Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!

APRIL FOOLS’ DAY

OUR MOVIE, Penn & Teller Get Killed, is about two guys, named Penn and Teller, played by Penn Jillette and Teller, who play practical jokes all the time and—this isn’t more of a spoiler than the fucking title—those practical jokes end up killing Penn & Teller, and depending on how you read the ambiguous ending, maybe those jokes end up killing everyone in the world. Our movie was not the first movie starring people using their own names as characters who die in the movie. The Monkees’ movie, Head, stars Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones and Mike Nesmith playing characters of the same names and they all die at the end (also not a spoiler, the end is shown at the beginning).

Penn & Teller Get Killed was directed by one of the greatest directors of all time, Arthur Penn, and he made exactly the movie we wanted. The movie we wanted was not the exact movie the audience wanted, and now it’s called a “cult film.” I’m pretty proud of it. I’m happy we did something that nutty for our movie. Nutty made me proud and ended our movie career.

The movie would have been better art if it had been popular. I’m fascinated by the difference between characters and real people in entertainment. I’ve spent most of my life playing a character that has my real name and many of my real-life personality traits. I try to make that character as close to my real self as possible, but that’s still quite a distance. The Penn who lives with his family doesn’t always feel like doing those tricks onstage every night in Vegas at nine p.m. But the Penn who works at the Rio wants to put his suit on and walk onstage every night at the same time, in the same mood, and perform those same miracles. The real me, the I, always feels like being onstage when the other Penn is supposed to be, but if I were totally myself, I might not leave my children to drive into the theater and put a suit on. Once we’re onstage, doing those tricks, we’re pretty much the same guy.

I try not to say anything in character that I wouldn’t say myself. People ask me if I believe everything I said on Penn & Teller: Bullshit! and I did and I still do believe almost all of it. There has been some information that’s changed my mind on a few things, and I’m also a different person now, so some of my opinions have changed a little, but when I said it, I meant it.

I’ve done a few TV dramas where I played myself and then it gets tricky. I did a detective show called Numb3rs and I was playing myself. Someone else wrote the script, but I was pretty much myself. The Penn in Numb3rs was proud of having known Richard Feynman, and the real Penn is even prouder.

I know the audience makes very sophisticated separations between fantasy and reality, but some reactions still confuse me. Lawrence Konner, one of my friends, was a writer on The Sopranos. He gave me a call once and asked my permission to write a scene in which one of the women on the show, Adriana La Cerva, confesses to having sucked my cock in a men’s room in Atlantic City. He was inspired to write that after an evening he and I spent hanging out in Vegas—you know what I mean. I was flattered. Even more flattered when a morning DJ told me that Mick Jagger had called Steve McQueen to ask if it was okay for Mick to sing about someone sucking Steve’s cock in the song “Starfucker” (it’s copyrighted as “Star Star”). Steve said yes to Mick and I said yes to Larry. Steve and I are that same kind of guy. After it was shot, Lawrence called me to apologize. I guess in his script she blew me in the men’s room, but they changed it on set to her blowing me in the women’s room. I don’t know why that made a difference on the set, and I don’t know why Larry felt he had to apologize. I have no idea what that means. I guess the Penn of The Sopranos cares where he’s blown. The real Penn would be happy to go into the bus station transsexual bathroom for any blow job.

When that episode of The Sopranos came out, I had people call me and say, “I loved your appearance on The Sopranos.” I got more reaction to that than the many TV shows I’ve gotten into makeup for. I’m at my best when I don’t show up. A character on 30 Rock talked about what outfit she’d wear to watch porno in Vegas with me. For the real Penn, you can watch porno with me without any outfit at all. People called up and congratulated me for being on 30 Rock. After The Sopranos blow job line, I was most shocked by the people who said, “You know, that actress, Drea de Matteo, must really dig you, or she wouldn’t have said that.” What? It was my buddy Lawrence who thought about sucking my cock; Ms. de Matteo had no more desire to suck my cock than James Spader desired to fuck Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary. Okay, that’s a bad example, but I was surprised how many people thought that I was somehow on The Sopranos.

