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

by Jillette, Penn

  We have a bit we call “Water Tank.” The gist is that Teller holds his breath completely submerged in a tank of water, which is locked from the outside, until I find the right freely selected card. I find the wrong card and he drowns. After he’s dead, the right card appears on his dead face underwater. It’s a great bit and one that was responsible for one of my stupidest showbiz decisions. We were asked to appear on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. I’m talking the real fucking Tonight Show. We were going to be on with Johnny. I was going to sit on the couch next to Johnny. The couch that meant showbiz. This was going to be it. We wanted to do the “Water Tank.” Johnny’s people said that after we showed the card was right, before we went to commercial, Teller would have to pop out of the tank and wave to show the audience he was okay, and then we’d go to commercial—just a quick wave on the pull back. We said that we wanted to leave Teller dead going to commercial. They said wave. We said that everyone knew Teller wasn’t really dead and we’d go to commercial with him lifeless floating in the tank; that was the respectful way to do it. They said theirs was a happy show, and waving made everyone happy. We pretended to have integrity about something where integrity doesn’t matter and we hung tough. They said that they wouldn’t hang tough. They wanted us on the Tonight Show, and they wanted us on our terms . . . okay—but we couldn’t do it with Johnny. We could do our bit, as we wanted, but we’d do it when The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson was guest-hosted by Jay Leno. We won. And then because we’re loser assholes, we changed to another bit for some reason I can’t even remember and went on with Jay, without doing the “Water Tank” at all. No waving, no not waving, no “Water Tank.” We love Jay and he’s been great to us, but it meant although we were on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson we were never on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson with Johnny Carson.

  I never met Johnny Carson face-to-face. But we did e-mail and talk on the phone a lot. I take about one real day off a year, but one year I took more than a week off, in Newfoundland with my bride-to-be. Everyone was told that I was not to be contacted. Not for any reason. I was with my love and the moose and that was it. We got to our hotel room in St John’s and the phone rang. “Sorry to bother you, Mr. Jillette, but this is Johnny Carson.” I froze. The voice was perfect. This was after he’d retired, and my heart flew, my heart banged, my heart stopped. “Is this a bad time?”

  “No, this is the best time of my life.”

  Johnny had gotten my number from the Amazing Randi and he was calling to compliment me on Penn & Teller: Bullshit! He said things about our show that you’d have to be more of an asshole than me to type here. Very complimentary. I reminded him that he was Johnny Carson and that was a bigger deal. We talked skepticism and atheism. We talked showbiz. I told him I was working on a documentary about the dirty joke known as “The Aristocrats.” He said it was his favorite joke. I said I knew that. I was respectful enough to not ask him to do our movie. He knew I wanted him, and he would certainly have done it if he wanted. I stayed in touch with him, writing e-mails about our movie and how it was going and about atheism. I was writing to fucking Johnny Carson. I told him our movie was going to open at Sundance, and he asked whether the movie’s director, Paul Provenza, and I would come to his house in Malibu after the festival and screen it for him. Holy fucking shit.

  We did Sundance and we were a hit. A big fucking hit. There was only one thing more exciting than showing our movie for the crowds at Sundance, and that was the prospect of showing our comedy movie to Johnny Carson. It would be the end of this project. The morning after our debut at Sundance, Provenza and I were having a hot chocolate to celebrate our success. My cell phone rang. It was Randi telling me that Johnny Carson had died. Provenza and I sat and cried into our hot chocolate all morning. The joy was gone. We pulled back the print and added “For Johnny Carson” to the end of the movie. Okay, so fuck you, we made a great movie and people loved it, but we never got to show it to Johnny. Life speeds by and no matter how much joy there is, there is sadness.

  If we had let Teller wave at the end of the “Water Tank,” I would have met Johnny Carson, but we talked on the phone and we wrote e-mails, and maybe that’s okay. It’ll have to be okay.

  The first time we did “Water Tank” was on Saturday Night Live with Madonna hosting. There are a few moments in it where the audience has to know that I’m worried I won’t be able to find the right card. If you watch the SNL performance, I play it big. Wicked big. Stupid big. I don’t trust myself or the audience. I make sure I get the laughs.

