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 trying.

I took a break from living on the streets to go to Clown College and then went to New York and practiced juggling a lot. I lived in an apartment with a girlfriend and Michael Moschen, MacArthur Genius juggler and my next-door neighbor from when we were children. He doesn’t like me saying this, but I taught Mike to juggle. Put that in your genius dance belt and pose. We lived together in the city, ate peanut butter and jelly, and practiced our juggling eight hours a day, six days a week. We just juggled. I knew Teller by then. He’d drive into the city from New Jersey and take me out to a real restaurant. I began to associate Teller with food.

During those great meals, we had a lot of long talks about art. Teller’s idea was that magic was essentially an intellectual art form. It was a hard case to make with the magic that was popular then. Teller contended that magic could have built-in irony and the collision of the visceral and the intellect at breakneck speed. All I want out of art and life is for my guts and my brains to collide. It’s the feeling of being on a roller coaster, my guts knowing I’m going to die and my brain explaining that if they killed too many people, the insurance rates would be too high. That’s magic. The audience knows that Teller cutting the shadow of that rose won’t make the real petals fall, but they do fall, motherfucker, they do fall.

One of the fucking clowns in my class in Florida, Jeff Siegel, still a good friend, started booking acts for the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. His idea was to bring in people who had a lot of experience street performing, and figured it was easier to put those people in tights than to teach a guy already in tights to be funny. I was hired to do my juggling street show with wooden balls and striped tights. I threw in a few “ye oldes” and we were done.

With a full stomach, I started to listen and I got excited about Teller’s ideas. When Jeff called a year later about the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, I asked him if I could bring a magician along. Jeff drove a hard bargain: I would have to take a big cut in my pay that Jeff could pay Teller. I said okay. I owed Teller some suppers.

Teller had been preoccupied with magic since he was a child. He put himself through Amherst College by doing magic shows at frat parties (and the diamond miners in Zimbabwe think they got it tough). When we first met, I watched Teller in a New Jersey library basement performing for about thirty people. He wasn’t doing “Shadows” then, but I watched him silently pluck one hundred needles out of an apple and swallow them with an audience member this close to him. He swallowed some thread and after that audience member gave him a full mouth examination with a dentist’s mirror and flashlight, Teller brought the shimmering needles back up all threaded. It was creepy, beautiful, classy, amazing, and all silent. It’s a trick he still does today.

I called up Teller and told him I had a magician gig for him. I asked him if he wanted to put together a street show and do it with me in Minnesota. We could get a car and drive out there together.

“When?”

“It starts in August.”

“Perfect!”

“And it goes through October.”

“Oh, I have to be back to teaching by then.”

I said, “Okay, I thought you were a magician, not a schoolteacher,” and I hung up. It probably wasn’t really that precise a conversation, but that’s the way it’s become over the years of telling it.

He called back a few hours later and said he’d take a leave of absence from teaching and do the gig. This was a really hard decision for Teller. He had just gotten tenure, and he was a great teacher. I can’t imagine a better teacher. While I was still in high school, I went to visit him and sat in on one of his high school Latin classes. He was getting New Jersey public school students excited about Latin. Beat that.

It was a conspiracy between the Viet Cong and the American military industrial complex that made Teller a teacher. He was the right age for Apocalypse Then. In the draft lottery he was number 3. Penn & Teller are very different from each other, but neither of us would do well in the military. “Bombs bursting in air, man, not my thing,” as Tony Bennett allegedly said. I was too tall to go in and too young to be drafted, but Teller with his number 3 was on his way to Saigon, shit. He got a school deferment to go to college and then a teaching deferment. My aboriginal American name for Teller is “Terrier-with-a-Slipper.” All our pluses are our minuses and Teller does not give up. His tenacity is infuriating, and I’ve built a very good life on it. He doesn’t give up. Was it hard for a guy with a classics degree to get a teaching job in a public school in the late sixties? Sure enough. Would you have bet against Teller doing it? You would have lost.

