Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!

GROUNDHOG DAY

THE MOVIE GROUNDHOG DAY POSTULATES perhaps thousands of years’ worth of a single day, when Bill Murray’s character learns to live that one day the right way, and by extension his entire life. Bill’s character has to learn to get his heart right and learn to love. I don’t care much about that; I care that he learned to play piano and speak French and read a lot of books. I like time to get good at real things; the heart stuff is easy. And in reality, Murray, Harold Ramis, and the rest of the cast and crew making the movie had only a bunch of rewrites and a few takes to accomplish that idea.

Teller has been doing one trick called “Shadows” in our show for his entire professional career. We did a version at our first indoor stage show together, he did it in our Asparagus Valley Cultural Society show, and it’s been in most our live shows ever since. When Teller was a child, he had a dream where the cutting of an object’s shadow had the same effect on the real object. Teller used magic tricks to make others share that dream. On one level it’s a celebration of magical thinking: that the shadow, the idea, can affect the real thing. It’s voodoo. Teller is a magician who fights against magical thinking, but onstage, in fantasy, magical thinking is a beautiful dream. To the non-magical thinker, to the atheist, “Shadows” can be seen as being about art. Art is the representation of ideas that can change the real things, the shadows on the back of the cave wall that teach us about the real world. As writers and performers, we’re always trying to make others see our ideas, the images inside our heads. We’re trying to make others see our dreams, our hopes, and our fears. Maybe if we can all see more points of view, we can all learn. Art is the real magic.

It’s good, in this anthropic world where “good” is defined as anything we’ve found a way to live with, that magical thinking doesn’t work. We don’t have to be careful what we wish for, only what we work for. One of the big reliefs for the atheist is not having to worry about what to hope, wish, and pray for. Did I want to pray for my mother’s suffering to end? Did I want to hope for her death? I didn’t have to worry about that. I could hope one day that she’d live longer so I could talk to her, and wish the next day that she would die and not have to suffer her paralysis and physical loss any longer. My wishing and hoping were inert; I could let them run wild. I could use them as pure solace.

“Shadows” addresses this pretty idea directly in just a couple of minutes. Teller uses a stemmed rose in a vase with a light in front of it, casting a shadow on a screen. He cuts the shadow on the screen and the petals of the actual rose fall as though they had been cut. It’s probably the defining trick of our Penn & Teller career. I’m not onstage for it. Fuck you. I didn’t think it up, and… I don’t know how the trick is done.

I don’t know how a lot of the tricks in our show are done. We did one of our non-performance shows called 35 Years of Bullshit (the number of years changes, but the Bullshit stays the same) with, I think, Stephen Fry, interviewing us onstage in London. For these appearances Teller talks and answers the questions. Teller is an engaging and articulate conversationalist, and when we do a “Teller will talk” show, I really don’t have much to do. People have heard me enough. They all want to hear Teller for a change. But during this appearance, I went off on a jag, talking about how the tricks are done. I was explaining a moment in the first trick we did on Letterman. In it, Teller tries to do a classic of magic, a card stab, and as part of the act I’m being such a dick that my hand gets in the way and the knife goes through my hand. Teller has the correct card impaled stigmata-like to my palm as the blood flows. We named the bit “Handstab” and that name stuck with us and our crew before we realized that naming the tricks mattered. Now we try to name tricks with names that don’t give away the big surprise endings. We learn slowly.

In London that evening, I was explaining how Teller switches the real knife for the fake knife and I load the blood into my palm with the right card. I had explained my part and I was explaining Teller’s part—the real knife has a hook on it and Teller hangs it on the back on his pants as his hand was coming up to meet mine with the fake knife. Teller spoke up and corrected me. We hadn’t done it with a hooked knife in years and years; we now used a magnet setup in his back pocket. I didn’t know. No one had mentioned to me that it changed, I never checked, I never noticed, and I never asked.

