I try not to say anything in character that I wouldn’t say myself. People ask me if I believe everything I said on Penn & Teller: Bullshit! and I did and I still do believe almost all of it. There has been some information that’s changed my mind on a few things, and I’m also a different person now, so some of my opinions have changed a little, but when I said it, I meant it.
I’ve done a few TV dramas where I played myself and then it gets tricky. I did a detective show called Numb3rs and I was playing myself. Someone else wrote the script, but I was pretty much myself. The Penn in Numb3rs was proud of having known Richard Feynman, and the real Penn is even prouder.
I know the audience makes very sophisticated separations between fantasy and reality, but some reactions still confuse me. Lawrence Konner, one of my friends, was a writer on The Sopranos. He gave me a call once and asked my permission to write a scene in which one of the women on the show, Adriana La Cerva, confesses to having sucked my cock in a men’s room in Atlantic City. He was inspired to write that after an evening he and I spent hanging out in Vegas—you know what I mean. I was flattered. Even more flattered when a morning DJ told me that Mick Jagger had called Steve McQueen to ask if it was okay for Mick to sing about someone sucking Steve’s cock in the song “Starfucker” (it’s copyrighted as “Star Star”). Steve said yes to Mick and I said yes to Larry. Steve and I are that same kind of guy. After it was shot, Lawrence called me to apologize. I guess in his script she blew me in the men’s room, but they changed it on set to her blowing me in the women’s room. I don’t know why that made a difference on the set, and I don’t know why Larry felt he had to apologize. I have no idea what that means. I guess the Penn of The Sopranos cares where he’s blown. The real Penn would be happy to go into the bus station transsexual bathroom for any blow job.
When that episode of The Sopranos came out, I had people call me and say, “I loved your appearance on The Sopranos.” I got more reaction to that than the many TV shows I’ve gotten into makeup for. I’m at my best when I don’t show up. A character on 30 Rock talked about what outfit she’d wear to watch porno in Vegas with me. For the real Penn, you can watch porno with me without any outfit at all. People called up and congratulated me for being on 30 Rock. After The Sopranos blow job line, I was most shocked by the people who said, “You know, that actress, Drea de Matteo, must really dig you, or she wouldn’t have said that.” What? It was my buddy Lawrence who thought about sucking my cock; Ms. de Matteo had no more desire to suck my cock than James Spader desired to fuck Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary. Okay, that’s a bad example, but I was surprised how many people thought that I was somehow on The Sopranos.
Weirder than getting my imaginary cock sucked on that show were the two Penn & Teller appearances on The Simpsons. It seems everyone wanted to know what that was like. What? It was like being in a recording studio in Vegas wearing headphones and reading a piece of paper on a music stand. We didn’t go to Springfield. Homer didn’t want to suck my cartoon dick in the cartoon women’s room of the cartoon nuclear plant.
The X-Files called us in to do a script with them in the nineties. We went to L.A. for a meeting with the big cheeses on the show. They were considering having us play Penn & Teller, who discover that some bullshit wasn’t bullshit. We were to play the skeptics who were proven wrong. Morally, the show is fiction and so anything is okay. My favorite movie is Dawn of the Dead and my twelfth favorite movie is the remake of Dawn of the Dead and there’s nothing wrong with doing a fictional movie about zombies even when there aren’t real zombies. That’s okay. It was okay for us to play Penn & Teller and get killed even though we weren’t killed. It was okay to have some Mafia girlfriend talk about sucking my cock. But something rubbed us the wrong way about playing skeptics who are proved wrong in The X-Files. It didn’t feel right.
We were discussing this with the cheeses at The X-Files and they were being pretty snotty about it. They thought we should get off our fucking high horse and just do their big fancy TV show. They were right and they probably would have convinced us, but then one of them said something crazy. One of them said something like it was impossible to have drama without the supernatural. What? I brought up Psycho and all Sherlock Holmes and then they made a bigger mistake. They said something to Teller like “I see why you don’t talk much. Penn is so argumentative, you can’t get a sane word in.” Oh dear. When you say in real life that Teller doesn’t talk because I’m too aggressive and he’s dominated by me . . . well, things don’t go well. Don’t assume anything that Teller does isn’t his own choice.