Without the best and the brightest forcing us into an immoral, undeclared and unconstitutional war, Teller might have gone right into magic and now there would be a Teller Theater in Vegas, and I’d be in prison where I belong. Teller killed time to avoid killing people, and had time to meet me; it looks like I was the one who got him into professional magic, but the truth is that Uncle Sam just delayed the inevitable and I wound up with the best performing partner in the world.

I was with Teller on his first free school day in autumn since he had been five years old. We were driving and eating doughnuts, far away from our homes, on a Monday at eleven a.m. in September. Every year before that he would have been in class, either teaching or studenting. I was an old pro at playing hooky. I hadn’t gone to school much of my junior year, I missed almost all of my senior year, and I’d been out for a couple years living on the streets, but still, the air smells sweeter and time stands still any day you’re in the world and everyone else is working or in school.

Teller and I drove together from the East Coast to Minnesota to do our Renaissance Festival shows. We were together twenty-four hours a day. We ate together and shared Motel 6 rooms together. If one of us got laid, the other had to walk around the parking lot to give some privacy. And this was before iPhones. In the car I played Teller Lou Reed and the Shaggs and he played me Bach and Bernard Herrmann, and we talked. It was some of the best times of our lives. All that would become the Penn & Teller style we talked about in that car. We talked mostly about lying to people for a living while being honest. To be able to lie for art, and tell the truth for morality. It was heavy talk. It was pretentious. There was no humility; we were young so we had to try for the best show in the world. We were going to do something brand-new in magic and in entertainment. There were no hope or desire to be famous or rich—we weren’t that crazy—but we were going to do some stuff onstage that we loved. We weren’t going to be greasy guys in tuxes with birds torturing women in front of Mylar to bad small-dick rip-off Motown music. We were going to speak our hearts while doing tricks. Some of the specific ideas talked about on those drives weren’t realized until thirty-five years later, and we’re still working on others. The results of those theoretical conversations can be found in all the Penn & Teller shows. Our career is just an appendix to those conversations.

When we got to Minnesota, we didn’t do an act together. We each did our separate shows and then would meet back in the employee area in the hay behind the trees to reset our props, count our money and roll our quarters. My show was a very long crowd gathering. I would explain to a few passersby that I was going to do “absolutely nothing” and when I signaled them, they were going to scream, yell and applaud. When other strangers heard this and ran over to see what was happening, the original “crowd” could all turn and laugh at them for rushing over to see nothing. We’d do it again and again until there were a couple hundred people watching me do nothing. It got funny. With my audience in place, I would juggle balls, while commenting in a disparaging way about the routine, explaining, in different ways, that I bothered to do all this practicing, so they could at least bother to watch it. I moved from balls to very big and really sharp knives (I was a juggler, not a magician—I didn’t fake much). First I would juggle the knives with an apple. I would eat the apple while juggling and spit all over myself (slightly less of a hackneyed trick at that time, and much more interesting when juggling knives along with the apple). I went to all knives, and then got a “volunteer” from the audience, put an opaque bag over her head, stood behind her, and juggled the knives around her. I’d return her to the crowd and then put the same hood over my head and juggle the knives blindfolded. That was the big finish and then I would do my money pitch. I said I’d do a magic trick and change the executioner’s hood into a change purse, snap my fingers and claim it was done. I then said to prove I had been successful, I would need money from all of them. I then did a list of reasons they should give me money and excuses that I would not accept. There was lots of talk about my size, and my aggression, so it was mostly threats. The money speech was the longest (and most important) part of my act. I had forgotten it, but just this week, I mentioned to Teller I was writing this, and he performed my whole speech from memory. It’s his favorite thing I’ve ever written.

After all this loud, insane, aggression, I ended my show with a very quiet “thank you” and then moved into the crowd to collect my pay. The ball and knife juggling were part of the Penn & Teller show even into the first Broadway show, but the crowd and money gathering fell away. Resetting my props meant dumping money out of my blindfold/bag and grabbing a new apple. Teller had all this niggling magic shit to do, so I just watched him. I don’t want to give the impression of starving artists here, but we were working hard for showbiz. I always have to add “for showbiz,” because no one in showbiz works as hard as anyone with a real job.