Weirder than getting my imaginary cock sucked on that show were the two Penn & Teller appearances on The Simpsons. It seems everyone wanted to know what that was like. What? It was like being in a recording studio in Vegas wearing headphones and reading a piece of paper on a music stand. We didn’t go to Springfield. Homer didn’t want to suck my cartoon dick in the cartoon women’s room of the cartoon nuclear plant.

The X-Files called us in to do a script with them in the nineties. We went to L.A. for a meeting with the big cheeses on the show. They were considering having us play Penn & Teller, who discover that some bullshit wasn’t bullshit. We were to play the skeptics who were proven wrong. Morally, the show is fiction and so anything is okay. My favorite movie is Dawn of the Dead and my twelfth 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:

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.

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 about where the guy worked and his girlfriend and diet, but all of that would be done on the fly in Arno’s own style. The most important part of the joke was that at the punch line his voice had to go up and trail off. His right arm should go up with his voice and hang there on the ellipsis. I don’t think it matters very much for this joke whether the Playboy Channel or the Cheetos are last, as long as the audience gets to put the image together during the ellipsis. As long as the right arm and the pitch leads them to the right altitude for the punch line.

Over lunch, I had Arno tell me the joke over and over. He just kept telling it, and I kept correcting him, telling him to use more details or less and kept working on the punch line. I coached him to make sure that he had something else on the list in his mind. He had to have masturbating on the list, he just wasn’t to say it, but his voice had to lead to that. The punch line is really the silence. The punch line must be the offbeat—it’s gotta hit you where you ain’t. Arno starting taking this joke very seriously and really working on it. He had really no experience telling jokes, but he was focused and trying.

We both knew we were kidding; he had no intention of telling any joke in his Bell Labs talk at TED. That would be inappropriate, but we both made believe he was going to and really had fun pretending the dumb guy was teaching the smart guy something. Some of what I was explaining was real information and some was just fun bullshit. It was friends playing over lunch.

We went our separate ways after lunch, and I didn’t see him again until I was in the auditorium for his talk and he walked onstage. The TED audiences are heavy. I believe Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were both in the audience for Arno’s talk. Jonas Salk was there in the front row. Can you imagine being onstage with Jonas Salk in the front row? I did a fake séance and waved my arms around with Jonas looking at me. He saw me at a restaurant and complimented me on all the magic and monologues he’d seen me do. I told him to shut the fuck up, in those words. He wasn’t allowed to talk about stupid shit like our shows, when he had fucking helped eradicate polio. He laughed and talked about some bit we did on SNL. “What are you doing watching fucking TV? What, have you cured all diseases already? Fuck you, shut up, get to work.” I had to run and get my parents and sister on the phone and tell them I talked to Jonas Salk. I’ve met Lou Reed, but Jonas Salk, motherfucker. I just kept looking him in the eyes and trying to imagine what it felt like to help save that many lives. I can’t imagine it. I guess Jonas could have talked about it to Norman Borlaug, but it’s a short list. There’s a lot of debate about the Salk vaccine, but no matter whom you give what credit to, Dr. Salk was part of it. Doing card tricks for a living is stupid no matter who you’re talking to, but look Jonas Salk in the eyes, and it seems everyone else is doing stupid card tricks for a living.

Arno walked onstage with that kind of audience. I wasn’t fit to eat shit off anyone’s shoes in that crowd, but I was about halfway back on the aisle. I was still giggling about our goofy lunch when Arno began to speak. He started with something like, “I had lunch with Penn Jillette and he told me a great joke and tried to convince me to start my talk with it this afternoon.”

Jonas Salk started heckling, something like, “Tell the joke.”

Arno said that it was a great joke, and people should ask me to tell it to them during the break.

Someone else heckled him to tell the joke. Arno explained that it was an inappropriate joke and it was time for his prepared talk, which would take up all the allotted time.

Jonas Salk yelled something about not caring a bit about the same old boring Arno stuff; he wanted to hear a joke.

