Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!

“My family never did either. We sulk.”

“Yes, we are pouters.”

“And yet we’ve both discovered there’s nothing funnier than a big guy yelling.”

I guess that’s true. For eight years on Penn & Teller: Bullshit! I screamed “Fuck you, asshole!” at the fucking top of my fucking lungs. In our live show, I yell several times, but not at home. I was taught if you’re yelling, you’re joking. That hasn’t served me that well. I’ve had people like Lou Ferrigno scream right in my face because he couldn’t understand something, and it’s so hard for me to believe he was really serious. It seemed like he was going to turn green and do a cartoon show.

There must be older parents who scream at one another and at their children, but it did seem like my parents’ wisdom and measured actions were related somewhat to their age. Older parents are wonderful until they croak. They both died when I was forty-five. I was with my mom and dad for about half of their lives, and vice versa. I will have to live to a hundred for Mox, Zz and I to share half our lives.

I hope I’ve learned something from being alive this long that will make me a better dad. I know I will be an embarrassment. I’m an embarrassment to everyone who loves and/or works with me. Moxie and Zolten have already been asked if I’m their grandfather, but that’ll be the least of their embarrassments. They’ll also have a dad with a stupid beard and hair down his back talking atheism at the PTA meeting and calling an almost-saint Motherfucking Teresa on TV. If they say the name of their dad’s TV show in school, they’ll be punished. They have a dad who lost on Dancing with the Stars to Adam Carolla and lost on The Celebrity Apprentice to Clay Aiken. They may hang their heads in shame.

They have a dad who’s a goddamn Las Vegas magician, and that’s embarrassing whatever age he is.

I better buy them two ponies each.

Listening to: “I Want My Mommy”—NRBQ

^{Penn & Teller and Zz & Mox at the AFAN charity walk for people suffering from AIDS. My children are sometimes forced to wear pictures of their dad and his business partner on their shirts.}

GRADUATION DAY—NOTHING IS FUNNY BUT PENN JILLETTE

I GOT OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES. I avoid writing “graduated.” I did technically graduate, but I sure lettered and not spirited. I test wicked good, and as soon as I got my stupid high SAT scores, I went to the principal. I told him that if this gifted student didn’t graduate, this gifted student would talk to the school board about how this gifted student was let down by the not-so-gifted principal. I had his gift hanging. He asked if I were threatening him. I answered I was, and I didn’t go to school much after that. The threat took and he made sure I graduated at the very bottom of my class. That was his gift to the gifted student.

I had an English teacher at Greenfield High School who is still a friend, but GHS was a terrible place to learn. I lived in a dead factory town that was a half-hour drive from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. That meant that every acid-head education major who wanted to try some farkakte new pedagogical system could just get a grant (it was the seventies; you could get grants to condescend to rural students) and try it at a real no- kidding school. The worst hippies didn’t want to go too far from their drug dealers, so Greenfield was perfect. The college students could patronize us, use us for one paper, and be able to drive home nights to bang the tripping undergrads.