Springsteen does a three-hour concert with people cheering for him, while people work at a desk for eight hours just taking shit from assholes. We were doing eight shows a day, and that’s a ten-hour day with a lot of time to talk and roll quarters and it was only weekends. Even when we were “working,” we were getting paid for doing what we would have done for free. We were doing what we had to do. If writing or going into showbiz is a choice, you shouldn’t choose it. Morally and politically I’m a capitalist, but money was not my motivation for getting into showbiz. I didn’t really think I had a chance of making my living in showbiz, and when that started to happen, I was shocked. I still can’t believe it.

I have a commie friend, a good friend, a famous friend, a political friend, who when he admitted to me privately, after he’d admitted on TV publicly, that he was a socialist explained to me the real reason. He believed that big salaries paid to hard workers were just society wasting money. “Hardworking assholes like Bill Gates are going to work no matter what you pay them. They like to work. Look at you, you’re not anything compared with Bill Gates and yet you’d do your little shows even if you were being paid 1/100th of what you get paid. You’d do the same quality show and work just as hard for a subsistence wage. It’s bullshit that money is the motivator for people who really work hard. Hardworking people have a mental illness that helps all of us, and we should exploit that. They don’t really work for the money, so let’s give them a lot less. Take that money and give it to the lazy fucks like me who don’t really want to work. Then take the rest of the money and use it to motivate the people in the middle, who do need incentive.” It’s the best argument for socialism I’ve ever heard. I would do our show for next to nothing.

In Minnesota, Teller and I were trying to get better, and how much money we made was a good measure of how well our shows had gone. Somewhere we have the booklet in which we kept track of every penny we made. If you’re with the IRS, that booklet might be hard for us to find. There we were in leather tops, tights and dance belts resetting our shows and counting our money. I was sitting across from Teller, both of us sitting on the ground, while Teller reset all his magic tricks. After a few weeks working, Teller asked me to take a look at his brilliant “Needles” routine. He wanted my eye and some pointers on how to make the trick better. How he could be a little more deceptive. I said, “Sure, but it’s already deceiving me, so you’ll have to tell me how it’s done before I can help you conceal how it’s done.” Teller was stunned. I had sat and watched him set up all his tricks and I still didn’t know how they were done? I never paid any attention. I didn’t care. I liked the way it looked onstage, and I wasn’t interested in the mechanics.

I think it was that moment. The moment that Teller realized he had found someone who really deeply didn’t care about how the tricks were done was the moment that he decided to work on a magic show with me. We did the Minnesota Renaissance Festival a few years, added Texas, Maryland, Canada, California, and North Carolina, and during the drives back and forth to New Jersey, we wrote bits and shows and talked over the theories that we’re still carrying out. Nothing is more fun than taking one’s work seriously, and we always have.

I did very well street performing and it was mostly a cash-only enterprise. I did a show that was shorter than fifteen minutes and most of that was crowd gathering and collection. Not a lot of juggling in my juggling show. I didn’t study anyone else who was street performing, and with the exception of the Renaissance festivals, I performed mostly where it was illegal. Most street performers get people to give them money because they look like they need it. People gave me money because I looked like I deserved it. Offstage I’m a slob. I’ve never dressed well. I sit around in gym shorts and a work shirt. I don’t look in mirrors. I don’t shave or get dressed unless I have a show. I have to be paid to brush my hair. “Who’s looking at you?” my mom would ask when I made any comment about the clothes she chose for me to wear. But when I was street performing, I always dressed very nicely and made sure that everything I wore looked expensive. I didn’t play poverty. I tried to work places where people were upscale.

Teller and I were partners, and while we were getting our stage show together we needed to make money, and I always hit the streets. Teller had put his Renaissance act together but there weren’t always festivals, so I dragged him back to my old way of making money. Teller and I staked out the area of Philadelphia where we wanted to do our street shows. Before we did any shows, we sniffed around. We went to all the local merchants and spent money and talked to them. We went to them, bought their shit, and said we were going to be doing street shows, and if we hurt their traffic flow at all, could they please let us know right away. We wanted to help their business.

