To mark their 50th anniversary, Penn Jillette and Teller returned to the scene of their first show. Having initially joined forces in 1975, the duo celebrated their golden anniversary, nearly to the day, at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival on the outskirts of Minneapolis last month. The Las Vegas-based comedians were greeted by a throng — nearly three times the size as the 1975 crowd and mostly older — who had waited for eight hours on a hot and humid Midwestern day to attend the performance.
“The pants I wore 50 years ago somehow still fit me,” Jillette tells The Times over Zoom from his home in Las Vegas.
Back then, Jillette entertained audiences by juggling knives (“I was a very, very good juggler and very much into comedy and writing”). This time around, not having used them in years, he dusted off his old trunk, props and tricks (specifically Teller swallowing a bunch of needles and thread and bringing the needles up threaded) from 50 years ago with no problems.
“It was strange to play that same thing,” says Teller (born Raymond Joseph Derickson Teller) in a separate Zoom interview later that afternoon. But, he says, it’s a trick that’s so tried and true that if the sound system goes out or there are additional production issues, it still works.
As much fun as it was to bring it all back home and pull out old favorites, Penn and Teller hate nostalgia.
“Teller and I have been called by friends the least sentimental people who have ever lived,” Jillette says. “I take Bob Dylan’s [1967 documentary] ‘Don’t Look Back’ to heart. But all that being said, performing there was pretty sweet.”
“I think it means more to people outside of us than it does to ourselves,” Teller says. “It’s all just another gig.”
Back in the day, Penn, now 70, and Teller, 77, had intended to reimagine magic by bringing a comedic element into it. Before their careers in magic, Jillette was a juggler and Teller a Latin teacher, which allowed them the freedom to bring their diverse interests into their show. They weren’t bound by the unwritten rules and restrictions that constrained magicians. They had a different type of showmanship that blended magic with comedy and rock ‘n’ roll flair. Yet, at the same time, Penn and Teller performed with earnestness and never judged their audiences. The approach opened them, and in turn, magic, to a broader group of people.
“The idea was, could you do magic without insulting people?” Jillette says. “And, more so, could you do so with respect and without lying to your audience. And it’s all playful. It’s just a gentle exploration of a silly kind of truth.”
To him, most magicians aren’t like that. Instead, Jillette says, they treat audiences as if they lack intelligence and want to “have something over on them,” and that is something he finds “appalling.” Instead, Penn and Teller always saw the relationship between them and their audience as symbiotic. “Magic actually is the playful study of epistemology,” Jillette says. “That’s what stage magic is supposed to be. It’s respect, consent and truth.”
It’s why the duo continues to endure.
The boisterous Penn, left, and reticent Teller are a throwback to an era when the team was greater than the individual performer.
(Joan Marcus)
“I’ve had a guy come up to me and say, ‘My parents took me to see you when I was 7 years old. And this is my 7-year-old son,’ ” Teller says. “It’s something that really moved me. I feel like I’m a member of their family.”
At the same time, if history has taught audiences anything, they’ve learned they have to be careful about putting faith in these illusionists. In a sense, Penn and Teller are a throwback to an era when the team was greater than the individual performer.
What’s made Penn and Teller work together is the yin-and-yang of their public personas. Jillette carries himself with the brashness of Rowdy Roddy Piper yet is keen on presenting himself with an element of mystery, much like Dylan (on our Zoom call, a poster of Dylan’s 1978 film “Renaldo and Clara” is in clear focus behind him). Even so, whether it’s discussing the merits of Dylan’s catalog, recalling encounters with Lou Reed as the president of his fan club (“He said I had to stop that because we became very close friends”), Jillette is boisterous and outgoing. Meanwhile, the reticent Teller serves as the perfect foil.
Collectively, what’s allowed them to flourish is putting their show ahead of anything else. Despite maintaining somewhat of an illusion that they’re not friends offstage, there’s a mutual admiration between the two. During the separate conversations, there are moments when they reveal that they are pals in the context of describing their laser focus on putting together the best show possible. A magician doesn’t reveal their tricks or let emotions be shown easily, but after working together for so long, the two speak of each other fondly, more like brothers than business associates (“After I had quadruple bypass surgery, Penn visited me every day and came to me with ideas,” Teller says. “Nothing was going to heal me faster than working on a magic idea, so I guess you can say we’re secretly friends”).
Making sure the show is the best it can be, matters more to them than individual accolades.
