They tried “open campus,” “open study,” open everything but a fucking book. I had hair down my back, elephant bells, fringe jackets, and eye makeup, but I wasn’t a very good hippie. I like the sex and some of the rock and roll (I could never stand the Grateful Dead), but I didn’t try the drugs. I’ve been told by professional drug users that if I did the drugs, I would like the Dead. It seems like the most effective PSA against drugs could just play some Dead jams and say, “If you do drugs, you will like this kind of music.” What other deterrent would one need? I don’t understand PSAs. If we have a marketplace of ideas in this country, isn’t our government just the ref? Wouldn’t the marketplace of ideas allow billboards that read, “Try Heroin,” and “Beat Your Spouse, Eventually He’ll Dig It”? How do they justify taking tax money, received at gun point, and use it to put TV ads and billboards that tell parents to talk to their children about drugs? My mom and dad never once spoke to me about drugs or alcohol. They never even said that they didn’t use them and never had. I could see that, what’s to talk about? Why would the government tell us what to talk about? There was a billboard on my way to the Penn & Teller Theater at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, that read something about stopping spousal abuse. Has there ever been a person who was driving home, planning on beating the shit out of her husband, who read that billboard and thought, “No, maybe I’ll go talk to my children about drugs instead?” I noticed while reading a few smart-guy books like Daniel Kahneman’s wicked smart one, that the author who didn’t want to use “their” incorrectly when he needed a pronoun and didn’t know the sex, didn’t use “he,” “his,” and “him” but to be modern used “she,” “her” and hers,” so I decided I wanted to be like a smart-guy author and have it be an imaginary woman beating her imaginary husband reading my imaginary billboard. We don’t know what sex a husband or wife is anyway, let alone the perp. Men get beaten a lot. I bet Mike Newdow, the atheist who went to the Supreme Court to try to get “under God” back out of the Pledge of Allegiance, gets beat up a lot. Re also pushes really hard to replace “he” and “she” with “re,” and “his” and “hers” with “rees,” and “him” and “her” with “erm.” I met Mike at some atheist shindig and re really talks like that, it’s rees style, it works for erm and I like it, but smart-guy books don’t use it. Doing it in this book will just piss off my editor and I don’t want to do that. Mike Newdow is cool about pissing off the Supreme Court so re sure doesn’t give a fuck about my editors, so let erm do it.
In 1987, Bob Dylan did a tour with the Dead, and my buddy Jesse Dylan invited me to go with him to see his dad. Jesse told me we should time our arrival so we got to the stadium as his dad was hitting the stage. I thought we should go for the whole shebang. If I was going to see a little of the Dead, I should see the whole thing. I had this vision of noodling, improvised music providing the soundtrack to lots of beautiful braless women spinning and jiggling in tie-dye clothes. How bad could it be? Pretty fucking bad. I ended up backstage with Don Johnson. Crockett and I watched the show together from the wings. It would have been better if Don had been wearing a bra. Don Johnson still hates me from the episode of Miami Vice that I guest starred on. I was doing an awful movie, that awful TV show, and our pretty good Off-Broadway show in the same week. I went a whole week without ever once lying down to sleep. I slept in cars from one set to another, but never more than an hour a day for a week. I was sitting up in a deep sleep when I was shaken awake by Don Johnson saying, “We’re rolling.” I looked at him, heard “action” and started doing my lines. As luck would have it, I was playing a drug dealer, so who cares? I woke from a deep sleep to be in a scene with Don Johnson and Starsky without Hutch directing. Aren’t you supposed to wake up from that?
My sister used to dream all the time that she was a super James Bond–type female spy. At the time she told me this, my sister was a seventy-year-old New Englander caring for her grandchild. She told me she had this theory that we dreamed the opposite of our real lives, so she was all sex and violence. She asked me what I had dreamed the night before. I told her I dreamed I was sitting comfortably reading a magazine. Magazine reading is my only recurring dream except for the dream of pulling my own teeth out, which always makes me wake up with a hard-on. This time I woke up from a relaxing dream to be in a scene with Don Johnson. He hates me and he wasn’t wearing a bra backstage at the Dead and it was awkward and the music was awful and I wanted to be pulling my own teeth out, so Jesse and I ended up outside his dad’s dressing room playing pinball until Bob hit the stage. Bob is always good. The Dead were not. At least not with the sexiest man in the eighties and without doing drugs.