We found out the area we’d chosen didn’t have other performers because there were a bunch of young men around who considered themselves a gang and made it impossible to work there. Maybe they were a gang. I don’t know how gangs work, but these were young men with a median age of about fourteen. I guess they were scary, but we didn’t think they really hurt people. Maybe they did really hurt people. I didn’t know and I don’t know. We did know that other people who had tried street performing had their props and money stolen and blamed these guys, and we knew they disrupted acts. Teller and I decided to try something bold with them. I decided to gamble about a grand to see what would happen if I tried trusting them. I had one of the first really fancy digital watches. I loved it. It would be worth nothing now, but then it was almost a grand. In our age of iSleek it would be just clunky and ugly, but back then I thought it was really sexy and groovy.

I arrived to do my first street show in that area. I had my juggling balls and my wooden log with my big juggling knives stuck into it. I had a suitcase with my blindfold, apples for juggling, and my bank bags for money and quarter rolls and hundred-dollar paper bill-bands. While I was juggling balls at the beginning of my show, all that other stuff was easy to swipe and run away with. One of the “gang” guys was watching me closely as I set up. I said to him, “I’m going to do a show here in a little bit.” He nodded. He had seen other street performers come and go on his turf. Maybe he was the one who forced them out.

I said to him, “I have trouble juggling with this watch on, and I’m afraid to leave it in my suitcase. I’m afraid someone might steal it. It’s a wicked expensive watch.” I took the watch off. “Would you hold on to it while I do my show so it’ll be safe?” I threw the watch to him. It was a gamble, but it felt right. The story is better if you see this guy as the main potential thief, but I have no evidence of that. He was just a tough-looking child with a different complexion than mine. He caught the watch and said, “No problem.”

I did that whole first show without ever looking back once to see if my props were okay. I never checked on my watch. I gathered a crowd of a couple hundred people and juggled my ass off and blew my voice out. I used to put Chloraseptic in a Coke can and use it to stop my throat from hurting so much. I had no vocal training, I just yelled. The voice I have now is not just my age; it’s a lot of stupid screaming. Some people have told me very kindly that I have a sexy voice. It’s just damage. I guess damage is sexy. Bob Dylan has the blood of the lamb in his voice; I have the blood of screaming for hundreds of people in my voice. It was a really good show. Teller might be right—that street show might be the best thing I’ve done in my life. My crowd gathering was ripped off and is now part of many, many street shows. I asked a guy doing it on the street where he got it, and he said it went back hundreds of years. Some of the lines in my money collection are also used as standards. I’m pretty proud of all that. It was a good show.

After I had gotten the last penny from the crowd, I turned around and there was my newest friend still guarding my watch. He was beaming. He liked my show and he liked holding my watch for me. I asked him if he wanted to help me out and he said yes. His name was Jose, and I threw him the whole moneybag. I asked Jose to separate the bills out, sort them, and count them. At the end of every night, Jose would reach into my moneybag and take a handful of the unsorted money from the last show and that was his pay for helping and protecting me. Some nights he got a twenty-dollar bill in the handful, maybe one or two nights two twenties, and some nights just ones and quarters. He never complained and neither did I. I would arrive at my corner, Jose would run over, take my watch, take my suitcase, set things up, and I would do shows. At the end of every collection, I would throw all the money to Jose and he kept everything safe. He cleaned and organized my props and bought apples for me and made sure I had a fresh one for every show. He said he was part of a gang, and he told me one night about a fight that he got in and I let him “hide” at our house out of the city for a few days. I never knew anything about it. I never asked him about his “gang.” We talked about juggling and how much money we’d made. Maybe he just wanted to see my house. I know he didn’t steal my watch, but maybe he lied about other stuff. I knew Jose for a couple of years. He was a good friend.

Jose and his gang also watched over Teller, and they made it very difficult for any other performers to take over our corner. We had to give our imprimatur for anyone else to work. We shared our area with a harmonica player, an old sailor named Big Al. Occasionally a magician named Chris Capehart shared our space. Chris was one of the finest performers I’ve ever seen. Chris is still working, doing all sorts of shows and he’s great, but his street act was really something else. Chris is African-American, and back then looked really tough. He dressed for his street act in these weird jumpsuits with batwing arms. I don’t if his mom made those outfits for him or a girlfriend or a friend or if he sewed them himself. I never asked him. He didn’t talk during his act, but he wasn’t silent like Teller. Chris whistled. He whistled for the whole show. He was a whistling, scary guy dressed like James Brown in the “hot pants give you con-fi-dance” period.