Teller spoke. Oh my glory, did Teller speak. Teller explained that he was quiet during this meeting not to stay in character or because I bullied him into silence, but rather because he couldn’t figure out a way to suffer fools as well as I had. He then made a very strong case for realistic drama, quoting Aristotle and Shakespeare and using phrases such as “hacks like you.” It didn’t go well. They did the show without us and got a couple of other guys to transform from make-believe skeptics to make-believe believers. The guys who did the bit are friends of ours and it was a good break for them. It would have been good for us too, but we queered that deal. I think it’s okay to do anything in fiction, but it’s not okay to say that Teller is being quiet because I overpower him. That’ll get you a new asshole ripped. Of course, their show did fine without us. It was our loss, not theirs. Sha La La La, man.
We were not the first to kill our fictional selves in a movie, but I really wanted to be the first to be the bad guy under my own name in a fictional show. I can’t think of another example of that except maybe Donald Trump on The Celebrity Apprentice, but I’m not sure he sees himself as the villain. I wanted to be a fictional real bad guy named Penn Jillette. I asked the CSI guys if they’d let me play Penn Jillette on their show and turn out to be a murderer. I thought me in an orange jump suit with a prison ID number and the name “Jillette” on it at the end of the show would be great. But Teller and I pissed off the CSI guys too. I don’t think there was even a story to how we pissed them off; they just plain didn’t like us. We were told by our manager that they hated us. We don’t know what we said or did. I guess we were just ourselves, sometimes that’s all it takes.
When I was on Numb3rs playing myself, I asked if the fictional Penn could be friends with the lead guy, Charlie Eppes, played by the groovy David Krumholtz. I asked if I could be some sort of recurring character. I wouldn’t start out as the bad Penn Jillette. I would start out as the good Penn Jillette, who was getting to be friendly with Charlie Eppes. I’d be a guy he went to for a few shows. That would be the arc of my character. And then after Charlie and the audience got used to me, there would be a case where some perp was killing showwomen or magicians or something sexy like that. Charlie would come to me to help me solve the crime, and then he’d realize that I was the bad guy and he’d lock me up as “Penn Jillette.”
I’ve heard that people who play the bad guys in re-creations of real crimes on TV get turned in as “most wanted,” but with my own name, I thought it would be even nuttier. I guess they kind of did that to me on The Celebrity Apprentice, but I wanted to try it with a real script and plot and not just after-the-fact editing. I think going to TV prison would be way more fun than the boardroom. The writers/producers seemed to like the idea, but the show ended before we got to do it. Or maybe they were just being nice over lunch and weren’t even considering. I never know what’s really going on in showbiz. I still wonder what we did to piss off CSI.
I’ve heard hard-core drinkers don’t go out on New Year’s Eve because it’s for amateurs. I feel that way about practical jokes. Teller and I do not play practical jokes. Hardly ever. We played a real-life practical joke on an agent in Atlantic City and it didn’t go well. We were too good. Way too good. It really didn’t go well. I’m going to tell you a slightly watered down version, because I’m ashamed of the real story.
Our opening act for one run in Atlantic City was Robert Wuhl doing
stand-up and telling wonderful showbiz stories. The three of us decided to play a practical joke on a booking agent who we shared. We’ve done most of what there is to do in Atlantic City. We wanted to see what would happen if an agent had to break up a serious fight between Robert and Penn & Teller. We rehearsed with Robert, and he did a great job. We planned some special effects and rehearsed those too. With a bunch of people, including the agents, standing around backstage in the green room after the show, I started by making a small negative comment about a joke in Robert’s show. He came back defensively. I came back more offensively. We escalated to screaming at each other. That led to some pushing and shoving. Teller had a pot of coffee that looked like it was boiling hot (dry ice), and he threw it at Robert and there was a lot of blood-curdling screaming, swearing and stage combat. It was wicked heavy. We convinced everyone it was real, including a few security guys who weren’t in on it (though a couple were), and it really made people feel scared and awful. It was worse than what I’m writing here. No one was physically hurt, but it went on much too long and there was real panic. It was awful. The guy we did it for never believed it was fake and never forgave us. I’m on his side.