They tried “open campus,” “open study,” open everything but a fucking book. I had hair down my back, elephant bells, fringe jackets, and eye makeup, but I wasn’t a very good hippie. I like the sex and some of the rock and roll (I could never stand the Grateful Dead), but I didn’t try the drugs. I’ve been told by professional drug users that if I did the drugs, I would like the Dead. It seems like the most effective PSA against drugs could just play some Dead jams and say, “If you do drugs, you will like this kind of music.” What other deterrent would one need? I don’t understand PSAs. If we have a marketplace of ideas in this country, isn’t our government just the ref? Wouldn’t the marketplace of ideas allow billboards that read, “Try Heroin,” and “Beat Your Spouse, Eventually He’ll Dig It”? How do they justify taking tax money, received at gun point, and use it to put TV ads and billboards that tell parents to talk to their children about drugs? My mom and dad never once spoke to me about drugs or alcohol. They never even said that they didn’t use them and never had. I could see that, what’s to talk about? Why would the government tell us what to talk about? There was a billboard on my way to the Penn & Teller Theater at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, that read something about stopping spousal abuse. Has there ever been a person who was driving home, planning on beating the shit out of her husband, who read that billboard and thought, “No, maybe I’ll go talk to my children about drugs instead?” I noticed while reading a few smart-guy books like Daniel Kahneman’s wicked smart one, that the author who didn’t want to use “their” incorrectly when he needed a pronoun and didn’t know the sex, didn’t use “he,” “his,” and “him” but to be modern used “she,” “her” and hers,” so I decided I wanted to be like a smart-guy author and have it be an imaginary woman beating her imaginary husband reading my imaginary billboard. We don’t know what sex a husband or wife is anyway, let alone the perp. Men get beaten a lot. I bet Mike Newdow, the atheist who went to the Supreme Court to try to get “under God” back out of the Pledge of Allegiance, gets beat up a lot. Re also pushes really hard to replace “he” and “she” with “re,” and “his” and “hers” with “rees,” and “him” and “her” with “erm.” I met Mike at some atheist shindig and re really talks like that, it’s rees style, it works for erm and I like it, but smart-guy books don’t use it. Doing it in this book will just piss off my editor and I don’t want to do that. Mike Newdow is cool about pissing off the Supreme Court so re sure doesn’t give a fuck about my editors, so let erm do it.

In 1987, Bob Dylan did a tour with the Dead, and my buddy Jesse Dylan invited me to go with him to see his dad. Jesse told me we should time our arrival so we got to the stadium as his dad was hitting the stage. I thought we should go for the whole shebang. If I was going to see a little of the Dead, I should see the whole thing. I had this vision of noodling, improvised music providing the soundtrack to lots of beautiful braless women spinning and jiggling in tie-dye clothes. How bad could it be? Pretty fucking bad. I ended up backstage with Don Johnson. Crockett and I watched the show together from the wings. It would have been better if Don had been wearing a bra. Don Johnson still hates me from the episode of Miami Vice that I guest starred on. I was doing an awful movie, that awful TV show, and our pretty good Off-Broadway show in the same week. I went a whole week without ever once lying down to sleep. I slept in cars from one set to another, but never more than an hour a day for a week. I was sitting up in a deep sleep when I was shaken awake by Don Johnson saying, “We’re rolling.” I looked at him, heard “action” and started doing my lines. As luck would have it, I was playing a drug dealer, so who cares? I woke from a deep sleep to be in a scene with Don Johnson and Starsky without Hutch directing. Aren’t you supposed to wake up from that?

My sister used to dream all the time that she was a super James Bond–type female spy. At the time she told me this, my sister was a seventy-year-old New Englander caring for her grandchild. She told me she had this theory that we dreamed the opposite of our real lives, so she was all sex and violence. She asked me what I had dreamed the night before. I told her I dreamed I was sitting comfortably reading a magazine. Magazine reading is my only recurring dream except for the dream of pulling my own teeth out, which always makes me wake up with a hard-on. This time I woke up from a relaxing dream to be in a scene with Don Johnson. He hates me and he wasn’t wearing a bra backstage at the Dead and it was awkward and the music was awful and I wanted to be pulling my own teeth out, so Jesse and I ended up outside his dad’s dressing room playing pinball until Bob hit the stage. Bob is always good. The Dead were not. At least not with the sexiest man in the eighties and without doing drugs.

My high school was the result of a poor community school controlled by condescending hippies. Oh boy! I didn’t go to school much, but there really wasn’t much of a school to go to. High school students are evolutionarily programmed to think they know more than grown-ups, but when the grown-ups are hippie student teachers, evolution wins. Fucking stoners.

The conservative community of real teachers and administrators did a little bit of push back. They’d given up any hope of teaching the students anything, but thought maybe they could give them some of the American high school experience. We had pep rallies and a yearbook. The graduating class ahead of us was all hip and had voted to not have class personalities. Those are the people who are “Most Likely to Succeed,” “Class Clown,” “Class Flirt,”