Chris did the “Miser’s Dream,” a standard magic trick where you pull coins out of all sorts of places and drop them in a champagne bucket. Teller uses a fishbowl instead of a bucket and then turns the coins into goldfish in the P&T show. Some magicians use a beautiful classy bucket and some use a beat-up bucket more like a spittoon (as though I’ve ever seen a spittoon). Al Flosso, one of the best ever at the “Miser’s Dream” would bring a child up and do the routine with him, pulling coins out of the child’s ears and nose and armpits. Flosso was the best. Very much a “Go away, son, you bother me,” W. C. Fields type.

Chris, with balls much too big to fit in his beat-up champagne bucket, would walk around with his wings flapping, whistling and gathering a crowd. With all the people standing around him, he would pick the biggest, strongest, meanest Caucasian man in his front row and get in that man’s space. Then he would get in his face. He would stand too close to him, whistling and making eye contact. He had done no magic yet. It was just uncomfortable. He would hang there a little too long and then reach up and slap the guy lightly in the face, not a painful slap, no one was hurt—but it was a real violation of personal space and a racially charged gesture. It was a heavy moment. This is on the street. This isn’t a theater. There’s no one around to make it okay. His mark always had friends standing nearby, and Chris was always alone. The reaction was strong, and as his audience member recoiled and considered how he was going to kick Chris’s ass, a magic coin fell from where the man was slapped and jangled into Chris’s bucket. It was a magic trick. The slap had produced a coin from nowhere. There was a pause and then the crowd would react huge. This was a coin that meant something. The guy would give Chris a dismissive relieved laugh. The guy thought it was over, but it wasn’t over. Chris kept eye contact and kept whistling. It was unbelievable. He’d reach up again, but this time he wouldn’t slap—he just flick the same guy’s nose, and another magic coin would fall. “Fine, that’s funny, magic boy, now quit it.” Chris wouldn’t. He would continue to pull coins from all over the guy, until everyone was laughing. The guy’s only way out of this uncomfortable position was to let it all go, and be the child in the magic act. He had to trust Chris. He had to like Chris. He had to laugh. There was no other choice. He had to be the little boy, to this whistling, jumpsuited, batwinged, crazy African-American authority figure. There was subtext and there was tension and then it was all okay. When we achieve world peace, Chris’s act will deserve some of the credit. Chris’s act identified the problem and then solved it. I watched him do it a lot, and every time my stomach tightened up and every time it worked. He and I had long talks at Burger King after our shows. Chris is very successful now. He works cruise ships, clubs, and even children’s parties, and every time I see him, my heart goes back to those days on the street. What a genius.

Chris, Big Al, Teller, and I would talk to the police on that beat and do little tricks for them and make jokes. Our shows would have been illegal if we were panhandling, but there was no law against entertaining for money. The police liked our acts. Once I got a few policemen to line up behind me for the whole show. During my threatening money collection speech, that show I ended by gesturing to the line of policemen, saying “and they’re on my side.” On my cue, all the police pulled out their billy clubs and brandished them. It would have been a lot funnier if they hadn’t been laughing. Amateurs.

I made a shit-ton of money working the streets. Teller and I bought all the equipment for our theater shows with that money. My parents bought me a sound system with the money they had saved for my college tuition, but most of the rest we made there on the streets. We had spotlights and dimmer packs and all the stuff we needed for our theater show. We could produce our shows ourselves with our own money.

When I was twenty, I went to an accountant and asked what I should do about paying taxes (all taxes are theft!) on the money that I made street juggling. He asked me how much I made and I told him. He said, “If you say you made that much money street performing, they will arrest you as a drug dealer.” Even he thought I was a drug dealer and wouldn’t work for me. So Teller and I bought a van with bundles of tax-free singles.

