Magicians Penn & Teller set to start Australian tour

I hated, hated, hated magic in high school,” says Penn Jillette, the taller half of Penn & Teller, who are arguably – or perhaps inarguably – the most famous magic duo in the world.

“I thought the idea of lying to people was repulsive,” he explains. “I had been fooled when I was very young by a person doing ESP on TV, and that had turned me against science. And because of that appearance on TV, I actually went from an A student to a D student.”

There’s no doubting the sincerity or the vehemence of Jillette’s response. Nor is there any question about the significance of the moment in forming his approach to his chosen field: it bred the scepticism that has been at the heart of the duo’s work since they began performing together in 1974.

Next month, Penn Jillette and Raymond Joseph Teller will kick off their 50th-anniversary tour in Australia (Teller is a former schoolteacher who uses only the surname these days; like Madonna or Pele, he’s famous enough not to need more than a single moniker).

Remarkably, it’s only the second time the pair have been here, the first tour happening just two years ago, at its third attempt.

“Because of the plague [COVID] and because of Teller’s back, and because of some other things, we cancelled two or three times,” says Jillette. “There were people who had actually bought front-row tickets three times to see our show. When we finally went out on stage the response was something we’d never had before. And it was nice.”

Screaming fans are not typically a part of a Penn & Teller show; they’re much more about the triumph of the rational over the illusory. Their stage act, like their TV series Bullshit and Fool Me, is all about the presentation of an illusion followed by the explanation of how it was done (or at least the appearance of an explanation; misdirection remains part of their armoury). And there are jokes. Lots of jokes. Penn does all the talking, machine-gun fast; Teller almost never utters a word.

Which is not to say they don’t have fans. They are billed by the Rio in Las Vegas as the longest-running residency on the strip; the 1500-seat theatre in which they perform is even named after them.

Success on this scale was never part of the plan, insists Jillette. “Teller and I were doing very well and were very happy before we had what anybody else would consider ‘success’,” he says. “We were carny trash, playing fairs, playing Renaissance festivals, playing streets, and we were very, very happy.

“The goal was never to do a show in Vegas, was never to have our own theatre, was never to do Broadway. The goal was just to do these little weird ideas. Our obsession was always with the ideas.”

Teller claims the pair have developed almost 200 “bits” over the course of their career – “which incidentally is more different bits than any magicians in history have done” – but at core they all come down to the same idea: use your brain to understand what is going on because there is no such thing as “magic” or the supernatural.

This commitment to rationalism was born in Jillette out of that realisation as a kid that he had been hoodwinked. He was, he recalls, “about 12 or 13”, and at home with his parents watching an evening chat show on TV when George Joseph Kresge Jr, aka The Amazing Kreskin, came on. “And I saw him do an ESP card trick, and he was hawking this jive-ass ESP test set as though it was science, and I was very, very interested in science. And my parents, although not wealthy – my dad was a jail guard – were very interested in my education, so they bought me this ESP set.”

Over time, Jillette did all the tests in the kit using his parents as his guinea pigs, assiduously recording the results, like any good young scientist. But one day when he was in the library looking for a book on juggling, he pulled a magic book from the shelf. His memory tells him the book fell open to the page, though his rational mind tells him “that cannot be true”. Either way, “I found the trick that he had done on TV explained in the book. And the embarrassment I felt was overwhelming.”

He confronted his parents, who immediately confessed they had known it was bogus, but gee, didn’t they all have fun doing it? “But I was just like, ‘I was lied to, and I believed it, I’m just stupid, why do people treat people like that?’”

‘The embarrassment I felt was overwhelming.’

He wasn’t just angry at his parents and Kreskin. He was furious at anything that purported to tell the truth. “I would go into class and go, ‘Oh, you’re lying to us about stuff. I’m not taking any tests. I’m not doing anything.’ And I kept that attitude towards science and school pretty much until I met Randi.”

Randi was the American sceptic James Randi, most famous in Australia as the guy variety program host Don Lane told to “piss off” his show in 1980 for casting doubt on the legitimacy of the English “psychic” and medium Doris Stokes (an incident that provided the inspiration for last year’s Australian horror film Late Night with the Devil).

Jillette was in his final years at high school when he read Randi’s book Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions, and its impact was immense. “It’s a very simple thing to say, ‘If there were no Randi, there would be no Penn Jillette’,” he says. “He created me. Usually, he’s given credit for creating Penn & Teller, which is also true. But I go even deeper and say the way I am now is not the way I would be without Randi.”

Later in our chat, he demurs a little. “I don’t want to give Randi all the credit; Teller also deserves some of the credit, because Teller was also saying, ‘Maybe we can do a magic show without insulting people’s intelligence.’” But it was Randi, he says, “who said to me, ‘You could do tricks and be honest, and you could be on the side of right.’”

A sceptic might observe that this oppositional talk is a handy way of marketing a magic act both to people who don’t much like the form and those who do. You get the tricks, but you also get to have the lid lifted on them. But Jillette really does believe that there’s something rotten in the heart of magic, and he and Teller are here to cut it out.

Loading

“Many magicians, I’m afraid to say, the morality of their art form doesn’t cross their mind. And morality does enter into magic in a way it doesn’t with, say, music. The idea of lying comes up in magic every time you consider doing a trick, and how you deal with that is everything.”

There’s a great bit of video from Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s, in which Penn & Teller make objects disappear and float into space, including tiny versions of a plane, the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower – all chosen in reference to David Copperfield, who made the real things “disappear” in his magic act. At the end of the SNL skit, the camera pulls back to reveal the duo have been performing while hanging upside down.

The reveal isn’t just a gag, it goes to the heart of what they’re all about.

“[Magician] David Blaine has said to me, and has said publicly, that he believes the magician’s job is to leave people believing things that aren’t true,” says Jillette. “That is diametrically opposed to what I believe.”

Penn & Teller perform at the Sydney Opera House, January 11-18, Arts Centre Melbourne, January 21-26, and QPAC, Brisbane, January 29 to February 7. Details: pennandteller.com

___