take our boxers off and have the audiences members check out everything. We showed them everything we had, lifting our penises and testicles and letting them check for hidden bunny rabbits. The plastic didn’t really cover much and people could always see over, under, and around it. This wasn’t a flash—this was a genital tour. The audience members would then examine a couple of long white tank tops and we’d put those on and nothing else. They were short enough that when we lifted our arms, well, on a warm or exciting night, the shirts wouldn’t cover the full frontal even during the magic.
Big-band Penn & Teller theme music would play and, out of nowhere, we would produce a few liters of stage blood each and cover ourselves from head to toe with it while doing a little dance routine, soaking the T- shirts. That would be the end of the show, and we’d appear afterward in the lobby to meet people and sign autographs wearing Carrie-like, blood-soaked T-shirts with our little Houdinis hanging out. It was pretty great, because instead of having to sign autographs, we could just slap our chests and give them a bloody handprint on their souvenir programs.
In Atlantic City once, a professionally beautiful woman came up to me, wearing a white minidress without undergarments just like me, and gave me a big hug. The blood left her dress slightly transparent and imprinted all of the private parts of my body onto hers. So sexy. It was a great moment. I felt I should invite her backstage to shower with me, help her pack up her souvenir minidress, give her a P&T T-shirt, but the girlfriend at the time wouldn’t have been cool with that. I’m such a loser. But it’s a great memory. Wow. I should have gotten her e-mail address and I could see that great tit/cock blood live gravestone rubbing. Shoot.
I’ve stripped naked in public other times too, maybe not as much as Ginsberg, but a lot of times and I learned a few tricks and tips. I stripped in Zero-G on the Vomit Comet, and I stripped a couple times in business meetings (I once stripped naked for all the Disney execs and served them doughnuts to show I didn’t think a certain deal with us was going to happen), and on radio shows.
Once while co-hosting radio with Alex Bennett in Florida, we had some Hooters waitresses on who served everyone chicken wings, including the whole live audience. Alex always had a live audience of about thirty people, and the women had brought enough Buffalo wings for everyone. They got to talking about how they themselves weren’t bad people like the topless dancers we’d had serving doughnuts on the air the morning before. Alex and I argued that the name Hooters was a joke about breasts, and it just wasn’t a classy organization. Alex asked the self-righteous servers if they would go topless if Hooters changed their policy and offered them more money. One of the women said, “Would you take your clothes off for a million dollars?” She thought that was a rock solid argument. She didn’t know whom she was saying it to.
I took off all my clothes as fast as I could and threw them into the audience. I stood naked, not in front of the world, but in front of a Florida radio-station audience. I was standing on top of the engineering board. My friend’s elderly parents were in the audience to see me, and there was their son’s buddy naked. A few nights later the same couple came to see our show, and Teller, accidentally, picked my friend’s mom to come onstage for the stripping bit. My buddy called me up and said, “What is it with you exposing yourself to my mom?” He had a point: she had seen my penis twice in one week. That’s not right.
I learned that day in the radio station why professional strippers don’t throw their clothes into the audience. When Alex threw to commercial and I wanted to get dressed, I had to walk naked among the audience trying to find all my clothes to get dressed again. No matter how humiliating the scene standing on the radio desk had been, bending over naked to pick your boxer shorts up from under an elderly woman’s chair is worse. “Please excuse me” doesn’t help much.
The poets stand naked before the world. The magician is always just left clutching his naked penis, wearing half a shirt and a proud satisfied smile.
A TELEPHONE CONVERSATION WITH GILBERT GOTTFRIED ON JANUARY 13, 2002
PENN: Are you the Aflac duck? Is that your voice?
GILBERT: Yeah.
PENN: Is it just saying “Aflac”?
GILBERT: Yeah, and a few other sounds.
PENN: But no words, right?
GILBERT: No, just kinda quacking.
PENN: I can’t bring it to mind. Just do the voice for me once—just do “Aflac.”
GILBERT: I’m not going to do a voice for you.
PENN: C’mon, I want to hear it.
GILBERT: “Do the parrot.” “Do Comedy Central.” I’m not doing a voice for you. I’m not performing for you.
PENN: Listen, you little fucking bastard, do the fucking duck or I’ll slap you. I’m not kidding.
GILBERT: Is that technologically possible over the phone?
PENN: I’m coming to New York tomorrow, asshole.
GILBERT:…… Aflac.
NEW YEAR’S DAY, GYMS, WHORE-HOUSES, AND MOURNING WITH PROSTITUTES
NEW YEAR’S DAY IS A BIG HAIRY DEAL DAY FOR ME. On New Year’s Day 2000, my mom died after spending the last few days of 1999 relaxing in a coma. January 1 of every year our family releases balloons into the sky in memory of all the people we’ve loved and lost. My mom’s final conscious days were spent watching some helium balloons that dear Teller got for her, tied outside her bleak Massachusetts winter window, dance around in the wind. Mom asked if I would let her balloons go free right after she died.
New Year’s isn’t the only day I show our children pictures of the grandparents they never knew and tell them family stories that now are theirs, but I always do that then. We give the children a ton of presents that day, one week to the day after Christmas, to make up for all their Christian friends who taunt them about not having presents from Santa and Jesus. I believe in this arena the theological debate can be won with more toys. Penn & Teller don’t do a show on New Year’s Eve, so it’s a rare evening at home, hanging with friends, watching movies, and eating ice cream. I like to start the New Year with friends and family, not selling people our show with a glass of champagne added for three times the price. If the gift battle for the hearts and minds of our non-Christian children continues to escalate, Penn & Teller may have to go back to New Year’s Eve shows, so I can afford to buy my children a dozen ponies with Richard Dawkins’s picture stenciled on their sides in Sour Patch Kids, but until that time, we’ll take it as a day of rest.
The private Jillette New Year’s Day is spent at home with the family. But public New Year’s for sub-star celebrities means writing up our jive-ass New Year’s resolutions beforehand to sell tickets. These are unabashed advertisements for our show: “I resolve to try to go another year without blowing Teller’s brains out on the Penn & Teller Theater Stage at the Rio All-Suites Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, during our World-Famous Bullet Catch—featured as the #1 Best Magic Trick of All Time by
I’m the essence of a sixteen-year-old Midwest mall girl in the body of the three-hundred-pound fifty-six-year- old Las Vegas man. I don’t watch any sporting events. I’ve never seen any whole game of anything live or on TV. Paul Simon and Lorne Michaels took me to one Yankees game. We arrived late, talked, ate hot dogs, and left early. I once escorted a woman who worked in our Penn & Teller office to a local Vegas hockey team. She was trying to explain “icing” to me when the guy in the Thunderbird mascot suit recognized me through the face mesh of his