Some of the tricks we’re doing in our Vegas show now, we’ve been doing since those street days. We’ve done them tens of thousands of times. Our Vegas show is made up of bits we’ve been doing for more than thirty years right alongside bits we’ve been doing for a few weeks. People ask how we can stand doing the same show every night. Do we put the new bits in just for ourselves, to keep it fresh? Nope. There is no need to keep it fresh. It is fresh. It’s Groundhog Day.

There is a myth that improvisational comics are in tune with the audience and really reading what the audience is doing and reacting to that. Bullshit. I’ve done appearances that are improvised and I have no knowledge of the audience except an occasional laugh. I’m just trying to save my ass any way I can. The focus is on survival, not the audience. I’m trying to keep it moving and get laughs. When I’m doing a bit I know how to do, I can tell you everything about the audience. I know who is smiling and where the big laughers are. I know every word I’m going to say and when I’m going to scratch my nose, so I can really feel the audience and go with them. The first time I do a bit, I do big gestures to make sure everyone gets the joke. After a thousand times, I’ve made everything smaller. As small as I can, so the audience can’t even tell how they know what I’m thinking. Repetition in front of different audiences gives me the information about how subtle I can make things. We’ve lost a lot with vaudeville gone. There were people who wrote a twelve-minute act when they were sixteen years old and performed it multiple times a day until they died. They learned things about how people learn things that no one else will ever know. They knew about language and pronunciation and breathing. I tried to see as many of those acts as I could. There aren’t many people around today who can do a real twelve minutes of Groundhog Day.

We have a bit we call “Water Tank.” The gist is that Teller holds his breath completely submerged in a tank of water, which is locked from the outside, until I find the right freely selected card. I find the wrong card and he drowns. After he’s dead, the right card appears on his dead face underwater. It’s a great bit and one that was responsible for one of my stupidest showbiz decisions. We were asked to appear on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. I’m talking the real fucking Tonight Show. We were going to be on with Johnny. I was going to sit on the couch next to Johnny. The couch that meant showbiz. This was going to be it. We wanted to do the “Water Tank.” Johnny’s people said that after we showed the card was right, before we went to commercial, Teller would have to pop out of the tank and wave to show the audience he was okay, and then we’d go to commercial—just a quick wave on the pull back. We said that we wanted to leave Teller dead going to commercial. They said wave. We said that everyone knew Teller wasn’t really dead and we’d go to commercial with him lifeless floating in the tank; that was the respectful way to do it. They said theirs was a happy show, and waving made everyone happy. We pretended to have integrity about something where integrity doesn’t matter and we hung tough. They said that they wouldn’t hang tough. They wanted us on the Tonight Show, and they wanted us on our terms… okay—but we couldn’t do it with Johnny. We could do our bit, as we wanted, but we’d do it when The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson was guest-hosted by Jay Leno. We won. And then because we’re loser assholes, we changed to another bit for some reason I can’t even remember and went on with Jay, without doing the “Water Tank” at all. No waving, no not waving, no “Water Tank.” We love Jay and he’s been great to us, but it meant although we were on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson we were never on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson with Johnny Carson.

I never met Johnny Carson face-to-face. But we did e-mail and talk on the phone a lot. I take about one real day off a year, but one year I took more than a week off, in Newfoundland with my bride-to-be. Everyone was told that I was not to be contacted. Not for any reason. I was with my love and the moose and that was it. We got to our hotel room in St John’s and the phone rang. “Sorry to bother you, Mr. Jillette, but this is Johnny Carson.” I froze. The voice was perfect. This was after he’d retired, and my heart flew, my heart banged, my heart stopped. “Is this a bad time?”

“No, this is the best time of my life.”

Johnny had gotten my number from the Amazing Randi and he was calling to compliment me on Penn & Teller: Bullshit! He said things about our show that you’d have to be more of an asshole than me to type here. Very complimentary. I reminded him that he was Johnny Carson and that was a bigger deal. We talked skepticism and atheism. We talked showbiz. I told him I was working on a documentary about the dirty joke known as “The Aristocrats.” He said it was his favorite joke. I said I knew that. I was respectful enough to not ask him to do our movie. He knew I wanted him, and he would certainly have done it if he wanted. I stayed in touch with him, writing e-mails about our movie and how it was going and about atheism. I was writing to fucking Johnny Carson. I told him our movie was going to open at Sundance, and he asked whether the movie’s director, Paul Provenza, and I would come to his house in Malibu after the festival and screen it for him. Holy fucking shit.

