Penn and Teller

Penn (left) & Teller

Penn and Teller are a two-man magic and comedy team, comprised of Penn Jillette and Teller. The duo specializes in gory tricks (in which the mechanisms of the illusions are fully revealed) and clever pranks, and have become associated with Las Vegas, atheism, skepticism and libertarianism. They call themselves “a couple of eccentric guys who have learned how to do a few cool things.” [1]

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 and Teller had national tours throughout the 1990s, gaining critical praise.

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 reveal a secret of how a magic trick is done and then use that very effect to fool the audience. Penn and Teller perform their own adaptation of the famous bullet catch illusion. Both simultaneously fire a gun at the other and then catch the respective bullets in their mouths.

In one of their more 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." 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 [2] , this final part was omitted for dramatic reasons.

They have also made television guest appearances on Babylon 5 [3] (as a comedy team Rebo and Zooty), The Drew Carey Show, Hollywood Squares, and The Simpsons. They also appeared as scam artists in the music video for "It's Tricky" by Run-DMC in 1987.

Their cable television show Bullshit! takes a skeptical look at psychics, religion, and pseudoscientific and paranormal frauds, and has featured segments on astrology, Feng Shui, environmental issues, weight loss and the war on drugs. Some have praised the show for being from a libertarian atheist perspective. Others have criticized it for the same reason, and alleged that it sometimes employs the same brand of fallacious reasoning which the show ostensibly opposes.

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

Since 2001, Penn & Teller perform 6 nights a week in Las Vegas at the Rio All Suite Hotel and Casino.

1 Quotations
2 Television projects
3 Movies
4 Books
5 Awards and recognitions
6 External links

[edit]

Quotations

Image:Wikiquote-logo-en.png

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Penn and Teller

"Is this your card?" (traditionally the three of clubs)
"Doing stuff like Van Praagh and Kreskin is like taking a shotgun and going into a mall, and discharging it in people's faces and stealing twenty bucks from each one of them." - Penn
"When (Norman Borlaug) won the Nobel Prize in 1970, they said he had saved a billion people. That's BILLION. 'BUH!' That's Carl Sagan's billion with a 'B'. And most of them were of different race from him. Norman is the greatest human being. And you've probably never heard of him." --from Bullshit! #1-11 "Eat This!"
Penn: "We wouldn't do anything to this animal that we wouldn't do to ourselves." (he applies a branding iron to Teller's right buttock) Teller: "MotherFUCKER!" #2-1 "P.E.T.A."
"Naked people are their own reward." --from Bullshit! #1-6 "Sex, Sex, Sex"
"It's fair to say that the Bible contains equal parts of fact, history, and pizza." --from Bullshit! #2-6 "The Bible: Fact or Fiction?"
"This is drugs....and these are your civil liberties—AND THIS IS THE GOVERNMENT." (Penn in a steam roller crushes the pan representing drugs and all the eggs with civil liberties written on them) Penn: "Any questions?" --from Bullshit! #2-4 "War on Drugs"
"You don't heal a broken heart by pretending it's not broken." --from Bullshit! #1-1 "Talking to the Dead"
(in The Simpsons episode Hello Gutter, Hello Fadder)
Teller: "Will you get off the stage!"
Homer Simpson: "Hey, I thought you didn't talk."
Teller: (nervous) "Well, I didn't mean to...it slipped out. Oh, now Penn's gonna beat me....I'm not the first Teller you know"
"And then there's this asshole..." --from various episodes of Bullshit!