Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!

Arno said the first word, “Hello.” rob typed stuff on a third terminal. rob was acting. On the terminal Arno was facing, things flickered, and a graph and some numbers (“autocorrelation coefficients”) appeared. Arno said the next word, “Sanskrit.” More flickering, graphs, numbers. Arno said, “Hohokus.” I had said while we were setting the joke up, “If we can just get Arno to say ‘Hohokus’ into a microphone, we will have already won!”

The words disappeared, and several sentences came up on the terminal. Arno had to pick one of the sentences, and speak it. rob readjusted Arno’s head to make sure his lips were centered on the TV. There was no reason for this, but rob wanted to manhandle his boss. Arno read, “It’s a pleasure having you with us,” and, after a calibrated annoying pause, a synthesized voice said, “Please repeat.” Demos are supposed to fuck up. During this phase, the machine was supposedly deciding which of the sentences had been spoken. Finally, it got this right, and Arno moved on to “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” After two tries, the machine repeated this too. It was wobbly, but rob’s demo was moving along.

Now, rob said, we can have some fun. Arno was aware of the famous Eliza program. It was a computer program that pretended to be a shrink. That demonstrates a lot about computers and/or a lot about shrinks. To bring the idea up-to-date, rob had taken a videotape of David Letterman’s show, and digitized the guests’ answers and the host’s questions. Arno would play Letterman, on his own talk-show, and ask the questions. The machine would match each question to one actually asked on a past show, and then play back the closest appropriate answer. This was serious voice recognition and artificial intelligence. First, Arno had to select which guests he would like. His choices were: The author of Dance, Dance, Dance, She Said, Penn and Teller, or an actress from Dynasty.

We were taking a gamble here, but rob and Dennis said they knew Arno liked us.

Arno chose Penn and Teller. Our little psychological force had worked. If he had picked one of the others, rob would have pretended that the system crashed and asked him to make another choice, but it would be a better trick if he chose us himself.

Arno started with a menu of questions. Arno spoke one of them: “Which is Penn and which is Teller?” On Arno’s screen, after the graphs and numbers, a video image shuffled through several stills of us and finally an animated (and very lo-fi) image of P&T appeared, and my voice, scratchy but recognizable, said, “Don’t you learn anything? I’m Penn Jillette, and this is my partner Teller. Longer name, bigger person.” Arno asked several more questions from this menu and got the same kinda appropriate answers.

“Does Teller ever talk?”

“No, not to you.” Every answer was accompanied by the corresponding lo-fi video clip.

Now, the punch line. rob invited Arno to ask questions of his own. The theory was this would work because the computer could search for spoken words and phrases among the stored clips. This was the really amazing part. The computer would have to make it look like it understood the question and picked an answer that was closest to right. Each of Arno’s questions elicited a response, though some of them were peculiar.

“How long has it been since you became partners?”

“I think it was in San Francisco, about 1981… That’s when Lou Reed came to the show…” rob acted frustrated and suggested that Arno rephrase the question.

“How long have you been partners?”

“It’s been fifteen years of complete hell.”

“Have you won many awards?”

“Well, Teller took the Obie, and he’s going to win an Academy Award. Me, I’m holding out for a Nobel Prize!” Just our little hint for Arno that he might be being fucked with. He didn’t pick up on it—just coincidence.

“What do you do with rats and cockroaches?”

“That’s the way we have sex.”

rob played embarrassed and asked Arno to speak more clearly, keeping his mouth in the right position, “Do you use rats and cockroaches?”

“Oh, I like that on pizza, and Teller uses it on a hot dog roll or a hamburger bun.” It was kludgy but not more so than a lot of first-time demos.

rob acted flustered and suggested that Arno ask Penn & Teller to show him a trick, because rob and Dennis had loaded in a few good ones from the show, and the computer would show it.

After another peculiar reply, the computer sputtered and I finally said, “Well, we hung upside down on Saturday Night Live, and we dumped cockroaches right here on your show, but come with us, we have something special for you. Could the camera go handheld?”

On the video, Penn & Teller stood up and the camera followed us into corridor. It was kinda sorta like the Letterman corridor, but not quite. Arno should have found the hall a little familiar, but he was wrapped up in the new technology. I continued talking on camera, “Let’s go down this hall here. We’ve done a lot of stuff on television, and TV is not the most conducive medium to magic. We wanted something where things would seem to go from TV into reality…”

On the screen in front of him, Arno watched Penn & Teller open a door and approach a man sitting in front of several terminals inside, with a bright light shining on his mouth. “. . . So we worked out this little thing where a person was watching a video screen, and we could actually come in and interact with the person—”

Then Arno turned around, and was confronted with us live in the room with him.

It was pretty groovy. Arno just couldn’t understand for the longest time that it was all a scam. While Arno was saying words and sentences into the microphone earlier, Dennis had been in the next room controlling what Arno saw and heard on the computer. The “video clips” were live pictures of Teller and me in the next room, digitized and turned on at appropriate times. We were just ad-libbing and monkeying with Arno. Our crew for this video shoot were some of the greatest computer minds in history. They had run the cables and were operating the cameras and mixing the sound. It was the most overqualified crew in show business history. They had high-quality video feeding to Dennis’s machine and he was cheapening it and glitching it up before it was sent to Arno’s monitor. I had been ad-libbing the wrong answers for verisimilitude.

Arno was shook. It really did blow his mind. As he started to understand, he wondered if the author and the Dynasty star had been in other rooms with other crews. He was freaked. He told us it felt more intense than winning the Nobel Prize. I think that was something said in the heat of the moment, like saying “I love you” right before you cum, but it still thrilled us. We had learned our lesson; this is the right kind of practical joke. It was a gift to Arno from the people who worked with him and liked and respected him.

A few years later, Arno returned that thrill by an order of magnitude (that’s science talk). We were at a TED conference. Teller and I were doing a mini-opera with magic about the spiritualist who tangled with Houdini. We had put together a presentation with Tod Machover and his gang at the Media Lab at MIT. It featured the “sensor chair,” a new musical instrument, like a Super Theremin that I would play by moving my hands and body is space. It was pretty cool. I was there to wave my arms around in a chair and Arno Penzias was there to talk smart stuff.

During the TED conference, the whole town is filled with TED people, and during lunch at a small Chinese restaurant, I found myself at the table next to Arno’s. We pulled tables together and told them all about “LabScam.” We then talked about the “talks” (my arm waving) that we were giving and, just to be weird, I asked, “What joke are you opening with?” Arno laughed and moved on, but just for fun, I pushed, “You know, you really have to open your talk with a joke. You gotta break the ice.”

Arno said he couldn’t tell jokes. I figured if Arno could teach me superficially about the 3K of cosmic background radiation that won him the Nobel Prize, I could teach him to tell a joke. He agreed to let me try over lunch to teach him to tell a joke.

I told him my version of the “Orange Dick” joke. Here are the beats, the bare bones a comedian would build on:

A guy has an orange dick.

He goes to a doctor.

Doctor examines him, asks a lot of questions about lifestyle, work and diet, but can’t figure out why the guy’s penis is orange (this is the body of the joke).

Finally doctor asks him to detail his average day, and the guy does so. He describes his typical day and ends with, “I get home, open a bag of Cheetos, turn on the Playboy Channel…”

It’s a fine joke. I told Arno those were the only beats he had to remember, but he would fill in all the details on the fly. Those were the parts of the joke that had to be all his. He needed to have the doctor ask questions