“There are long bits during the show, during which I’m really just helping Penn as an assistant, and that’s fine,” Teller says. “And there are long moments in the show where he’s, like, playing music for something that I’m doing. The only thing that matters is the value to the show.”
For most of the history of the medium, magicians have entertained audiences through a variety of means, most notably tricks, effects, sleights of hand or illusions of seemingly impossible feats. It’s the excitement of engaging and building the best show possible that’s served as Penn and Teller’s ultimate motivation and ultimate bond, even if they have had their fair share of creative squabbles over the years, and sometimes the arguments go on for months.
Initially introduced by Weir Chrisemer, who performed with them in the 1970s, Penn and Teller officially solidified their two-man act by the beginning of the 1980s. As they crafted their act through alternative locations Off Broadway, the duo broke through to the mainstream in 1985 on “Saturday Night Live,” where they performed their trick in which an audience member had to guess the correct card to spare Teller from certain death. Additional appearances on “Late Night With David Letterman” boosted their profile, and they won an Emmy for their 1985 special “Penn & Teller Go Public.”
By that point, Penn and Teller weren’t just content with their place in culture but also in their career.
“The dividing line is, ‘Can you earn your living doing what you passionately love?’ ” Teller says. “If the answer to that is yes, you’ve won the game. So the game was over for me in 1975 when I started street performing in Philadelphia with Penn and came home with enough money to pay the rent, buy food, and buy clothing.”
Today, when most of their peers have retired or died, Penn and Teller continue to keep themselves in front of audiences. Through their collective creative restlessness, they refuse to rest on their laurels. When they could have easily sat back and phoned in greatest-hits tours in places like Egypt, India and China, they instead have pushed themselves to make sure their show was better and to entertain as many people as possible. And that includes dusting off some of their hits from time to time.
“We have the luxury of saying we haven’t done that bit in the long run, right?” Teller says. “Why don’t we revive that and then take a fresh look at it? And we do.”
In the early 2000s, when the two appealed to an older crowd with their Showtime program “Penn & Teller: Bulls—!” That show was centered on the duo’s libertarianism (which softened considerably during the pandemic) and called out what the title of the show implied.
But for the past 13 years, the duo’s CW program “Penn & Teller: Fool Us,” in which other magicians attempt to fool Penn and Teller, has introduced them to a younger audience and inspired them to think of new tricks. Penn and Teller also implored the show’s producers to feature magicians from underrepresented groups, hoping to disrupt the decades-long reality of magic being dominated by white males.
“Magicians in the 20th century were a misogynistic, painful group,” Jillette says. All you need to know is the Magic Circle in London did not let women in until the ‘90s.”
“There are people of color, there are women, there are trans people who do magic, and that’s really nice,” Teller says. “We’ve also seen very old people and really young people. There are 7-year-old card magicians who do stuff that I can’t begin to imagine being able to do.”
The origins of “Fool Us” came from a pure place, they say. Repulsed by other talent shows where gatekeepers insulted contestants, the duo came up with a concept where the only objective was to fool them with a single performance. And it worked. “Some of the best magicians haven’t fooled us,” Jillette says. “Some that are not to my taste have. Everybody [the contestants] is treated with respect.”
“We have the luxury of saying we haven’t done that bit in the long run, right?” Teller says. “Why don’t we revive that and then take a fresh look at it? And we do.”
(Joan Marcus)
Having been on “The Apprentice,” Jillette knows a thing or two about deception outside of performing magic — specifically the charade of a competition television show. Calling it “a joke,” Jillette doesn’t mince words when it comes to the current president. Ripping him for being “the only person to fail to run a casino,” Jillette isn’t afraid to lift the curtain of that show, on which Teller made cameos as well.
“Him acting successful was a goof,” he says. “He had no boardroom; they built a set for him. He had no assistant. He wasn’t doing anything and was ripping people off, and not even that very successfully. When you have no morality and you’re not successful, it’s remarkable that with a lack of shame and a lack of morality, he became president of the United States, which goes against my entire worldview.”
Unlike some career-minded magicians, Jillette insists that he and Teller had no ambitions beyond entertaining audiences. He is adamant that he’d be as content performing on street corners as he would at the duo’s residency at the Rio in Las Vegas in a theater that bears their name. Jillette says success to them is that they’re still performing and still working.
“We have never had goals and we’ve never had market plans,” he says. “We just get ideas and do them.”
