Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!

favorite movie is the remake of Dawn of the Dead and there’s nothing wrong with doing a fictional movie about zombies even when there aren’t real zombies. That’s okay. It was okay for us to play Penn & Teller and get killed even though we weren’t killed. It was okay to have some Mafia girlfriend talk about sucking my cock. But something rubbed us the wrong way about playing skeptics who are proved wrong in The X-Files. It didn’t feel right.

We were discussing this with the cheeses at The X-Files and they were being pretty snotty about it. They thought we should get off our fucking high horse and just do their big fancy TV show. They were right and they probably would have convinced us, but then one of them said something crazy. One of them said something like it was impossible to have drama without the supernatural. What? I brought up Psycho and all Sherlock Holmes and then they made a bigger mistake. They said something to Teller like “I see why you don’t talk much. Penn is so argumentative, you can’t get a sane word in.” Oh dear. When you say in real life that Teller doesn’t talk because I’m too aggressive and he’s dominated by me… well, things don’t go well. Don’t assume anything that Teller does isn’t his own choice.

Teller spoke. Oh my glory, did Teller speak. Teller explained that he was quiet during this meeting not to stay in character or because I bullied him into silence, but rather because he couldn’t figure out a way to suffer fools as well as I had. He then made a very strong case for realistic drama, quoting Aristotle and Shakespeare and using phrases such as “hacks like you.” It didn’t go well. They did the show without us and got a couple of other guys to transform from make-believe skeptics to make-believe believers. The guys who did the bit are friends of ours and it was a good break for them. It would have been good for us too, but we queered that deal. I think it’s okay to do anything in fiction, but it’s not okay to say that Teller is being quiet because I overpower him. That’ll get you a new asshole ripped. Of course, their show did fine without us. It was our loss, not theirs. Sha La La La, man.

We were not the first to kill our fictional selves in a movie, but I really wanted to be the first to be the bad guy under my own name in a fictional show. I can’t think of another example of that except maybe Donald Trump on The Celebrity Apprentice, but I’m not sure he sees himself as the villain. I wanted to be a fictional real bad guy named Penn Jillette. I asked the CSI guys if they’d let me play Penn Jillette on their show and turn out to be a murderer. I thought me in an orange jump suit with a prison ID number and the name “Jillette” on it at the end of the show would be great. But Teller and I pissed off the CSI guys too. I don’t think there was even a story to how we pissed them off; they just plain didn’t like us. We were told by our manager that they hated us. We don’t know what we said or did. I guess we were just ourselves, sometimes that’s all it takes.

When I was on Numb3rs playing myself, I asked if the fictional Penn could be friends with the lead guy, Charlie Eppes, played by the groovy David Krumholtz. I asked if I could be some sort of recurring character. I wouldn’t start out as the bad Penn Jillette. I would start out as the good Penn Jillette, who was getting to be friendly with Charlie Eppes. I’d be a guy he went to for a few shows. That would be the arc of my character. And then after Charlie and the audience got used to me, there would be a case where some perp was killing showwomen or magicians or something sexy like that. Charlie would come to me to help me solve the crime, and then he’d realize that I was the bad guy and he’d lock me up as “Penn Jillette.”

I’ve heard that people who play the bad guys in re-creations of real crimes on TV get turned in as “most wanted,” but with my own name, I thought it would be even nuttier. I guess they kind of did that to me on The Celebrity Apprentice, but I wanted to try it with a real script and plot and not just after-the-fact editing. I think going to TV prison would be way more fun than the boardroom. The writers/producers seemed to like the idea, but the show ended before we got to do it. Or maybe they were just being nice over lunch and weren’t even considering. I never know what’s really going on in showbiz. I still wonder what we did to piss off CSI.

I’ve heard hard-core drinkers don’t go out on New Year’s Eve because it’s for amateurs. I feel that way about practical jokes. Teller and I do not play practical jokes. Hardly ever. We played a real-life practical joke on an agent in Atlantic City and it didn’t go well. We were too good. Way too good. It really didn’t go well. I’m going to tell you a slightly watered down version, because I’m ashamed of the real story.

