DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC? : Then Don’t Go See Penn and Teller, Because They Want to Show You It’s All a Lie

A grand variety of acts may have performed at UC Irvine’s Bren Events Center in the last few years, but one thing that has yet to grace its stage is a gas-powered, deafening, branch-devouring chipper-shredder. Penn and Teller hope to remedy that cultural lack this evening.

“A few years ago I bought a chipper-shredder to turn my useless yard rubbish into useful mulch,” the mono-monikered Teller explained. “And we were impressed by the extreme power and terror of the chipper-shredder. Over the last year we’ve devised a vanishing bunny rabbit trick, utilizing the chipper-shredder. You can sort of put it together yourself from there.”

Teller (who legally dropped his first name after no one used it for years) is the smaller, eerily silent member of the duo onstage. He says the silence comes in handy when he’s drowning or swinging upside-down over a bear trap.

The physically and verbally imposing 6-foot-6 Penn Jillette, meanwhile, embellishes their bold comedic magic with monologues of Spectorian density.

Penn describes himself and Teller as “sub-stars”: “If you spent 20 minutes recounting to the average person everything we’ve done, chances are he’ll eventually go, ‘Oh, them.’ ” In their 18 years together, Penn and Teller have created a wealth of unique reference points. They’ve irked some magicians by breaking the rule of not revealing how their tricks are done, but the tricks remain twistedly wondrous nonetheless: Teller is run over by trucks or seemingly impaled by power drills. They do card tricks in which the key card turns up in the mouth of a rat balanced on the nose of Teller, who has his head in the rat’s cage. They’ll pull a rabbit from a hat on David Letterman’s show, followed by 500 cockroaches.

Oh, them.

They play Vegas, Broadway and long touring runs with their shows, the most recent being “Penn & Teller Rot in Hell.” They do PBS, NBC and MTV with equal ease. They have two books on the shelves, including last year’s “How to Play With Your Food,” which gives tips on eating ants and how to get the image of Satan to appear on a burrito. On their own, Teller pens articles for the New Yorker, while Penn tells computer buffs what’s on his mind in a column in PC/Computing magazine.

The performances in Irvine tonight, and at UCLA Friday, are among a handful of shows they are doing to break in new material. The chipper-shredder bit is one of four new routines which will be accounting for a quarter of the two-hour show. They intend to return to the Southland in late ’94 or early ’95 with an entirely new show celebrating their 20th year of performing together.

In separate phone interviews recently, the two spoke enthusiastically about another new bit they’re working on, which they intend to debut on Thanksgiving on “The Late Show with David Letterman.”

Penn said, “Teller and I have both gotten to a point where we think that big machinery is really funny. On Letterman we’ll be doing a card trick with two forklifts and four-foot playing cards made of metal, where the entire deck weighs in at about 1,000 pounds. Our thinking was that we’re playing bigger places all the time, and that we should do bigger things. The idea of using giant cards like a clown would use really turned my stomach. But the idea of them being four-by-three and metal and dangerous I really enjoyed.

“And, man, have we been working, every day, learning to operate these forklifts. Fortunately Teller and I, when it comes to practicing, are both like terriers with slippers. We’re getting pretty good, so now we have learned to cut the cards and shuffle them with forklifts. It is absolutely, literally, sleight-of-forklift that we’re doing.

Teller said, “From time to time we will hear complaints from people that they have a little trouble in the back seeing the faces of playing cards when we do card tricks in the show. I think this will fix them.”

Penn thinks it will give audiences a unique perspective: “We’re using Hyster electric forklifts. They’re completely silent, and the cards are pretty loud. I imagine if you were tiny and standing right near a normal deck of cards, they’re probably pretty loud, while the hands are silent. I think it really has the feeling of just blowing up a card trick.”

That combination of whimsy and large machinery is representative of Penn and Teller’s singular approach to their art. Though they’ve worked hard to gain their status as the Bad Boys of Magic, a lot of thought goes into the splatter and clang of their act.

When they met in 1974, Teller was a Latin professor who dabbled in magic, and Penn an unemployed clown school graduate. Neither harbored dreams of stardom. Instead they were drawn to their present pursuits through an annoyance that no one was practicing magic with the attitude and intelligence they felt it deserved.

Penn said, “At the time, magicians had this rap for being condescending and insulting to their audience. As Jerry Seinfeld says, it was all, ‘Here’s a quarter, now it’s gone, you’re a jerk. Now it’s back, you’re an idiot, show’s over.’

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“When Teller and I first met we began having late-night conversations about the intellectual implications of magic, if you will, the fact that it’s built in irony, that things appear one way and are really another, and that its subtext is all swindling. Although everybody is talking about ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ in magic, it has nothing to do with that. In fact one of the definitions of magic could be unwilling suspension of disbelief.

“At that time Doug Henning was saying all this stuff about ‘just believe in magic’ and ‘don’t be critical, just watch.’ Essentially, the philosophy behind magic was, ‘While you’re watching, why don’t you just be stupid because it makes my job easier.’ Teller and I were really bothered by that and got to talking about what a powerful thing it would be to strip magic back down to what we knew it was, of saying, ‘I’m going to lie to you and cheat you,’ and then doing it.