“I don’t understand why people get into this to get out of it,” Jillette says. “Johnny Carson retired when he was at the peak of his game, and Frank Sinatra kept going until he declined. Let’s put it this way: I want to be Sinatra. I still want to go on stage when I suck.”
(Francis George)
That said, only two of the bits they perform are over five years old. The two are constantly writing and developing new bits, trying to keep the show as fresh and relevant as it was when they exploded into the pop culture lexicon.
“T.S. Eliot said old men should be explorers,” Jillette says. “We do the new stuff because we want to do the new stuff. I like the stuff we’ve done, and I don’t change stuff to keep myself amused. I change stuff because there’s stuff I want to say.”
Following their show at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, Penn and Teller went immediately to their next show, which was at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall. There it was, the journey of 50 years captured in back-to-back shows.
“I don’t understand why people get into this to get out of it,” Jillette says. “Johnny Carson retired when he was at the peak of his game, and Frank Sinatra kept going until he declined. Let’s put it this way: I want to be Sinatra. I still want to go on stage when I suck.”
Teller agrees but sees his demise a bit … differently.
“I’m expecting my demise will be something like this,” he says. There’s a box in the middle of the stage. Penn comes out and says, ‘Good evening. My name is Penn Jillette, and this is my partner, Teller. He opens the box, looks, and he says, ‘Oh, he’s dead. The show is over.’ ”
What’s more magical than that?
To mark their 50th anniversary, Penn Jillette and Teller returned to the scene of their first show. Having initially joined forces in 1975, the duo celebrated their golden anniversary, nearly to the day, at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival on the outskirts of Minneapolis last month. The Las Vegas-based comedians were greeted by a throng — nearly three times the size as the 1975 crowd and mostly older — who had waited for eight hours on a hot and humid Midwestern day to attend the performance.
“The pants I wore 50 years ago somehow still fit me,” Jillette tells The Times over Zoom from his home in Las Vegas.
Back then, Jillette entertained audiences by juggling knives (“I was a very, very good juggler and very much into comedy and writing”). This time around, not having used them in years, he dusted off his old trunk, props and tricks (specifically Teller swallowing a bunch of needles and thread and bringing the needles up threaded) from 50 years ago with no problems.
“It was strange to play that same thing,” says Teller (born Raymond Joseph Derickson Teller) in a separate Zoom interview later that afternoon. But, he says, it’s a trick that’s so tried and true that if the sound system goes out or there are additional production issues, it still works.
As much fun as it was to bring it all back home and pull out old favorites, Penn and Teller hate nostalgia.
“Teller and I have been called by friends the least sentimental people who have ever lived,” Jillette says. “I take Bob Dylan’s [1967 documentary] ‘Don’t Look Back’ to heart. But all that being said, performing there was pretty sweet.”
“I think it means more to people outside of us than it does to ourselves,” Teller says. “It’s all just another gig.”
Back in the day, Penn, now 70, and Teller, 77, had intended to reimagine magic by bringing a comedic element into it. Before their careers in magic, Jillette was a juggler and Teller a Latin teacher, which allowed them the freedom to bring their diverse interests into their show. They weren’t bound by the unwritten rules and restrictions that constrained magicians. They had a different type of showmanship that blended magic with comedy and rock ‘n’ roll flair. Yet, at the same time, Penn and Teller performed with earnestness and never judged their audiences. The approach opened them, and in turn, magic, to a broader group of people.
“The idea was, could you do magic without insulting people?” Jillette says. “And, more so, could you do so with respect and without lying to your audience. And it’s all playful. It’s just a gentle exploration of a silly kind of truth.”
To him, most magicians aren’t like that. Instead, Jillette says, they treat audiences as if they lack intelligence and want to “have something over on them,” and that is something he finds “appalling.” Instead, Penn and Teller always saw the relationship between them and their audience as symbiotic. “Magic actually is the playful study of epistemology,” Jillette says. “That’s what stage magic is supposed to be. It’s respect, consent and truth.”
It’s why the duo continues to endure.
The boisterous Penn, left, and reticent Teller are a throwback to an era when the team was greater than the individual performer.
(Joan Marcus)
“I’ve had a guy come up to me and say, ‘My parents took me to see you when I was 7 years old. And this is my 7-year-old son,’ ” Teller says. “It’s something that really moved me. I feel like I’m a member of their family.”