Our opening act for one run in Atlantic City was Robert Wuhl doing stand-up and telling wonderful showbiz stories. The three of us decided to play a practical joke on a booking agent who we shared. We’ve done most of what there is to do in Atlantic City. We wanted to see what would happen if an agent had to break up a serious fight between Robert and Penn & Teller. We rehearsed with Robert, and he did a great job. We planned some special effects and rehearsed those too. With a bunch of people, including the agents, standing around backstage in the green room after the show, I started by making a small negative comment about a joke in Robert’s show. He came back defensively. I came back more offensively. We escalated to screaming at each other. That led to some pushing and shoving. Teller had a pot of coffee that looked like it was boiling hot (dry ice), and he threw it at Robert and there was a lot of blood-curdling screaming, swearing and stage combat. It was wicked heavy. We convinced everyone it was real, including a few security guys who weren’t in on it (though a couple were), and it really made people feel scared and awful. It was worse than what I’m writing here. No one was physically hurt, but it went on much too long and there was real panic. It was awful. The guy we did it for never believed it was fake and never forgave us. I’m on his side.

So our new rule on practical jokes is we don’t do them. The one exception is if we can be sure that the “victim” enjoys the joke more than we do. I don’t mean being a good sport and laughing along with us; I mean really thrilled and honored.

We’ve done one great practical joke in that vein. We did a thing called “LabScam” in the fall of 1989. That year will be important later. rob pike, super-genius, and his super-genius buddies at Bell Labs wanted to play a practical joke on their boss, Arno Penzias. Arno is a Nobel Prize smart guy, and they wanted to really blow his mind. They wanted to do a magic trick that would make him think that technology had really progressed even faster than possible. That’s hard to do at Bell Labs. This is the place where the motherfucking transistor was invented. These guys wrote the book on UNIX. These are some serious cats and kitties. These are the cats and kitties who invented the future we’re living in.

Another major player on our “LabScam” team was Dennis Ritchie. He was one of the most important people in computer science, and he was such a great man. He died last year and is deeply missed. On the day of “LabScam,” we taught him to do some tricks with a thumb tip and he performed those tricks for the rest of his life. I have used Dennis’s description of “LabScam” from the Web as the backbone of this story. He wrote up the story well, and he did a lot of the work that made it possible for me to have a Web to find it on. Yeah, he’s that important to computers.

The night before the scam, Dennis sent an e-mail to Arno Penzias, vice president of Bell Labs, their big boss:

Subject: voice stuff

I think rob is almost ready to invite you to look at his latest effort, which is (pretty much) voice recognition. He’s able to show surprisingly good results from a fundamentally simple-minded scheme; it’s worth seeing. Besides, he appears to have spent the long weekend putting some pizzazz into his demo; he claims it is like Eliza (esp. the “Doctor” program) for the multimedia age.

Dennis

Remember, this is the end of the eighties; quality voice recognition was still years away. This is an e-mail from a heavy cat, Dennis, about another heavy cat, rob. When these guys say they got something heavy, you best believe they got something heavy. Dennis piqued Arno’s interest.

On the day, rob ushered Arno into a room and sat him in front of two terminals. There was a bright light shining in Arno’s eyes, a microphone and TV camera inches from his mouth. That was just to make him uncomfortable. I never said every moment of the practical joke had to be comfortable, did I? On one terminal, a real-time, processed image of Arno’s lips appeared. On the other were printed several words.

rob explained that he had been doing some work in speech recognition and had achieved some interesting results. The camera was watching Arno’s lips to determine when he was speaking and use the movement of his mouth to aid in recognition. The computer would analyze his utterances using both the audio and the video. It would first be necessary to say each word on the second screen in sequence, to train the program to recognize Arno’s voice.