“There was a raw, violent honesty to that--the fact that everything we do in the show if done outside of the context of the show would violate very deep social morals, and when done in the show becomes the most honest thing. There cannot be a more honest performer than a magician who comes out and says, ‘I’m going to lie to you’ and then does.”

Part of that process entails at least partially revealing how the tricks are done, while still executing them with a wonder-evoking skill. Although Penn says that David Copperfield and other top-flight magicians appreciate their act, others don’t.

“There are some amateurs who really loathe us. But they’re confusing a compositional rule with a moral rule,” Penn said, comparing magic to music, where it’s wise to follow rules until you learn how to break them. “With magic, if you were starting out and asked what the most important thing to do would be, I would tell you never, ever give a trick away. If you show how it’s done, the audience feels cheated. It’s a bad, stupid, terrible idea.

“But we’ve learned ways of giving away a trick that makes it interesting, and gives the trick a certain feeling of intimacy and taboo, almost. Those were all the feelings we wanted to get across and we very carefully played with the compositional rule to get that feeling. Now, some amateur magicians saw that, and having been taught never give a trick away, were taking it as a moral rule.

“The question they should have been asking was, ‘Does this bit work ? Does it accomplish what they want?’ Instead the reaction was, ‘You’re not supposed to do that.’ It’s really funny that amateur magicians would have lost sight of what they were trying to do, which was entertain or enlighten an audience, instead being so completely into this ‘we’re a secret club’ thing.”

Both he and Teller detest what the latter calls the “Prospero-like mumbo-jumbo” that accompanies many magic acts.

Teller said, “We work from the idea that mystery is fundamentally a very good thing, and the best way to enjoy mystery is to view it with klieg lights. When there’s a mystery there it’s unnecessary to add dry-ice smoke from the wings in order to give it atmosphere. Mystery is plenty mysterious on its own. And we’re loaded as human beings with mysteries that are unspeakably awesome if one simply walks out the door under the night sky and looks up. Which makes me and Penn as well resent people who manufacture mysteries where there are none.”

Neither is charmed by the fuzzy mysticism of the New Age, and they aren’t too big on older age thinking, either.

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“As far as I know, we are the most overt pro-science people in show business,” Penn said. “There may be tech-heads, but none as in love with the scientific method as we are. I really believe that if science hasn’t proven it, then it don’t happen. Both Teller and I are atheists, and I think that permeates the show. I certainly, although I’m for freedom of religion, think that no one should exercise it.

“In our show we have a little bit of a blasphemy section, although, sensibly enough, it is not a preachy blasphemous section, as we might be offstage. We do a thing with the Bible. Since we use the Bibles and give them away, we use Gideon Bibles because in our line of work they’re real easy to find. We’ve got us and four crew members living in hotels, so that’s six Gideon Bibles a night.”

Penn pointed out that the Gideons say guests are welcome to take the Bibles, and by passing them on to their fans, “We’re giving them to people who really need them.”

Somewhere between their acerbic humor and regard for reason lies a genuine affection for their audience. They are one of very few acts who make a point of going out to meet fans after every performance.

Asked why they don’t maintain the professional distance of other acts, Teller quickly responded, “I don’t see the point in keeping a professional distance, unless you have something to hide. We don’t particularly have anything to hide, and we love our audiences. Honestly, we just love them. The audience is why we’re there. They’re the people who pay our bills and applaud our work. To me, not to want to meet them is the thing that requires an explanation.”

For all the noisy magic of their shows, Teller had a surprising notion of what audiences appreciate about them.

“I think people value the partnership they see. They see onstage two people who could not be less like one another. They routinely put their lives into the other person’s hands. The division of labor in our act is one I haven’t seen any other place. Pretty much if there’s a physical stunt to do, I do it. Pretty much if there’s a word to speak, Penn does it. That’s a kind of dependency that seems to me to be extremely uncommon.

“People don’t trust each other. Normally someone in my position would be worried that the other guy gets to do all the talking and he would be worried that I get to do all the spectacular stunts. We’ve been together 18 years and have learned through a great deal of patience and a great deal of fighting and discomfort that in fact the other guy is worth trusting.”

So now they get to travel the world, getting paid for playing with insects and chipper-shredders and any other fanciful gimcrack that enters their fluted minds. Somehow, they avoid being miserable about it.

Penn said, “I’ve always, in every situation, appeared to have more fun than the people around me. I’m a very, very happy person, and I’m very happy to be a happy person. I don’t know what causes that. It certainly hasn’t been success. Had you met me 15 years ago, you would have found someone who was just as tickled pink to be alive.”

Teller sees them as “two guys who like to learn things and like to have adventures. In a lot of ways I think we live our lives more like fictional characters from the kind of book you read when you’re 12 years old than we do from proper grown-up values. So it strikes me as strange, and great, that as many people as seem to like us do.”