So our new rule on practical jokes is we don’t do them. The one exception is if we can be sure that the “victim” enjoys the joke more than we do. I don’t mean being a good sport and laughing along with us; I mean really thrilled and honored.
We’ve done one great practical joke in that vein. We did a thing called “LabScam” in the fall of 1989. That year will be important later. rob pike, super-genius, and his super-genius buddies at Bell Labs wanted to play a practical joke on their boss, Arno Penzias. Arno is a Nobel Prize smart guy, and they wanted to really blow his mind. They wanted to do a magic trick that would make him think that technology had really progressed even faster than possible. That’s hard to do at Bell Labs. This is the place where the motherfucking transistor was invented. These guys wrote the book on UNIX. These are some serious cats and kitties. These are the cats and kitties who invented the future we’re living in.
Another major player on our “LabScam” team was Dennis Ritchie. He was one of the most important people in computer science, and he was such a great man. He died last year and is deeply missed. On the day of “LabScam,” we taught him to do some tricks with a thumb tip and he performed those tricks for the rest of his life. I have used Dennis’s description of “LabScam” from the Web as the backbone of this story. He wrote up the story well, and he did a lot of the work that made it possible for me to have a Web to find it on. Yeah, he’s that important to computers.
The night before the scam, Dennis sent an e-mail to Arno Penzias, vice president of Bell Labs, their big boss:
Subject: voice stuff
I think rob is almost ready to invite you to look at his latest effort, which is (pretty much) voice recognition. He’s able to show surprisingly good results from a fundamentally simple-minded scheme; it’s worth seeing. Besides, he appears to have spent the long weekend putting some pizzazz into his demo; he claims it is like Eliza (esp. the “Doctor” program) for the multimedia age.
Dennis
Remember, this is the end of the eighties; quality voice recognition was still years away. This is an e-mail from a heavy cat, Dennis, about another heavy cat, rob. When these guys say they got something heavy, you best believe they got something heavy. Dennis piqued Arno’s interest.
On the day, rob ushered Arno into a room and sat him in front of two terminals. There was a bright light shining in Arno’s eyes, a microphone and TV camera inches from his mouth. That was just to make him uncomfortable. I never said every moment of the practical joke had to be comfortable, did I? On one terminal, a real-time, processed image of Arno’s lips appeared. On the other were printed several words.
rob explained that he had been doing some work in speech recognition and had achieved some interesting results. The camera was watching Arno’s lips to determine when he was speaking and use the movement of his mouth to aid in recognition. The computer would analyze his utterances using both the audio and the video. It would first be necessary to say each word on the second screen in sequence, to train the program to recognize Arno’s voice.
Arno said the first word, “Hello.” rob typed stuff on a third terminal. rob was acting. On the terminal Arno was facing, things flickered, and a graph and some numbers (“autocorrelation coefficients”) appeared. Arno said the next word, “Sanskrit.” More flickering, graphs, numbers. Arno said, “Hohokus.” I had said while we were setting the joke up, “If we can just get Arno to say ‘Hohokus’ into a microphone, we will have already won!”
The words disappeared, and several sentences came up on the terminal. Arno had to pick one of the sentences, and speak it. rob readjusted Arno’s head to make sure his lips were centered on the TV. There was no reason for this, but rob wanted to manhandle his boss. Arno read, “It’s a pleasure having you with us,” and, after a calibrated annoying pause, a synthesized voice said, “Please repeat.” Demos are supposed to fuck up. During this phase, the machine was supposedly deciding which of the sentences had been spoken. Finally, it got this right, and Arno moved on to “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” After two tries, the machine repeated this too. It was wobbly, but rob’s demo was moving along.
