Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!

life. I’d sometimes catch myself saying “Jiminy Cricket,” but I tried not to. “Oh my god” became “my word.” That was a powerful one. It seems that many believe that “my word” is “my lord” with one letter change. Or that it stands for “oh my word of god.” That etymology bothers me, but only a little. I use it as giving my word. Swearing to god means nothing to me, but I want my word to mean something. I don’t know where I come down on “oh my goodness.” It seems to me like that’s a pretty clear euphemism for “OMG,” and it would be better to go with “oh my word,” I suppose, but I like “oh my goodness.” There’s a purity to that. We non-swearing boys found that “ouch” worked pretty well when one dropped a hammer on one’s toe: you didn’t really need “motherfucker” then. As part of our no-baby-talk rule, we still used “fuck” to talk about fucking and “shit” to talk about shit. We were okay with “dick” for our penises, but not for Kreskin. He was an untalented mentalist. Not knowing which word would be worse to call him, we couldn’t talk about him for a while. When you’re not talking about the whole person, “asshole” doesn’t come up that much. Same with “pussy” and the like. It was fine for sex talk, but no more false metonymy on any of that.

The most surprising result was taking out the word “bullshit.” “Bullshit” is good-natured. It’s joking around. It has a colloquial playful feeling. Replace “bullshit” with “that’s not true” and you’ve really said something. There was a power to not swearing, especially in light social situations. “Oh my god, what a load of bullshit” becomes “My word, that’s simply not true.” That sure as fuck means something.

The experiment faded away. I like the way the rhythm of swearing works in sentences and it’s one of my social habits. I say “fuck” and “shit” around my children, but they rarely hear a “goddamn” or “Jesus Christ.” I don’t want them to be confused by any of that from me. The messages from the other children at school get garbled with the home messages, and once when her little brother said, “Oh my god,” Mox responded, “You shouldn’t say that, because there is no god.” Well, she’s right, but I’m not sure that’s why her Christian classmates don’t say it either.

I wanted to take all the power away from the idea of god and Jesus Christ. I wanted to see if I could speak more carefully. I wanted to have the strength to tell people to their faces that I didn’t believe what they were saying was true. I wanted more than just the balls to call bullshit.

I’m thinking maybe I’ll go back to the no-swearing thing. It worked well for my parents, but whether I do that or not, I’m going to try to phase out all the hateful terms and ideas. I’m sick of racial and sexual stereotypes or even making fun of those stereotypes. I believe people are people. Differences between men and women may exist in the aggregate, but they mean nothing at the street view. I know gay men who are a bit prissy, and I know gay men who are slobs. Gilbert Gottfried is the cheapest motherfucker on the planet, but that has nothing to do with Jews, that’s Gilbert.

I’m embarrassed that I wanted to make my African-American, gay, Jewish (background, now atheist) friends (I do have more than one friend who is all of those: African-American, gay and Jewish) prove how much they trusted me every time I felt like making a hack joke.

If I really don’t believe in tribalism and I really want all those stereotypes to go away, it’s much faster to just stop using them than to teach everyone to understand when I’m kidding. I’ve made a mistake or two being overheard or typing in a forum online that I thought was private, when someone didn’t know my relationship with the person I was writing to, and accused me of being a kind of person I’m really not. It really upset me. Isn’t it easier to just not do it than to make it easy for people who are trying to misunderstand?

I appeared on the same episode of Politically Incorrect as Jerry Lewis once. I had just done The Aristocrats and I was on the show selling it. Jerry was saying that he didn’t work blue; that he didn’t swear or make dirty jokes (I believe he meant in public). I decided to turn it on him, for the show, and as Bill Maher took the show out, I was saying things like, “Jerry, I think you’re good enough to make dirty jokes. I really do. You’re good. I bet you could work blue, if you worked on it. You may not be as good as Johnny Carson, Red Foxx, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, or George Carlin, but I bet you could do a pretty good job if you tried. I think you’re good enough to work blue, give it a try.”