We did Sundance and we were a hit. A big fucking hit. There was only one thing more exciting than showing our movie for the crowds at Sundance, and that was the prospect of showing our comedy movie to Johnny Carson. It would be the end of this project. The morning after our debut at Sundance, Provenza and I were having a hot chocolate to celebrate our success. My cell phone rang. It was Randi telling me that Johnny Carson had died. Provenza and I sat and cried into our hot chocolate all morning. The joy was gone. We pulled back the print and added “For Johnny Carson” to the end of the movie. Okay, so fuck you, we made a great movie and people loved it, but we never got to show it to Johnny. Life speeds by and no matter how much joy there is, there is sadness.

If we had let Teller wave at the end of the “Water Tank,” I would have met Johnny Carson, but we talked on the phone and we wrote e-mails, and maybe that’s okay. It’ll have to be okay.

The first time we did “Water Tank” was on Saturday Night Live with Madonna hosting. There are a few moments in it where the audience has to know that I’m worried I won’t be able to find the right card. If you watch the SNL performance, I play it big. Wicked big. Stupid big. I don’t trust myself or the audience. I make sure I get the laughs.

Ten years later, we had done the bit thousands of times, and we were playing much bigger places. I was able to get the back row of a 5,000-seat theater to understand with less than I used to get a close-up on TV to be clear. With my style and my movement, one little move of the head could get a bigger reaction from the back row than a full body turn. And those people wouldn’t even know how they’d figured out what I was thinking. Thousands of times had taught me how to really communicate. It takes so little, but it takes time to get that little.

Electronic media had forced a lot of novelty down our throats at the expense of skill. Novelty at the expense of nuance. I thought Andy Warhol said something like if they were going to do pretty much the same situation comedies every week on TV, why didn’t they do the exact same situation comedy every week on TV and get good at it. Since electronic mass media, there’s this sense of “new” that really bugs me. Saturday Night Live is a scripted show that’s more a sitcom, with returning stars and premises, than it is improvisation. Imagine if the brilliant men and women who did the first Saturday Night Live shows had done that same first George Carlin show every night for ten years. Imagine if all their tension had gone away. Imagine if they knew how big every laugh was going to be and exactly where to stand. Imagine no cue cards. Imagine no unneeded pauses and no mugging. The situation comedies don’t explore the depth of plot or those characters in a situation with all the depth that learning can bring; instead they get good at using those same characters in slightly different situations. I guess that’s why it’s called situation comedy. People get good at forms and not ideas. It’s fun to do and it’s fun to watch, but I love watching things that have been done just that way a thousand times before. I think the performers learn stuff that no one would have ever thought of.

Lance Burton, Master Magician, has a dove routine in Vegas. He’s magically pulling birds out of his jacket. Everyone knows he’s pulling them out of his jacket; there’s no other way to do the trick. He comes out onstage looking twenty pounds heavier than he looks when all the birds have flown magnificently to the back of the theater. Lance did that show seven nights a week, two shows a night, for decades. Other stuff in his show changed, but that dove opener was the same every night. Exactly the same. Every move. Every smile. How could he stand that? Well, he could stand that because he was living Groundhog Day, and he loved it. Lance had a chance to get good at something.

John Belushi had that one chance to nail that Star Trek sketch and he had to make sure everyone got it. Lance had thousands of shows to get that bird out right and every single night it got a little better. The magic was not in hiding the birds in his jacket. The magic was in doing it over and over again.

I can go out onstage and just try breathing in a different place to see if a line is smoother. I’m living my thousand years of Groundhog Day. That’s a rare thing in life, where you have something you want to say from your heart and you get to say it over and over again and get it better. Get it right. There are conversations with my wife I would like to have a thousand times so she understood me perfectly. These audiences get to hear me say for their first time something I’ve said a thousand times. I should be able to get them to feel what I want. There is the art. The art is Groundhog Day.