Penn & Teller Overview
Penn
Penn Fraser Jillette, the talking magician, is the
larger of the two (6'6"/1.98 m to Teller's 5'9"/1.75
m), and was born March 5, 1955 in Greenfield, Massachusetts.
He attended Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Greatest
Show on Earth Clown College - but he's apologized for
this. He became disillusioned with the type of magic
acts that present magic as "real" by watching
The Amazing Kreskin on the Johnny Carson show. He attended
a performance by The Amazing Randi with Teller at the
age of eighteen which suggested the idea of presenting
magic as an openly acknowledged trick rather than as
a mysterious power.
Penn appeared as "Drell" on the TV series
Sabrina the Teenage Witch and was a voice announcer
for the U.S. based cable network Comedy Central in the
early 1990s. One of his earliest guest roles was on
Miami Vice.
Penn has collaborated with avant-garde musicians, The
Residents. Penn's own band is called The Captain Howdy.
Penn married television producer Emily Zolten during
an impromptu ceremony at a Las Vegas wedding chapel
on November 23, 2004. They're expecting their first
child in June of 2005.
Teller
Teller was born Raymond Joseph Teller on February
14, 1948 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but has since
had his name legally changed to Teller. He attended
Amherst College and taught Latin at Lawrence High School
in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Teller does not speak
while performing although there are occasional exceptions,
mostly when the audience is not aware that his voice
is being heard. His trademark of not speaking began
as a way of dealing with audience hecklers.
Teller began performing with a friend, Weir Chirsamer,
as the Ottmar Scheckt Society for the Preservation of
Weird and Disgusting Music: they joined up with Penn
Jillette and renamed themselves the Asparagus Valley
Cultural Society.
Teller is an accomplished sleight of hand artist and
is considered an expert on the history of magic. He
is also a talented painter.
Despite his trademark of never speaking, Teller has
spoken in a number of films and television shows. Teller
played an anthropomorphic cat, Mr. Boots, on an episode
of Dharma & Greg. [2] (http://pennandteller.com/sincity/teller/articles/mrboots.html)
He also played the character of Mortimer in the 2000
film adaptation of the musical The Fantasticks.
The duo of Penn and Teller
By 1985, Penn & Teller were receiving rave reviews
for their Off Broadway show and Emmy award-winning PBS
special, “Penn & Teller Go Public.”
In 1987, they began the first of two successful Broadway
runs. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, the pair
made numerous television appearances on Late Night with
David Letterman and Saturday Night Live, as well as
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Night with Conan
O'Brien, The Today Show, and many others.
Penn and Teller had national tours throughout the 1990s,
gaining critical praise.
Their tricks include Teller hanging upside-down over
a bed of spikes in a straitjacket, Teller drowning in
a huge container of water, Teller being run over by
an 18-wheel tractor-trailer, Teller swinging over bear-traps
on a trapeze, and knives going through Penn's hands.
Many of their effects rely heavily on shock appeal and
violence, although presented in a humorous manner. Often,
the pair will reveal a secret of how a magic trick is
done and then use that very effect to fool the audience.
Penn and Teller perform their own adaptation of the
famous bullet catch illusion. Both simultaneously fire
a gun at the other and then catch the respective bullets
in their mouths.
In one of their more thoughtful and politically charged
tricks, they make a U.S. flag seem to disappear by wrapping
it in a copy of the United States Bill of Rights, and
apparently setting the flag on fire, so that "the
flag is gone but the Bill of Rights remains." They
normally end the routine by restoring the unscathed
flag to its starting place on the flagpole; however,
on a TV guest appearance on The West Wing, this final
part was omitted for dramatic reasons.
They have also made television guest appearances as
a comedy team on Babylon 5, The Drew Carey Show, Hollywood
Squares, and The Simpsons. They also appeared as scam
artists in the music video for "It's Tricky"
by Run-DMC in 1987.
Their cable television show Bullshit! takes a skeptical
look at psychics, religion, and pseudoscientific and
paranormal frauds, and has featured segments on astrology,
Feng Shui, environmental issues, weight loss and the
war on drugs. Some have praised the show for being from
a libertarian atheist perspective. Others have criticized
it for the same reason.
Penn & Teller are now appearing nightly in Las
Vegas at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino. Get
your tickets
Quotations
"Is this your card?"
"Doing stuff like Van Praagh and Kreskin is like
taking a shotgun and going into a mall, and discharging
it in people's faces and stealing twenty bucks from
each one of them." - Penn
"When (Norman Borlaug) won the Nobel Prize in 1970,
they said he had saved a billion people. Billion. That's
Carl Sagan's billion with a B. And most of them were
of different race from him. Norman is the greatest human
being. And you've probably never heard of him."
--from Bullshit! #1-11 "Eat This!"
"Naked people are their own reward." --from
Bullshit! #1-6 "Sex, Sex, Sex"
"It's fair to say that the Bible contains equal
parts of fact, history, and pizza." --from Bullshit!
#2-6 "The Bible: Fact or Fiction?"
"This is drugs....and these are your civil liberties--AND
THIS IS THE GOVERNMENT." (Penn in a steam roller
crushes the pan representing drugs and all the eggs
with civil liberties written on them) Penn: "Any
questions?" --from Bullshit! #2-4 "War on
Drugs"