My lack of concern for how tricks are done is partly why Teller chose me as his performing partner in 1975. I had just gotten out of high school. I don’t like to use the word “graduated,” because my exit from high school was messy, but I got out. The teachers told me in high school that these school years were the best years of my life and I’d look back on them with fondness and regret that I didn’t enjoy them more. I never have. For the first few years that I was out of high school, while I was hitchhiking around, living on the streets and juggling for food, I used to take some of my scarce money and send a postcard to my principal and guidance counselor, with a picture of some exotic location and a message saying something about everything about the road being way better than high school. They needed to teach the children that the real world is wonderful. What’s the use of teaching preparation for regret?

After a few months of bumming around, I went to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in Florida. That was a couple of months. Clown College was the first time in my life that I worked hard. I was already a great juggler and I could ride a unicycle, but I learned tightwire walking, and back flips, and falls, and I was in remedial makeup. Makeup makeup. It was the first time I met really funny people. It was the first time I’d exercised and trained. It was the first time anyone had ever taught me something that I was interested in. It was the first time I’d ever seen people take comedy seriously.

I met Teller while I was in high school, but he was still teaching high school (different schools). I went into a stereo store in my hometown. I’d saved up my money from juggling and doing odd jobs, and I was going to buy a good stereo. The salesman was Wier Chrisemer. In a few years, I would form the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society with Wier and Teller. Teller is seven years older than me, and he’d graduated college while I was still in high school. I got to talking with Wier that day in the audio store. I told him I was a juggler and demonstrated in the shop with whatever was around. It’s not hard to get me to do tricks. He said maybe he could use me in his college classical music parody group called the Othmar Schoeck Memorial Society for the Preservation of Unusual and Disgusting Music. Wier asked if I could read music well enough to play bass drum on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony while juggling, hitting the drum with the clubs. He had written comedy words to the symphony about eating and was going to have the vocalists served supper by the chorus, but he thought a little juggling would make it more absurd. I said I could read music well enough while juggling to do that. We started brainstorming on other ideas and he asked if I could juggle plungers and I said I could juggle anything I could hold that wasn’t attached. I told him I also rode a unicycle. He asked if I could ride in on a unicycle, juggling the plumbers’ helpers while he played Aram Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance on xylophone. Easy. Could he then stand against a board and have me throw the plungers around him and have them stick in a parody of a knife-throwing act? I said I had never done that, but I loved to practice and I would learn it for him. It took a stupid lot of practice, Vaseline on the plumbers’ helpers and a very smooth board, but I learned it. He was skeptical of bringing a high school student into his fancy tight-ass college comedy, so he assigned me Watt by Samuel Beckett (still one of my favorite books) to read. He told me to come back in a week when I picked up my turntable and tell him what was funny about the book to show I understood it, and if I impressed him, I could work for free at a time when I was already getting paid to do juggling shows. I had never met anyone with that advanced a sense of humor and I was thrilled. I worked and did the show. His friend from college, Teller, drove back up to Amherst College for the show and pretended to be blind and sold pencils out front while reciting poetry he’d written in Latin about the conception of Othmar Schoeck in the womb. After that show, Teller and I got to talking. We’ve never stopped. Bob Dylan talked, wrote and sang about hitchhiking and hopping trains, so I did it to be like him. But while he mostly talked, wrote and sang about it, I really did hop trains and hitchhike around. All over the country. I was homeless, with $500 sewn into my knapsack and a loving home I could go back to any time I chose. I called my mom and dad collect every day I was gone. I talked to my mom and dad every day that our lives overlapped. Either in person or on the phone. They supported me while I hitchhiked, hopped trains, and got all Woody Guthrie on America’s ass. I have a lot of stories from that time. The closer you come to death, the better the story. I have stories about great sex, but also stories about having guns pulled on me. I have a story about having a gun pulled on me and great sex in the same night (different people, of course). I told none of that to my mom and dad in the daily phone calls. Now that I have children, I consider my parents to be superhuman in their love of me. They loved me enough to let me live my life while they worried themselves sick. I don’t think I can possibly love my children that much, but I am