At the same time, if history has taught audiences anything, they’ve learned they have to be careful about putting faith in these illusionists. In a sense, Penn and Teller are a throwback to an era when the team was greater than the individual performer.
What’s made Penn and Teller work together is the yin-and-yang of their public personas. Jillette carries himself with the brashness of Rowdy Roddy Piper yet is keen on presenting himself with an element of mystery, much like Dylan (on our Zoom call, a poster of Dylan’s 1978 film “Renaldo and Clara” is in clear focus behind him). Even so, whether it’s discussing the merits of Dylan’s catalog, recalling encounters with Lou Reed as the president of his fan club (“He said I had to stop that because we became very close friends”), Jillette is boisterous and outgoing. Meanwhile, the reticent Teller serves as the perfect foil.
Collectively, what’s allowed them to flourish is putting their show ahead of anything else. Despite maintaining somewhat of an illusion that they’re not friends offstage, there’s a mutual admiration between the two. During the separate conversations, there are moments when they reveal that they are pals in the context of describing their laser focus on putting together the best show possible. A magician doesn’t reveal their tricks or let emotions be shown easily, but after working together for so long, the two speak of each other fondly, more like brothers than business associates (“After I had quadruple bypass surgery, Penn visited me every day and came to me with ideas,” Teller says. “Nothing was going to heal me faster than working on a magic idea, so I guess you can say we’re secretly friends”).
Making sure the show is the best it can be, matters more to them than individual accolades.
“There are long bits during the show, during which I’m really just helping Penn as an assistant, and that’s fine,” Teller says. “And there are long moments in the show where he’s, like, playing music for something that I’m doing. The only thing that matters is the value to the show.”
For most of the history of the medium, magicians have entertained audiences through a variety of means, most notably tricks, effects, sleights of hand or illusions of seemingly impossible feats. It’s the excitement of engaging and building the best show possible that’s served as Penn and Teller’s ultimate motivation and ultimate bond, even if they have had their fair share of creative squabbles over the years, and sometimes the arguments go on for months.
Initially introduced by Weir Chrisemer, who performed with them in the 1970s, Penn and Teller officially solidified their two-man act by the beginning of the 1980s. As they crafted their act through alternative locations Off Broadway, the duo broke through to the mainstream in 1985 on “Saturday Night Live,” where they performed their trick in which an audience member had to guess the correct card to spare Teller from certain death. Additional appearances on “Late Night With David Letterman” boosted their profile, and they won an Emmy for their 1985 special “Penn & Teller Go Public.”
By that point, Penn and Teller weren’t just content with their place in culture but also in their career.
“The dividing line is, ‘Can you earn your living doing what you passionately love?’ ” Teller says. “If the answer to that is yes, you’ve won the game. So the game was over for me in 1975 when I started street performing in Philadelphia with Penn and came home with enough money to pay the rent, buy food, and buy clothing.”
Today, when most of their peers have retired or died, Penn and Teller continue to keep themselves in front of audiences. Through their collective creative restlessness, they refuse to rest on their laurels. When they could have easily sat back and phoned in greatest-hits tours in places like Egypt, India and China, they instead have pushed themselves to make sure their show was better and to entertain as many people as possible. And that includes dusting off some of their hits from time to time.
“We have the luxury of saying we haven’t done that bit in the long run, right?” Teller says. “Why don’t we revive that and then take a fresh look at it? And we do.”
In the early 2000s, when the two appealed to an older crowd with their Showtime program “Penn & Teller: Bulls—!” That show was centered on the duo’s libertarianism (which softened considerably during the pandemic) and called out what the title of the show implied.
But for the past 13 years, the duo’s CW program “Penn & Teller: Fool Us,” in which other magicians attempt to fool Penn and Teller, has introduced them to a younger audience and inspired them to think of new tricks. Penn and Teller also implored the show’s producers to feature magicians from underrepresented groups, hoping to disrupt the decades-long reality of magic being dominated by white males.
“Magicians in the 20th century were a misogynistic, painful group,” Jillette says. All you need to know is the Magic Circle in London did not let women in until the ‘90s.”
“There are people of color, there are women, there are trans people who do magic, and that’s really nice,” Teller says. “We’ve also seen very old people and really young people. There are 7-year-old card magicians who do stuff that I can’t begin to imagine being able to do.”