  Ten years later, we had done the bit thousands of times, and we were playing much bigger places. I was able to get the back row of a 5,000-seat theater to understand with less than I used to get a close-up on TV to be clear. With my style and my movement, one little move of the head could get a bigger reaction from the back row than a full body turn. And those people wouldn’t even know how they’d figured out what I was thinking. Thousands of times had taught me how to really communicate. It takes so little, but it takes time to get that little.

  Electronic media had forced a lot of novelty down our throats at the expense of skill. Novelty at the expense of nuance. I thought Andy Warhol said something like if they were going to do pretty much the same situation comedies every week on TV, why didn’t they do the exact same situation comedy every week on TV and get good at it. Since electronic mass media, there’s this sense of “new” that really bugs me. Saturday Night Live is a scripted show that’s more a sitcom, with returning stars and premises, than it is improvisation. Imagine if the brilliant men and women who did the first Saturday Night Live shows had done that same first George Carlin show every night for ten years. Imagine if all their tension had gone away. Imagine if they knew how big every laugh was going to be and exactly where to stand. Imagine no cue cards. Imagine no unneeded pauses and no mugging. The situation comedies don’t explore the depth of plot or those characters in a situation with all the depth that learning can bring; instead they get good at using those same characters in slightly different situations. I guess that’s why it’s called situation comedy. People get good at forms and not ideas. It’s fun to do and it’s fun to watch, but I love watching things that have been done just that way a thousand times before. I think the performers learn stuff that no one would have ever thought of.

  Lance Burton, Master Magician, has a dove routine in Vegas. He’s magically pulling birds out of his jacket. Everyone knows he’s pulling them out of his jacket; there’s no other way to do the trick. He comes out onstage looking twenty pounds heavier than he looks when all the birds have flown magnificently to the back of the theater. Lance did that show seven nights a week, two shows a night, for decades. Other stuff in his show changed, but that dove opener was the same every night. Exactly the same. Every move. Every smile. How could he stand that? Well, he could stand that because he was living Groundhog Day, and he loved it. Lance had a chance to get good at something.

  John Belushi had that one chance to nail that Star Trek sketch and he had to make sure everyone got it. Lance had thousands of shows to get that bird out right and every single night it got a little better. The magic was not in hiding the birds in his jacket. The magic was in doing it over and over again.

  I can go out onstage and just try breathing in a different place to see if a line is smoother. I’m living my thousand years of Groundhog Day. That’s a rare thing in life, where you have something you want to say from your heart and you get to say it over and over again and get it better. Get it right. There are conversations with my wife I would like to have a thousand times so she understood me perfectly. These audiences get to hear me say for their first time something I’ve said a thousand times. I should be able to get them to feel what I want. There is the art. The art is Groundhog Day.

  Listening to: “Like a Rolling Stone”—Bob Dylan (a live performance from last year of a song written in 1965 and performed thousands of times since)

  SICK DAYS


  HOW MUCH WOULD YOU SPEND, right now, cash money, for five photographs of me getting a blow job? There are a lot of sex pictures in my collection, but only five of them are clearly me. It’s my fifty-year-old, 6'7'', 300-pound body standing there with an attractive, red-headed woman, a good friend of mine, and she has my proportionate-but-no-more penis in her mouth. I’m enjoying myself. She’s enjoying herself. She’s wearing a blindfold, so one of my personal sextortionists billboarded it as “Hardcore S&M.” At the time the pictures were taken, both of us were single, and so was the person taking the picture. I don’t remember her birthday, but she was just under thirty. There might have been a twenty-year age difference, but I’m so wicked old that she was still double the legal age in some farm states. Someone who used to work for me sold a laptop without wiping it really clean. Someone else got hold of it and went to a lawyer who specializes in extortion. That asshole lawyer got in touch with my groovy lawyer, who specializes, at least with me, on death threats against me for being an atheist. The asshole wondered whether I might be interested in keeping these pictures from going public. This is known as extortion. Or blackmail. The only unusual thing about it is that it was happening to me.