I thought it was really funny at the time, but maybe it was true. I’m not as good as that list of people. When I make jokes using those hateful terms, am I adding to our culture like Johnny, Red, Pryor, and Carlin? When Lenny was swearing and doing all that ethnic stuff, it took a lot of bravery, ideas and talent, but times have changed. It’s no longer brave or smart. We’ve gotten to the place where it’s too hard to tell whose side the harelip bartender is on. Even one person’s misunderstanding may not be worth the next guy’s laugh.

Don’t worry about any of that for the rest of this book. I’ll still use “fuck,” but Canadian Thanksgiving is at a different time than Thanksgiving in the States and that’s okay with me.

Listening to: “Don’t Call me Nigger, Whitey”—Sly and the Family Stone

^{With Ron Jeremy and Paul Provenza, invoking the punch line from The Aristocrats.}

HERE COME OUR “CELEBRITIES”—CUE THE FREEZING RAIN

I DID THE CELEBRITY APPRENTICE 2012 as kind of a work/study thang. TV networks are dying. The death throes of religion give us jihads. The death throes of television give us reality shows. I blame the writers’ strikes. That’s not really fair, but I hate a union that forces me to join it. I’d like to be the anti–Pete Seeger on this and stand up against the unions, but they really have Hollywood writing sewed up. Penn & Teller chose a different battle. We stood up to Equity.

Equity is the only live Broadway theater union. Penn & Teller are not members. The first time we played Broadway, Equity tried to get us to join. They said they could get us a better deal. That seemed impossible, because we were producers on the show. How would they help us negotiate with ourselves? They said we had to join. We found a couple loopholes. Equity guarantees understudies, so we said we would join if they could find five or six guys to audition for my part. They had to be 6'7'' tall and be able to perform the monologues, eat fire, juggle, play bass and do all the magic. Then they’d need to find someone with Teller’s abilities. He’s average height, but aside from that, he can do stuff no one else can do. They failed. Then we claimed we weren’t actors. (And if you saw me deliver the line “Superman, the others!” in Lois & Clark, you saw proof I’m not an actor. We might have been lying about Teller.) Penn & Teller are variety artists, so our Broadway union is the American Guild of Variety Artists. It handles circus performers and Vegas acts. The guild’s president was and is Rod McKuen, so don’t fuck with us. Equity is a union that boasts ninety percent unemployment at any given time. I hope the plate spinners and Risley acts on Broadway follow our lead and hang tough with AGVA.

Our sucky TV culture is all PBS’s fault. In 1971, they put a camera crew into the home of Bill and Pat Loud and their children and, in 1973, put everything the crew filmed on TV. The show was called An American Family, and viewers watched the Louds’ lives as though it was a TV show. It was a TV show. The Louds went from happy family to D-I-V-O-R-C-E and America watched it happen. Their son Lance became the first totally out gay guy on TV (I guess no one counts the Hollywood Squares and Bewitched). When Lance died of hep C and complications from HIV years later, there was another TV show.

Before An American Family, you would have bet your ass and your colonoscopy video that if you put TV cameras in a room with people, those people would behave better. They’d be kinder, wiser, more measured and more loving than they would be without the cameras. The whole world is watching, so be at your best.

The Hawthorne effect—coined in 1950 in response to factory workers’ productivity increases when they were being observed—manifests in every clinical shrink study of people’s motivations. When anyone watches anyone do anything, the watched people do whatever they’re being watched doing a little better for the short time while they’re being watched. The key is that the behavioral improvements are temporary. If the Hawthorne effect worked for more than a few days with TV cameras, we wouldn’t have The Celebrity Apprentice.

I noticed the Hawthorne effect for the first few days of my season of The Celebrity Apprentice, but it sure didn’t last long. We celebrities are desperate pigs. I knew several of my co-