My high school was the result of a poor community school controlled by condescending hippies. Oh boy! I didn’t go to school much, but there really wasn’t much of a school to go to. High school students are evolutionarily programmed to think they know more than grown-ups, but when the grown-ups are hippie student teachers, evolution wins. Fucking stoners.
The conservative community of real teachers and administrators did a little bit of push back. They’d given up any hope of teaching the students anything, but thought maybe they could give them some of the American high school experience. We had pep rallies and a yearbook. The graduating class ahead of us was all hip and had voted to not have class personalities. Those are the people who are “Most Likely to Succeed,” “Class Clown,” “Class Flirt,” and so on.
Our class also had a vote on whether to have class personalities and we also voted it down. We were hip and modern too. The yearbook committee and administrators decided to ignore our vote and have the personalities anyway. The same people who had voted against “class personalities” also had to vote for the “class personalities.” I thought maybe I could exploit that.
I knew the majority of my fellow students didn’t want “class personalities” and I knew when they were planning the vote for the student personalities. This was worth going to school for. We had a fairly small class, a few hundred students. If I was systematic, I would be able to reach every one of them personally before the vote, but I also did some group speeches. If we were in a class before a teacher came in, or there was any gathering of students, I stood up in front of them and gave a little speech like this: “In a few days, we’re going to be asked to vote for school personalities, you know, ‘Class Clown’ and ‘Most Likely to Succeed’ and all that shit. If you sincerely want to vote for these things, please write in the name you want, use your votes how you want. But if you’re thinking of writing in ‘Abbie Hoffman’ or ‘Mickey Mouse’ or ‘Mike Hunt’ or just writing ‘Fuck you’ and throwing the paper away, please just take the time to write in me, Penn Jillette, for everything. I promise you, if you do that, it’ll be more fun. Write me in for every category for both sexes. Class Flirts should be ‘Boy—Penn Jillette,’ ‘Girl—Penn Jillette,’ ‘Class Clown—Penn Jillette,’ ‘Best Athlete—Penn Jillette.’ Please remember, they will try to bust us on technicalities so write it perfectly, ‘P-E-N-N J-I-L-L-E-T-T-E’ and make it legible. Please block print it, two N’s, two L’s, two T’s—if you’re disgusted with the school or just making a joke, write in my name. If we work together, we can make this funny. Please, nothing is funny but Penn Jillette.”
The day of the vote, I used the school copy machine to print out and cut up many little slips of paper that said, “Vote Penn Jillette for everything—Nothing is funny but Penn Jillette.” I tried to give the slips out to everyone, so they would have the spelling in front of them. I put full-page versions of my message on every public bulletin board—“Nothing is funny but Penn Jillette!”
I went to class to vote. There were a lot of categories and they were doubled with a choice for each gender. I took the page and I wrote my name in every space.
I hung around until the end of the day and then headed to the administration office where I figured the yearbook committee would be tallying the votes. I walked in to see the head of the yea
rbook committee crying. Good sign. The principal was standing over her, very angry. Even better sign. I walked in with a big smile, like the class clown, and I said, “Which do you think is funnier, taking a different picture of every category, some of them in drag, or is it funnier to take one picture and just repeat it dozens of times. I’m kind of leaning toward the one picture over and over. That’s also a lot less work.”
The principal said, “Get out of here, Penn. We won’t be having class personalities.”
“But you wanted a vote and you had a vote. You can’t ignore it. You went against the wishes of the people, and the people won. You must do this. It’s only fair.” I said that like somebody “Most Likely to Succeed.”
“Don’t push it. Get out of here now.”
“How much did I win by?”