The origins of “Fool Us” came from a pure place, they say. Repulsed by other talent shows where gatekeepers insulted contestants, the duo came up with a concept where the only objective was to fool them with a single performance. And it worked. “Some of the best magicians haven’t fooled us,” Jillette says. “Some that are not to my taste have. Everybody [the contestants] is treated with respect.”
“We have the luxury of saying we haven’t done that bit in the long run, right?” Teller says. “Why don’t we revive that and then take a fresh look at it? And we do.”
(Joan Marcus)
Having been on “The Apprentice,” Jillette knows a thing or two about deception outside of performing magic — specifically the charade of a competition television show. Calling it “a joke,” Jillette doesn’t mince words when it comes to the current president. Ripping him for being “the only person to fail to run a casino,” Jillette isn’t afraid to lift the curtain of that show, on which Teller made cameos as well.
“Him acting successful was a goof,” he says. “He had no boardroom; they built a set for him. He had no assistant. He wasn’t doing anything and was ripping people off, and not even that very successfully. When you have no morality and you’re not successful, it’s remarkable that with a lack of shame and a lack of morality, he became president of the United States, which goes against my entire worldview.”
Unlike some career-minded magicians, Jillette insists that he and Teller had no ambitions beyond entertaining audiences. He is adamant that he’d be as content performing on street corners as he would at the duo’s residency at the Rio in Las Vegas in a theater that bears their name. Jillette says success to them is that they’re still performing and still working.
“We have never had goals and we’ve never had market plans,” he says. “We just get ideas and do them.”
“I don’t understand why people get into this to get out of it,” Jillette says. “Johnny Carson retired when he was at the peak of his game, and Frank Sinatra kept going until he declined. Let’s put it this way: I want to be Sinatra. I still want to go on stage when I suck.”
(Francis George)
That said, only two of the bits they perform are over five years old. The two are constantly writing and developing new bits, trying to keep the show as fresh and relevant as it was when they exploded into the pop culture lexicon.
“T.S. Eliot said old men should be explorers,” Jillette says. “We do the new stuff because we want to do the new stuff. I like the stuff we’ve done, and I don’t change stuff to keep myself amused. I change stuff because there’s stuff I want to say.”
Following their show at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, Penn and Teller went immediately to their next show, which was at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall. There it was, the journey of 50 years captured in back-to-back shows.
“I don’t understand why people get into this to get out of it,” Jillette says. “Johnny Carson retired when he was at the peak of his game, and Frank Sinatra kept going until he declined. Let’s put it this way: I want to be Sinatra. I still want to go on stage when I suck.”
Teller agrees but sees his demise a bit … differently.
“I’m expecting my demise will be something like this,” he says. There’s a box in the middle of the stage. Penn comes out and says, ‘Good evening. My name is Penn Jillette, and this is my partner, Teller. He opens the box, looks, and he says, ‘Oh, he’s dead. The show is over.’ ”
What’s more magical than that?
To mark their 50th anniversary, Penn Jillette and Teller returned to the scene of their first show. Having initially joined forces in 1975, the duo celebrated their golden anniversary, nearly to the day, at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival on the outskirts of Minneapolis last month. The Las Vegas-based comedians were greeted by a throng — nearly three times the size as the 1975 crowd and mostly older — who had waited for eight hours on a hot and humid Midwestern day to attend the performance.
“The pants I wore 50 years ago somehow still fit me,” Jillette tells The Times over Zoom from his home in Las Vegas.
Back then, Jillette entertained audiences by juggling knives (“I was a very, very good juggler and very much into comedy and writing”). This time around, not having used them in years, he dusted off his old trunk, props and tricks (specifically Teller swallowing a bunch of needles and thread and bringing the needles up threaded) from 50 years ago with no problems.
“It was strange to play that same thing,” says Teller (born Raymond Joseph Derickson Teller) in a separate Zoom interview later that afternoon. But, he says, it’s a trick that’s so tried and true that if the sound system goes out or there are additional production issues, it still works.
As much fun as it was to bring it all back home and pull out old favorites, Penn and Teller hate nostalgia.
“Teller and I have been called by friends the least sentimental people who have ever lived,” Jillette says. “I take Bob Dylan’s [1967 documentary] ‘Don’t Look Back’ to heart. But all that being said, performing there was pretty sweet.”
“I think it means more to people outside of us than it does to ourselves,” Teller says. “It’s all just another gig.”
