Penn & Teller

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Penn (left) & Teller
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Penn (left) & Teller

Penn & Teller are an illusionist and comedy duo from the United States. Penn Jillette is a raconteur; Teller (generally) does not speak while performing, although his voice can be heard as the narrator throughout their performance. They specialize in gory tricks, exposures of fakers and of some magic tricks, and clever pranks, and have become associated with Las Vegas, atheism, scientific skepticism, and libertarianism. They call themselves “a couple of eccentric guys who have learned how to do a few cool things.”[1]

Contents

[edit] Career

The duo met in 1975 and from the late 1970s through 1981, Penn & Teller were part of a three-man act called "Asparagus Valley Cultural Society" which played in San Francisco at the Phoenix Theater. This act was sillier and less "edgy" than today's Penn & Teller act. The third member of the AVCS, Weir Chirsamer, helped to develop some bits that have continued on, most notably Teller's "Shadow-Flower" trick.

By 1985, Penn & Teller were receiving rave reviews for their Off Broadway show and Emmy award-winning PBS special, Penn & Teller Go Public. In 1987, they began the first of two successful Broadway runs. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, the pair made numerous television appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live, as well as The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Today Show, and many others.

Penn & Teller had national tours throughout the 1990s, gaining critical praise. They have also made television guest appearances on Babylon 5[2] (as a comedy team Rebo and Zooty), The Drew Carey Show, Hollywood Squares, The Bernie Mac Show, Fear Factor, The West Wing, Home Improvement, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and The Simpsons. They also appeared as scam artists in the music video for "It's Tricky" by Run-DMC in 1987.

Their Showtime Network television show Bullshit! takes a skeptical look at psychics, religion, the pseudoscientific, and the paranormal. It has also featured critical segments on gun control, astrology, Feng Shui, environmental issues, PETA, weight loss and the war on drugs. Some have praised the show for its libertarian perspective, while others have criticized it for the same reason, alleging that it sometimes employs the same brand of fallacious reasoning that the show ostensibly opposes, notably in relation to passive smoking and climate change.

The pair have written several books about magic, including Penn & Teller's Cruel Tricks For Dear Friends, Penn & Teller's How to Play with Your Food, and Penn & Teller's How to Play in Traffic.

Since 2001, Penn & Teller have performed six nights a week (or as Penn puts it on Bullshit!: "Every night of the week . . . except Mondays!") in Las Vegas at the Rio All Suite Hotel and Casino.

Penn Jillette began a weekday one-hour talk show on Infinity Broadcasting's Free FM radio network in January 2006 with cohost Michael Goudeau.[3][4]

[edit] Tricks

Their tricks include Teller hanging upside-down over a bed of spikes in a straitjacket, Teller drowning in a huge container of water, Teller being run over by an 18-wheel tractor-trailer, Teller swinging over bear-traps on a trapeze, and knives going through Penn's hands. Many of their effects rely heavily on shock appeal and violence, although presented in a humorous manner. Often, the pair will claim to reveal a secret of how a magic trick is done, but those tricks are usually invented by the duo for the sole purpose of exposing them, and therefore designed with more spectacular and weird methods than would have been necessary, had it just been a "proper" magic trick.[citation needed] Penn and Teller perform their own adaptation of the famous bullet catch illusion. Each simultaneously fires a gun at the other, through small panes of glass, and then "catches" the other's bullets in his mouth.

They also have an assortment of card tricks in their repertoire, virtually all of them involving the force of the Three of Clubs on an unsuspecting audience member as this card is easy for viewers to identify on television cameras.[5]

The duo will sometimes perform tricks that seek to explain the intellectual underpinnings of magic. One of their acts, titled "Magician vs. Juggler", features Teller performing card tricks while Penn juggles and delivers a monologue on the difference between the two: jugglers generally start as socially aware children who go outside and learn juggling with other children, while magicians are misfits who stay in the house and teach themselves magic tricks out of spite.

In one of their most thoughtful and politically charged tricks, they make a U.S. flag seem to disappear by wrapping it in a copy of the United States Bill of Rights, and apparently setting the flag on fire, so that "the flag is gone but the Bill of Rights remains." The act may also feature the "Chinese bill of rights", presented as translucent. They normally end the routine by restoring the unscathed flag to its starting place on the flagpole; however, on a TV guest appearance on The West Wing this final part was omitted for dramatic reasons.[6]

[edit] Television projects

[edit] Movies

[edit] Other appearances

[edit] Books

[edit] Awards and recognitions

[edit] Video games

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Penn & Teller Bio
  2. ^ Penn & Teller on Babylon 5
  3. ^ Infinity Broadcasting article on Penn
  4. ^ Penn & Teller website
  5. ^ Penn & Teller on force trick
  6. ^ Guide to West Wing on Penn & Teller
  7. ^ IMDB on My Chauffeur
  8. ^ IMDB on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
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