“Get out of here.”
“What percentage did I get? Did I win by a lot?” He started walking toward me, and like the “Class Coward” I was, I ran away.
If they keep giving us two evils from two identical parties from which to “choose” our president of the United States, couldn’t we just do “Nothing is funny but Penn Jillette”?
Listening to: “High School”—MC5
“VISSI D’ARTE” EVEN ON THE CELEBRITY APPRENTICE
I FIRST SAW THE WHO ON TV. I was watching with my parents, and when Pete, Roger, and Keith started smashing their instruments, we were appalled. We were just barely middle class. My dad was a jail guard and we lived in a nice neat little house that my parents had built with their own hands. I loved music and I had a newspaper route, and I mowed lawns. I took drum lessons using a practice pad and was saving all my money to buy a used drum set so I could join a rock-and-roll band. At my rate of earning, it would have taken me decades to afford Keith Moon’s drum set and I didn’t understand how he could destroy it on TV. How could Keith do that? How could he have such little respect for music, for the TV show he was fortunate enough to be on, and for me and my family? My parents didn’t like the music or the act, but they still tried to console me. These rich rock stars just didn’t understand what money meant to us common folk. Then in a flash everything changed. I started to cry. Right then something happened and I understood The Who. I understood that passion and art could be more important than money. I went from sad and disgusted to exuberant. It was the first time I had ever understood real beauty. I loved The Who. I loved rock and roll. I loved life. It was at that moment I became an artist.
I use Teller’s broad definition of art: “Whatever we do after the chores are done.” There’s one show business and Bach, Dylan, Ron Jeremy, and the guy at the mall in the Santa suit are all in it. By that definition The Celebrity Apprentice is art, and for my sins, I was on it.
I’ve done a lot of TV, but one of my proudest moments in my career was shown on The Celebrity Apprentice. I didn’t watch it, I don’t know how it was edited, but I was there and it was beautiful. The Celebrity Apprentice is all about watching people argue and lie while they covet money and success. Those are the artistic ideas. Donald Trump scowls and passes judgment and we all suck up and rat out to win more time on TV and get money for our charities. The theme song is the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money,” used as awkwardly as “Born in the U.S.A.” at a political rally.
Some of the “tasks” on the show are measured by money, so if you convince a rich famous person to buy a sandwich for ten grand, you have a better chance of winning. I’ve been a fan of and friends with Blue Man Group since we were all working in NYC. They make my heart soar. They make me proud to work in the arts. They are the best of us. They’ve also got some money, so I called them, told them I was doing this TV show and did they want to donate some money to charity? They said yes before finding out what charity or how much I wanted because Blue Man Group is like that. They do charity all the time. They really deeply care about people and they do a lot for many charities. TCA is not the most likely show to have something beautiful happen, but the Blue Man Group can make beautiful anywhere. They are the best of us.
BMG asked if I wanted them to show up and do something. Oh yes, please. After weeks of sitting on boardroom sets pretending to do business, I really wanted something beautiful.
“Can you deliver the money in a fun way?” I asked them.
That was the problem. In the Blue Man Group world, money doesn’t exist. To the Blue Man Group, money means nothing. The ideals that they’ve established in their art don’t include avarice. The Blue Men Group donate tons of money out of the blue makeup, but in it, well, they’re not above money, but they’re beside it. It doesn’t exist. They asked me to give them some time to think of something beautiful. A couple days later they sent me a video of them filling a balloon with thousands of ten-dollar bills and blowing it up with a leaf blower. It was beautiful and it delivered money, without the Blue Men Group having to respect it. It was so beautiful.
I really wanted to save their appearance and money for “my task” and my charity (Opportunity Village for people with intellectual disabilities, a charity that BMG helps a lot), but I was on Dee Snider’s team and he asked me to help raise more money on his watch. I ran the idea by all our team members, the production company, and NBC. Everyone signed off. Blue Man Group would march up, with a loud parade and giant puppets and they would blow up a balloon full of money with leaf blowers and fill the air with ten-dollar bills that the Blue Men wouldn’t care about. Whatever our team could gather out of the wind, we would have to score for our team. Teller would join BMG and add thirty grand of his own money, not blown around, but handed politely to our cashier, American Idol Clay Aiken. Clay took The Celebrity Apprentice very seriously and played the game for all it was worth.