Back in the day, Penn, now 70, and Teller, 77, had intended to reimagine magic by bringing a comedic element into it. Before their careers in magic, Jillette was a juggler and Teller a Latin teacher, which allowed them the freedom to bring their diverse interests into their show. They weren’t bound by the unwritten rules and restrictions that constrained magicians. They had a different type of showmanship that blended magic with comedy and rock ‘n’ roll flair. Yet, at the same time, Penn and Teller performed with earnestness and never judged their audiences. The approach opened them, and in turn, magic, to a broader group of people.
“The idea was, could you do magic without insulting people?” Jillette says. “And, more so, could you do so with respect and without lying to your audience. And it’s all playful. It’s just a gentle exploration of a silly kind of truth.”
To him, most magicians aren’t like that. Instead, Jillette says, they treat audiences as if they lack intelligence and want to “have something over on them,” and that is something he finds “appalling.” Instead, Penn and Teller always saw the relationship between them and their audience as symbiotic. “Magic actually is the playful study of epistemology,” Jillette says. “That’s what stage magic is supposed to be. It’s respect, consent and truth.”
It’s why the duo continues to endure.
The boisterous Penn, left, and reticent Teller are a throwback to an era when the team was greater than the individual performer.
(Joan Marcus)
“I’ve had a guy come up to me and say, ‘My parents took me to see you when I was 7 years old. And this is my 7-year-old son,’ ” Teller says. “It’s something that really moved me. I feel like I’m a member of their family.”
At the same time, if history has taught audiences anything, they’ve learned they have to be careful about putting faith in these illusionists. In a sense, Penn and Teller are a throwback to an era when the team was greater than the individual performer.
What’s made Penn and Teller work together is the yin-and-yang of their public personas. Jillette carries himself with the brashness of Rowdy Roddy Piper yet is keen on presenting himself with an element of mystery, much like Dylan (on our Zoom call, a poster of Dylan’s 1978 film “Renaldo and Clara” is in clear focus behind him). Even so, whether it’s discussing the merits of Dylan’s catalog, recalling encounters with Lou Reed as the president of his fan club (“He said I had to stop that because we became very close friends”), Jillette is boisterous and outgoing. Meanwhile, the reticent Teller serves as the perfect foil.
Collectively, what’s allowed them to flourish is putting their show ahead of anything else. Despite maintaining somewhat of an illusion that they’re not friends offstage, there’s a mutual admiration between the two. During the separate conversations, there are moments when they reveal that they are pals in the context of describing their laser focus on putting together the best show possible. A magician doesn’t reveal their tricks or let emotions be shown easily, but after working together for so long, the two speak of each other fondly, more like brothers than business associates (“After I had quadruple bypass surgery, Penn visited me every day and came to me with ideas,” Teller says. “Nothing was going to heal me faster than working on a magic idea, so I guess you can say we’re secretly friends”).
Making sure the show is the best it can be, matters more to them than individual accolades.
“There are long bits during the show, during which I’m really just helping Penn as an assistant, and that’s fine,” Teller says. “And there are long moments in the show where he’s, like, playing music for something that I’m doing. The only thing that matters is the value to the show.”
For most of the history of the medium, magicians have entertained audiences through a variety of means, most notably tricks, effects, sleights of hand or illusions of seemingly impossible feats. It’s the excitement of engaging and building the best show possible that’s served as Penn and Teller’s ultimate motivation and ultimate bond, even if they have had their fair share of creative squabbles over the years, and sometimes the arguments go on for months.
Initially introduced by Weir Chrisemer, who performed with them in the 1970s, Penn and Teller officially solidified their two-man act by the beginning of the 1980s. As they crafted their act through alternative locations Off Broadway, the duo broke through to the mainstream in 1985 on “Saturday Night Live,” where they performed their trick in which an audience member had to guess the correct card to spare Teller from certain death. Additional appearances on “Late Night With David Letterman” boosted their profile, and they won an Emmy for their 1985 special “Penn & Teller Go Public.”
By that point, Penn and Teller weren’t just content with their place in culture but also in their career.
“The dividing line is, ‘Can you earn your living doing what you passionately love?’ ” Teller says. “If the answer to that is yes, you’ve won the game. So the game was over for me in 1975 when I started street performing in Philadelphia with Penn and came home with enough money to pay the rent, buy food, and buy clothing.”