Arno stood onstage quietly and thought. There was a lot to weigh before the vice president of Bell Labs could tell a dirty joke onstage at TED. This was a big hairy deal. The audience was clamoring for the joke, and Arno was thinking. Salk was still heckling and being a dick about it. Jonas wanted to hear a joke.

Arno looked out at the crowd and found me. He asked from the stage, “So, Penn, can I do it?” I nodded yes, and raised my right hand in the gesture of our rehearsed ellipse.

Okay.

“A guy goes into the doctor with an orange dick.”

Imagine if Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, and Elvis Presley walked out onstage together at a sold-out rock show at Madison Square Garden. The crowd went nuts. Looking back, I imagine I can hear Jonas whooping.

Arno told the joke. He got way carried away. During the section where the guy is getting his dick tested, Arno had details of the machines being used. When talking about the guy’s job, Arno built an entire backstory. This was the extended play version. One of the most important parts of comedy is committing. If you hold back one bit, if you give the slightest wink that shows you’re not completely in the joke, the audience leaves with you. Even if you’re dying, even if the idea isn’t good, you have to keep your heart in it completely. In acting, we all know the actors who let you know they’re above the character. These are the actors who suck dead dog cock. We know the comedian who laughs a bit at his own joke and let’s you know he’s just a regular guy talking weird shit. You might laugh at the time, but those comics will never change you. They won’t give you lasting beauty.

Arno committed. Like a motherfucker. Arno committed like Andy Kaufman. My mouth was bone dry. I was hyperventilating. I had tears in my eyes. At the time, I didn’t have children, but I felt like my mom must have felt watching my TV appearance. I was leaning forward in my seat, moving my mouth with his. I have never wanted a joke to go better in my life. I was more nervous in that TED audience than I was on Saturday Night Live live. Arno was going long. There was no doubt he was going way too long. He was putting in too many details. But this was an audience of scientists, and the details were killing. He knew the names of all the machines that would be used to test this guy’s dick. He had the doctor in the joke do a House differential on what could have caused this perplexing orange dick.

I haven’t found any recording of Arno telling this joke online, but I don’t want to. I want my memory, with all its mistakes and exaggerations. My memory is that this joke went on longer than the longest Grateful Dead show. My stomach was in knots, but the audience was right with him. It wasn’t too long. Penzias was killing. He got to the end of the orange dick guy’s day. He got to right before the punch line, and his eyes found mine in the audience, and he went into it. He started the list, his right hand and voice rose for the ellipses and he hit the punch line on the offbeat. He nailed it. Silence for a heartbeat, and then explosion.

Remember that Madison Square Garden show with Jimi, Lennon, and Elvis onstage? Kurt Cobain, Lenny Bruce, Dean Martin, Tiny Tim, and Jesus H. Christ joined them onstage. The crowd went nuts. In my memory (all of this is my memory, I didn’t fact-check, I didn’t want to), Jonas jumped to his feet. The reaction was insane.

It was a lecture hall, with a raked audience and very low stage. Arno jumped off the stage and ran up the aisle. I stood up and Arno hugged me. I was crying my eyes out. I believe if I were to win a Nobel Prize, it would be more emotional than this, but not by much. Arno was just a different person. We were all different. He finally got the crowd to calm down and went into his talk. My hands shook for the whole talk and I had butterflies in my stomach until I went to bed that night. It was an amazing moment. Payback can be a bitch, but payback can also be a super inamorata. Wow, did Arno pay me back for “LabScam.” I saw scientists in a whole different way. The separate worlds in my mind joined together. The strongest moments in my life make me feel one-nation-under-a-motherfucking-groove, and I felt that when Arno talked about the guy’s orange dick and Jonas laughed his genius ass off.

Several times during the next couple of days, speakers made references (some of them on graphs) to the orange dick. Arno had set up a runner for the conference.

Arno’s telling of the “Orange Dick” joke in that room was the platonic ideal of a joke. Brave and true, and not the least bit mean-spirited. Rebellious and shocking at no one’s expense. Uplifting and enlightening to everyone involved. Beautiful.

Think about that next April Fools’ Day when you’re thinking about putting Saran plastic wrap under the toilet seat. Get it?