We were outside selling our bullshit little jive guidebooks (the sandwich of the week). I gave the signal, and from blocks away we could hear the parade. BMG with their giant drums and confetti cannons were changing traffic patterns in NYC. They arrived at the park where we were set up to sell our guidebooks. My business partner for my entire adult life, Teller, was in the parade, firing streamers into the air and dancing. Teller had the eyes of Keith Moon in The Who. I had been sequestered on The Celebrity Apprentice with all the complaining, backstabbing and phony heart-to-heart talks, and down the street came joy. Pure joy. Honest human joy personified by Teller and Blue Man Group. I started to cry.
They got to our stand, they exploded the balloon full of cash, and suddenly the air across from Madison Square Park in New York City was filled with money. Blue Man Group stayed in character and just enjoyed blowing the money around. Their joy was more important than the money or us winning our game. They were there for art and to help the cause, in that order. We all scrambled to pick up as much money as we could. Paul Sr., the reality star from Orange County Choppers, and Lou Ferrigno held people back, while Dee, Arsenio, Clay, and I tried to grab all we could. Everyone had been prepared for the money balloon exploding, but for some reason Clay was surprised and disgusted by the chaos. I was still crying with joy, and Clay was crying with pure hate and anger toward me and my blue buddies.
Some of the camerapeople, the producers, the sound people and crew ran up after the Blue Men had gone and said they had never been prouder of anything they worked on. Some of them were crying with me with joy. It made them remember why they had gotten into the arts. It was like being just a few feet from The Who while they smashed their instruments for America. They proved that art meant more than money. I’m pretty proud of Penn & Teller, we’ve done some pretty groovy stuff, but I was exploding with pride at the beauty of The Blue Man Group.
When we had the first break from the cameras, Clay was gathering evidence to take me down for this in the boardroom. He was angry and detailing the humiliation and the injuries he endured in all the beautiful chaos. He was very vague about the injuries. When I asked him if he needed medical attention, he made sure the cameras weren’t on and screamed, “I need you to shut the fuck up!” It was so easy to shut the fuck up right then.
Teller and The Blue Man Group work without words and they had said more than I could ever say in defense of art. I drifted away in the NBC van, to my childhood and the moment with The Who when I understood that I needed my life to mean more than “Money, Money, Money, Money.”
The “boardroom” didn’t matter. Clay lowballed the amount of money we were able to gather, but I didn’t argue. Clay said that the Blue Man Group’s money that Clay wanted to go to our TV charity had ended up going to some homeless people. Trump joined him, disgusted by the idea that some of the Blue Man Group’s money might have gone to people who needed it instead of the people Donald Trump would get credit for giving it to who needed it. Trying to explain to Donald Trump that beauty and art can be more important than money is like trying to explain to Donald Trump that beauty and art can be more important than money. The “contest” was revealed to be very close (in terms of money, beauty wasn’t discussed) and Donald Trump tried to make me say that I regretted what the Blue Man Group had done. Clay tried to get me to say that I should have gotten the Blue Man Group to be more responsible, and by that he meant, give us more money so he could win his game.
It was during this episode that Donald Trump understood that he didn’t understand me, and feeling misunderstood by Donald Trump and Clay Aiken is its own kind of joy.
I thought about some family at home in a small town watching the Blue Man Group on The Celebrity Apprentice like I watched The Who. I thought about many children being disgusted by all that money being “wasted” on the homeless. And I thought about maybe one child all of a sudden understanding what art can mean and crying with joy.
As The Who sang, “Why don’t you all just f-f-f-fade away. Don’t try to d-d-d-dig what we all say.”
Listening to: “My Generation”—The Who
THE FOURTH OF JULY
Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! Page 22