Now, rob said, we can have some fun. Arno was aware of the famous Eliza program. It was a computer program that pretended to be a shrink. That demonstrates a lot about computers and/or a lot about shrinks. To bring the idea up-to-date, rob had taken a videotape of David Letterman’s show, and digitized the guests’ answers and the host’s questions. Arno would play Letterman, on his own talk-show, and ask the questions. The machine would match each question to one actually asked on a past show, and then play back the closest appropriate answer. This was serious voice recognition and artificial intelligence. First, Arno had to select which guests he would like. His choices were: The author of Dance, Dance, Dance, She Said, Penn and Teller, or an actress from Dynasty.
We were taking a gamble here, but rob and Dennis said they knew Arno liked us.
Arno chose Penn and Teller. Our little psychological force had worked. If he had picked one of the others, rob would have pretended that the system crashed and asked him to make another choice, but it would be a better trick if he chose us himself.
Arno started with a menu of questions. Arno spoke one of them: “Which is Penn and which is Teller?” On Arno’s screen, after the graphs and numbers, a video image shuffled through several stills of us and finally an animated (and very lo-fi) image of P&T appeared, and my voice, scratchy but recognizable, said, “Don’t you learn anything? I’m Penn Jillette, and this is my partner Teller. Longer name, bigger person.” Arno asked several more questions from this menu and got the same kinda appropriate answers.
“Does Teller ever talk?”
“No, not to you.” Every answer was accompanied by the corresponding lo-fi video clip.
Now, the punch line. rob invited Arno to ask questions of his own. The theory was this would work because the computer could search for spoken words and phrases among the stored clips. This was the really amazing part. The computer would have to make it look like it understood the question and picked an answer that was closest to right. Each of Arno’s questions elicited a response, though some of them were peculiar.
“How long has it been since you became partners?”
“I think it was in San Francisco, about 1981 . . . That’s when Lou Reed came to the show . . .” rob acted frustrated and suggested that Arno rephrase the question.
“How long have you been partners?”
“It’s been fifteen years of complete hell.”
“Have you won many awards?”
“Well, Teller took the Obie, and he’s going to win an Academy Award. Me, I’m holding out for a Nobel Prize!” Just our little hint for Arno that he might be being fucked with. He didn’t pick up on it—just coincidence.
“What do you do with ra
ts and cockroaches?”
“That’s the way we have sex.”
rob played embarrassed and asked Arno to speak more clearly, keeping his mouth in the right position, “Do you use rats and cockroaches?”
“Oh, I like that on pizza, and Teller uses it on a hot dog roll or a hamburger bun.” It was kludgy but not more so than a lot of first-time demos.
rob acted flustered and suggested that Arno ask Penn & Teller to show him a trick, because rob and Dennis had loaded in a few good ones from the show, and the computer would show it.
After another peculiar reply, the computer sputtered and I finally said, “Well, we hung upside down on Saturday Night Live, and we dumped cockroaches right here on your show, but come with us, we have something special for you. Could the camera go handheld?”
On the video, Penn & Teller stood up and the camera followed us into corridor. It was kinda sorta like the Letterman corridor, but not quite. Arno should have found the hall a little familiar, but he was wrapped up in the new technology. I continued talking on camera, “Let’s go down this hall here. We’ve done a lot of stuff on television, and TV is not the most conducive medium to magic. We wanted something where things would seem to go from TV into reality . . .”
On the screen in front of him, Arno watched Penn & Teller open a door and approach a man sitting in front of several terminals inside, with a bright light shining on his mouth. “. . . So we worked out this little thing where a person was watching a video screen, and we could actually come in and interact with the person—”
Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! Page 16
