Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!

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,” and so on.

Our class also had a vote on whether to have class personalities and we also voted it down. We were hip and modern too. The yearbook committee and administrators decided to ignore our vote and have the personalities anyway. The same people who had voted against “class personalities” also had to vote for the “class personalities.” I thought maybe I could exploit that.

I knew the majority of my fellow students didn’t want “class personalities” and I knew when they were planning the vote for the student personalities. This was worth going to school for. We had a fairly small class, a few hundred students. If I was systematic, I would be able to reach every one of them personally before the vote, but I also did some group speeches. If we were in a class before a teacher came in, or there was any gathering of students, I stood up in front of them and gave a little speech like this: “In a few days, we’re going to be asked to vote for school personalities, you know, ‘Class Clown’ and ‘Most Likely to Succeed’ and all that shit. If you sincerely want to vote for these things, please write in the name you want, use your votes how you want. But if you’re thinking of writing in ‘Abbie Hoffman’ or ‘Mickey Mouse’ or ‘Mike Hunt’ or just writing ‘Fuck you’ and throwing the paper away, please just take the time to write in me, Penn Jillette, for everything. I promise you, if you do that, it’ll be more fun. Write me in for every category for both sexes. Class Flirts should be ‘Boy—Penn Jillette,’ ‘Girl—Penn Jillette,’ ‘Class Clown—Penn Jillette,’ ‘Best Athlete—Penn Jillette.’ Please remember, they will try to bust us on technicalities so write it perfectly, ‘P-E-N-N J-I-L-L-E-T-T-E’ and make it legible. Please block print it, two N’s, two L’s, two T’s—if you’re disgusted with the school or just making a joke, write in my name. If we work together, we can make this funny. Please, nothing is funny but Penn Jillette.”

The day of the vote, I used the school copy machine to print out and cut up many little slips of paper that said, “Vote Penn Jillette for everything—Nothing is funny but Penn Jillette.” I tried to give the slips out to everyone, so they would have the spelling in front of them. I put full-page versions of my message on every public bulletin board—“Nothing is funny but Penn Jillette!”

I went to class to vote. There were a lot of categories and they were doubled with a choice for each gender. I took the page and I wrote my name in every space.

I hung around until the end of the day and then headed to the administration office where I figured the yearbook committee would be tallying the votes. I walked in to see the head of the yearbook committee crying. Good sign. The principal was standing over her, very angry. Even better sign. I walked in with a big smile, like the class clown, and I said, “Which do you think is funnier, taking a different picture of every category, some of them in drag, or is it funnier to take one picture and just repeat it dozens of times. I’m kind of leaning toward the one picture over and over. That’s also a lot less work.”

The principal said, “Get out of here, Penn. We won’t be having class personalities.”

“But you wanted a vote and you had a vote. You can’t ignore it. You went against the wishes of the people, and the people won. You must do this. It’s only fair.” I said that like somebody “Most Likely to Succeed.”

“Don’t push it. Get out of here now.”

“How much did I win by?”

“Get out of here.”

“What percentage did I get? Did I win by a lot?” He started walking toward me, and like the “Class Coward” I was, I ran away.

If they keep giving us two evils from two identical parties from which to “choose” our president of the United States, couldn’t we just do “Nothing is funny but Penn Jillette”?