just live in this world the way it is.”

  ONE ATHEIST’S TENTH SUGGESTION

  Don’t waste too much time wishing, hoping, and being envious; it’ll make you bugnutty. (Man oh man, that MILF at my child’s school sure looks hot, but I have work to do.)

  You Could Be Bruce Springsteen

  You could never be Bob Dylan. You have no chance of that. You won’t be Eddie Van Halen; you’ll never practice enough. Even if you could write as well as Eminem, you don’t have a thick enough skin to be him. Yeah, you can play bass as well as Sid Vicious ever did, right now, but you’ll never be in that right of a place at that right of a time. You’re already as good a musician as Ozzy or Courtney, but it’s harder to be Ozzy and Courtney than it is to learn to do something. You’ll never have the attitude required to be famous with no skill and no talent. You couldn’t live with yourself if you stooped to doing impressions of people who really are talented, so that option is out the window. You’re too old and/or not good enough looking to be in a boy or girl band. But, you know, you really could be Bruce Springsteen. You could be the Boss. Put on “Born in the USA” and give that a listen. It’s a record you would have wanted to make. It sounds pretty good when you sing along, doesn’t it? You could have done that. Anyone could be Bruce Springsteen.

  It’s not that Springsteen is incompetent. Not at all. He’s not a hack. He’s not sloppy. He’s not a follower. Everything he does, he does well. He’s a superstar and a major talent. And he’s a superstar who’s one of us. The goofy thing is that it doesn’t matter very much who the “us” is in that sentence. Springsteen is one of the people, no matter who the people are.

  If the greatest art conceals the art, Springsteen is a great artist. Sit around with your rock snob friends and talk about great guitar players, great singers, and great songwriters. Hendrix, Pete, Eddie, Prince, Page, Zappa, Clapton, Richards, and Carlos are some of the guitar names you’ll throw around. Elvis, Lennon, Roy, Elvis, Freddie, and Fogerty are some of the singer names. Dylan, Prince, the Glimmer Twins, and Beck are some of your great songwriters. (There are no women on the list, because we’re talking about “rock snobs,” which is a boys’ club. Yeah, lots of women should be on that list, but they’re not; rock snobs, right now in this culture, are heterosexual men loving other men.) These lists were off the top of my head. I don’t pretend they’re up to date, complete, or even close to accurate—there are lots more in every category, and there’s lots of room for argument—but the point is that Bruce isn’t on any of those lists. However, if you’re not talking to snobs—if you’re talking to people who would put Elton and Billy Joel on that list—Bruce is near the top of all three of those lists. If you’re talking to “the people,” they’ll pick Bruce right away.

  When you go to see Dylan, you want to hang on his every word. You want to study how he stands, where he’s looking, and how he breathes. Even when Bob touches your heart directly, there’s still a lot of mystery. We’re always studying Dylan; we want to learn as much as possible about who Dylan is. Dylan falls in love and gets his heart broken just like you, but Dylan isn’t really just like you. Even when you mumble “right on” under your breath, even when you know exactly what the hell he’s talking about, he’s still Dylan and you’re still just you.

  You never get that feeling with Bruce. He’s always talking about “us.” Always. Even his personal little tape-recorded albums, done in the middle of the night in his house alone, are about us. He’s even antisocial like everyone else. Going to see Dylan is like going to the most wonderful freak show ever devised. You’re going to see “someone very special.” He makes no attempt to reach you. You come to him; he doesn’t reach out to you. Bob doesn’t make you sing along. Bob doesn’t ask you how you’re feeling. You’re there to see him, and his major job is to be Dylan, and he does that perfectly.

  Going to see Bruce is going to a pep rally. When you go to see Bruce, you’re going to hang out with all your peeps. He’s a cheerleader for all our lives. I grew up in a dying factory town. I had friends come back from Vietnam. I had friends not come back from Vietnam. Bruce lets you sing along. If he had time, he’d get everyone onstage to sing into the mic with him. He’s not on display; he’s inclusive. He looks at everyone in the crowd. A Springsteen show is about us.

  I remember seeing Elvis Costello for the first time and being bothered that people around me were singing along. These were private thoughts that Elvis and I shared. What right did these people have to sing them out loud? But with Bruce, it’s “tramps like us” who were
born to run. “We were born to run,” not “I was born to run.”

  As brilliant as Dylan is, you can disagree with him and still love him and want to see him. “Hurricane” probably did it, and not everyone must get stoned. But do you ever really disagree with Springsteen? What’s to disagree with? Where’s he pushing the envelope? What creepy ideas does he have? He’s not Eminem, dressing up like bin Laden and saying nasty things about sweet little girls with records out. Bruce has the same opinions you have. Yeah, he supposedly angered a few cops with “American Skin (41 Shots),” but I was at that show at Madison Square Garden, and as far as I can tell, the press was making it all up. People weren’t walking out in disgust. They were walking out for hot dogs during a new song they didn’t recognize. They just wanted to be fortified for the hits that would be coming up in the encore. It’s a long show; you need provisions. How far out on a limb is it to say that maybe cops don’t have to shoot the wrong guy forty-one times?

  I remember a Springsteen line from one of the early bootlegs: “There’s something about a pretty girl on a hot summer night that gets this boy excited.” What?! What a creep, huh? Man, what kind of nut would get excited by a pretty girl on a hot summer night? That puts him out there with Ozzy, Trent, and Marilyn, huh?

  I saw an ad for Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ when I was in high school in January of 1973. The ad was just the lyrics to “Blinded by the Light.” That was enough for me. I bought the album the day it came out. I’ve been a Springsteen fan as long as possible without living in Jersey in 1970. I saw him live before anyone you know. I saw Bruce open for In Cold Blood and It’s a Beautiful Day on May 6, 1973, in Amherst, Massachusetts. His hair was short and he was wearing a leather jacket and no bell-bottoms. Some of the hippies in the crowd (it was all hippies; it was an outdoor concert with It’s a Beautiful Day) taunted him by yelling “Sha Na Na.” The spotlight operators didn’t know who to put the spot on. They seemed to think it was Garry Tallent, the bass player, and the E Street Band. This story should end with his blowing away the whole outdoor festival, but he didn’t. He did okay. He did fine. He did his job. I left right after Bruce because I wasn’t a hippie who wanted to see those other bands. I had hair down to my shoulders, and I’d never been to Jersey, but he was singing for me.