  How can blackmail happen to me? What’s to blackmail me on? I wrote a bestselling book that included a chapter on my visit to a gay bathhouse, possibly with “Patient Zero” and trying to have gay sex. In the same book I wrote about group sex and having a fat Elvis impersonator piss on me in public. I’ve written about dropping my cock in a blow dryer and fucking a famous model underwater. I once had a CNN cameraman shoot my poisoned bleeding balls. There are pictures and stories of me wrestling naked with a little person, a man, both of us naked, in wet cornstarch. To use incorrect terms, there are pictures of me butt-naked wrestling a butt-assed-naked dwarf. We got rough, he was choking and he almost died. I came close to being the perp in naked homosexual dwarf murder. Isn’t that a little kinky? Even in the twenty-first century, that’s a little kinky, right? I’ve been to the Fetish and Fantasy Halloween Ball dressed as a leather daddy. I did a show called Penn & Teller: Bullshit!—available on iTunes, YouTube, and Netflix—where I’ve been naked and surrounded by naked people and have talked about and cheered for all kinds of sex. I also used every obscenity you’ve ever heard and I may have been the first to say “cunt pickle” publicly. I did a movie called The Aristocrats that was banned by a whole chain of theaters just for the graphic verbal descriptions of perverse sex acts. You can go to YouTube right now and watch me dance naked in Zero-G on the Vomit Comet with my cock flapping around. I have a United States patent on a female masturbation device that I demonstrated with nude models for Playboy. Bill Maher listed a bunch of “perversions” on his show and I said, seriously and honestly, “I’ve done all those.” Howard Stern talked to me about my sex dungeon in my home being used as a nursery when our children were young. I’ve attended the Adult Video Awards and felt Nina Hartley’s and Carrie Fisher’s breasts almost at the same time in public. At that same convention, I slipped behind a curtain with a porn star for an embarrassingly short time. I dropped my pants at a TSA checkpoint and was detained for indecent exposure. I’ve never done a drug in my life, never had sex with anyone who is underage (since I was underage myself), never committed an act of bestiality (mostly because I just don’t like animals), never coerced anyone into sex and I have no secrets from my wife. She sees every picture and she knows every woman who walks by in Starbucks who I find attractive and that’s most of them. I don’t lie to her. Unless there’s a surprise party coming up (that might include wrestling a naked dwarf), we have no secrets. How can blackmail scare me? But it made me sick for weeks. It fucked up my life.

  What was your number for the five pictures of me getting my cock sucked? The extortionists started at “six figures.” When bad douche bags are stealing money, and they say “six figures,” that doesn’t mean $1,000.29. They don’t put the decimal point in. Their jive-ass six figures start at $100,000.00. Let me tell you right now, if you’ll pay six figures even with the decimal point for a picture of me getting a blow job, my wife and I are happy to oblige and you can run the camera yourself. Hell, you’re welcome to join in. My wife and I sometimes have sex just for fun, sometimes for no figures, and not for procreation and not to sell on the Internet.

  When the sleazy extortionist lawyer got in touch with my super-expensive honest lawyer and laid out the threat, I had the odd feeling of being innocent and guilty at the same time. I knew I had done nothing wrong. If there were something I would feel guilty about, I wouldn’t do it. I believe very much in privacy, but I don’t keep much private. I get interviewed and I answer questions that others just say “no comment” to. I try to be a little cagey about what I think of Criss Angel, but people see right through me on that, and I don’t even try to be cagey about sex. I should be blackmail-proof, but when my lawyer called and explained that someone had my private pictures and were threatening to make them public, I almost threw up. Later, I did throw up. I got real, no kidding, sick. I ended up in the hospital and I’m sure stress was part of it. I don’t want to make comparisons with other sex crimes that are much more serious, but it is true that something that one gives up happily and for free can feel awful when it’s taken without permission. I felt awful.

