The Happiest of birthdays to Penn Jillette (b. 1955) who enters his seventh decade today. My previous Penn and Teller post was published on Teller’s birthday, because he was the one I got to interview for my book No Applause, but this benchmark seemed a good time to balance the scales, as well as the fact that the men mark 50 years as a team together this year (and there are other reasons too, which we’ll get to).
Penn would probably prefer a more recent picture at the top of this post, since he’s worked hard to lose a lot of weight, but I have to be honest, I preferred him fat ‘n’ sassy, with more of Falstaff about him. It’s not just him, I often find the sight of radically reduced former fatties to be somewhat alarming. I was raised entirely outside this culture where people are demented about looking like twigs. My parents both adored the likes of Jackie Gleason — his girth signified high living to them. And as for me: Christina Hendricks, the same. The sad fact is though, whatever you do, you can’t win in this culture. I criticize nobody. They eat, they don’t eat, I don’t care. Anyway, I admire the fact that Jillette mustered the discipline it takes to lose all that weight (he dropped around a hundred pounds). He is a very serious fellow, and that theme is going to form the body of today’s text.
There are very few dumb magicians. I have seen some though, because I have seen a lot of magicians. The dumber ones are generally hacks who perform the most shopworn of tricks, and as often as not, you can catch them out on what they’re doing. They’re not careful because they don’t care. And that’s because they don’t know enough to care. At any rate, as we all know, the Penn and Teller act is to REVEAL the secrets behind the illusions, though only after they’ve executed them flawlessly and mystified you. You (and they) get to have the cake and eat it too. Now, revealing the secrets of magic for fun and profit is an old dodge that goes at least as far back as the 19th century. Almost all of the big ones did it, as a kind of sideline, another revenue stream to flow from their painstakingly accrued storehouses of know-how. We wrote a post about a guy who did this just yesterday. But in the past, such revelations were usually published in books and pamphlets, or (in the tv era) divulged in talk show interviews by the likes of The Amazing Randi. Penn and Teller were ground breaking in making the revelation a part of their act. It was Jillette who made the act of doing that entertaining, because he was the talker. Since Teller is a mute, Jillette compensates by being an ultra-talker, in the time honored sideshow-medicine show-huckster-pitch man tradition. It was natural for him to parlay that into being an actual broadcast announcer as well. For years, his was the gravelly voice of Comedy Central for example, and those years (the ’90s and early oughts), I feel, are truly when Penn became an American institution.
The Barnumesque hoaxer as rationalist skeptic also falls within a very old tradition. I find Jillette’s first name interesting — was he named in honor of the Quaker? Penn’s an outspoken and famous atheist, but that also means that he thinks about religion far more than 95% of the people who claim to be believers. I felt a special kinship with him back in the day, because, like me, he was a New England-bred libertarian, and the framework that brought him to that place had to do with principle. If you’ve read widely in philosophy and the writings of the American Founders, your reverence for their clarity of thought can bring you to a dogmatic clinging to Age of Enlightenment ideals. Most people who use the word as an epithet may have some idea about libertarian beliefs, with little concern for what motivates some people to entertain them.
In my case, one of the main attractions was the party’s avowed pacificism, a disapproval of the military-industrial complex, the national security state, and the newly hyper-militarized police force. Frankly, both the Democrats and Libertarians are hypocritical when it comes to these things. The Democrats support them all, and I can’t see what’s so “progressive” about that. And many Libertarians prove not to be Libertarian at all when it comes to state violence — they’re just Conservatives by another name. Anyway, I don’t believe in conspiracies, I don’t belong to a militia, I don’t own a gun. The way I see it, any of that would turn me into the very thing I claim to be condemning. In fact, the thing that turned me away from any kind of official connection with libertarians was the online joking of certain people in libertarian chat groups about other targets they’d like to have recommended to the terrorists following 9/11. I don’t want to belong to a club that has even one member who talks like that.
As I’ve written here on this blog many times, another attraction to me had something to do with the relationship between capitalism and the American hoax tradition, which is often cloaked in romance in American popular culture. The ascension of Trump to the Presidency killed that feeling dead. (I also realized over time that I was not the materialist I pretended to be.) I was pleased to learn this morning that Penn (though a very rich man these days) drifted away for similar reasons. The breaking point for him, a lover of science, was Trump’s barbaric anti-leadership during the Covid crisis, as well as his fanning of the flames of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Penn came to the same conclusion I came to, which is basically that as a real world evil, government sometimes comes in second to the monsters who seek to fill the void left by its absence. There’s a reason it’s called political science. When one method is found wanting, you test another. That’s the scientific method. Doubling down on a bad bet is what the suckers do in Vegas. It was distressing to me (infuriating, more like) to see many Libertarians swallow the MAGA swindle. But it was heartening to see Penn have the intellectual humility to go the other way, and that’s the third reason I celebrate him today.
Happy 70th, Penn! And happy 50th Penn and Teller! Find out what they’re up to here.
Some Related Posts:
On my Libertarian ‘zine The Herald of Freedom (1996-1999)
Leave Barnum Alone: 7 Reasons Donald Trump is NOTHING Like P.T. Barnum, but In Fact Far, Far Worse
For more on show business history, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and please stay tuned for the upcoming Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.