  I asked Teller, “Who the fuck would want pictures of a fifty-year-old fat guy getting his cock sucked?” He answered, “Apparently you do, and that’s the mystery.” Teller always has the right answer. As funny as that is, it’s also true. It was his way of saying “no one,” but why the fuck did I have those pictures on my computer? Why the fuck did I want those pictures? What was I thinking? I understand why I have thousands of pictures of women (and a few men) that I took or had sent to me, I love naked pictures, but why pictures of me? I don’t even look in mirrors. I don’t brush my hair. I hate photo sessions. Why was I posing with my cock out? Well, I was thinking it was no big deal. We were playing around, there were three of us, one had a camera and the pictures were hot to us. They weren’t hot compared with SpankWire and Hamster or any of those professional porno sites, but they were hot to us because they were us. They wouldn’t mean shit to you. I’m not a sex symbol. I’m not attractive, but the wonderful thing about humans is that we can find people who find us sexy, and I’ve been very lucky. We had a really fun evening and took a few pictures so we could remember it and maybe rub a few more out to those same memories. It was efficiency as much as anything. It saved energy. We did it for the planet. I think others do this too. My politics and theology are certainly weirder than my sex life. I think I’m pretty much in the American sex pocket. I’m not a big deal. I’m not blackmail material.

  If I were a piece of ass, like Tom Cruise, or I was anti-ass like Rick Santorum, it seems a lot of people would want to see these pictures, and you could probably get six figures without the decimal point, but Penn Jillette? Who cares? No one cares, and I was still vomiting.

  If I were the person I’d like to be, I would have told my lawyer to throw the letter away. No answer is the answer that was deserved, or I should have told my lawyer to just quote Shakespeare: “There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats: For I am arm’d so strong in honesty That they pass me by as the idle wind, Which I respect not.” That’s the person I’d like to be. The person I am threw up.

  There was a sickening fear. Maybe it’s the sickening fear I feel every night when Teller points a gun that can’t hurt me at my face. A blackmail letter is scary. Was it possible there were pictures I didn’t know about? When the first e-mail came in, they didn’t say they had all my pictures. I thought they might have someone else’s pictures. I don’t know of anyone else’s pictures, but what if there were some? What difference does that make? It’s the same fat guy. The same cock. I’m used to my cock. I’ve accepted my cock. I’ve used my cock. What’s the difference who took the fucking picture? But I wasn’t strong enough. I threw up and I chattered in fear to my lawyer while her clock was running.

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nbsp; My lawyer and manager met with the extortionist lawyer. I didn’t want to feel like prey—I’d rather feel like the predator—so I engaged the lawyer who helped out David Letterman with his blackmail case. You may remember, Dave was embarrassed and the bad guy was incarcerated. Dave won. My new big-cheese blackmail lawyer told my manager and my regular super-lawyer to push hard when they met with the asshole lawyer. They were told to say pretty much what I said in the first paragraph of this article: Penn lives his sex life in public already, we know he fucks and fucks hard and has pictures of it all—now shock us. You better have him fucking a dog or a young boy. My guy is a fucking bad-ass. Shock us. Make us sick.

  This is a goofy situation. It’s like the thief inviting my manager and lawyer to his house to see the Ferrari he stole from me. As soon as he shows my pictures, he’s admitting to a crime. It’s bugnutty. The dickwad led with a picture of me and Liberace. Sadly, both of us fully clothed and not even kissing. He followed that with a picture of Gilbert Gottfried and me with a stripper on my lap. I think the stripper had claimed that she was Dolly Parton’s cousin and fronted that claim with a couple of similarities. My manager said, “That picture hung in our office for sixteen years.” Then my manager was shown the pictures of me getting a blow job from a woman in a comfortable blindfold and the extortionist pointed out that that woman was married (she was married five years after the pictures were taken, but why quibble) and she had a job she might worry about losing. Wouldn’t it be more embarrassing to have a homeless woman blowing me? He then showed them some video of my wife fucking and having sex, and yes, my wife knew the camera was running. I was running the camera and I told her that the red light was on. It would embarrass my wife in front of her mom and dad, but even if it was on SpankWire, her mom and dad would at least fast forward through the good parts. So what?