Today, when most of their peers have retired or died, Penn and Teller continue to keep themselves in front of audiences. Through their collective creative restlessness, they refuse to rest on their laurels. When they could have easily sat back and phoned in greatest-hits tours in places like Egypt, India and China, they instead have pushed themselves to make sure their show was better and to entertain as many people as possible. And that includes dusting off some of their hits from time to time.
“We have the luxury of saying we haven’t done that bit in the long run, right?” Teller says. “Why don’t we revive that and then take a fresh look at it? And we do.”
In the early 2000s, when the two appealed to an older crowd with their Showtime program “Penn & Teller: Bulls—!” That show was centered on the duo’s libertarianism (which softened considerably during the pandemic) and called out what the title of the show implied.
But for the past 13 years, the duo’s CW program “Penn & Teller: Fool Us,” in which other magicians attempt to fool Penn and Teller, has introduced them to a younger audience and inspired them to think of new tricks. Penn and Teller also implored the show’s producers to feature magicians from underrepresented groups, hoping to disrupt the decades-long reality of magic being dominated by white males.
“Magicians in the 20th century were a misogynistic, painful group,” Jillette says. All you need to know is the Magic Circle in London did not let women in until the ‘90s.”
“There are people of color, there are women, there are trans people who do magic, and that’s really nice,” Teller says. “We’ve also seen very old people and really young people. There are 7-year-old card magicians who do stuff that I can’t begin to imagine being able to do.”
The origins of “Fool Us” came from a pure place, they say. Repulsed by other talent shows where gatekeepers insulted contestants, the duo came up with a concept where the only objective was to fool them with a single performance. And it worked. “Some of the best magicians haven’t fooled us,” Jillette says. “Some that are not to my taste have. Everybody [the contestants] is treated with respect.”
“We have the luxury of saying we haven’t done that bit in the long run, right?” Teller says. “Why don’t we revive that and then take a fresh look at it? And we do.”
(Joan Marcus)
Having been on “The Apprentice,” Jillette knows a thing or two about deception outside of performing magic — specifically the charade of a competition television show. Calling it “a joke,” Jillette doesn’t mince words when it comes to the current president. Ripping him for being “the only person to fail to run a casino,” Jillette isn’t afraid to lift the curtain of that show, on which Teller made cameos as well.
“Him acting successful was a goof,” he says. “He had no boardroom; they built a set for him. He had no assistant. He wasn’t doing anything and was ripping people off, and not even that very successfully. When you have no morality and you’re not successful, it’s remarkable that with a lack of shame and a lack of morality, he became president of the United States, which goes against my entire worldview.”
Unlike some career-minded magicians, Jillette insists that he and Teller had no ambitions beyond entertaining audiences. He is adamant that he’d be as content performing on street corners as he would at the duo’s residency at the Rio in Las Vegas in a theater that bears their name. Jillette says success to them is that they’re still performing and still working.
“We have never had goals and we’ve never had market plans,” he says. “We just get ideas and do them.”
“I don’t understand why people get into this to get out of it,” Jillette says. “Johnny Carson retired when he was at the peak of his game, and Frank Sinatra kept going until he declined. Let’s put it this way: I want to be Sinatra. I still want to go on stage when I suck.”
(Francis George)
That said, only two of the bits they perform are over five years old. The two are constantly writing and developing new bits, trying to keep the show as fresh and relevant as it was when they exploded into the pop culture lexicon.
“T.S. Eliot said old men should be explorers,” Jillette says. “We do the new stuff because we want to do the new stuff. I like the stuff we’ve done, and I don’t change stuff to keep myself amused. I change stuff because there’s stuff I want to say.”
Following their show at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, Penn and Teller went immediately to their next show, which was at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall. There it was, the journey of 50 years captured in back-to-back shows.
“I don’t understand why people get into this to get out of it,” Jillette says. “Johnny Carson retired when he was at the peak of his game, and Frank Sinatra kept going until he declined. Let’s put it this way: I want to be Sinatra. I still want to go on stage when I suck.”
Teller agrees but sees his demise a bit … differently.
“I’m expecting my demise will be something like this,” he says. There’s a box in the middle of the stage. Penn comes out and says, ‘Good evening. My name is Penn Jillette, and this is my partner, Teller. He opens the box, looks, and he says, ‘Oh, he’s dead. The show is over.’ ”
What’s more magical than that?
To mark their 50th anniversary, Penn Jillette and Teller returned to the scene of their first show. Having initially joined forces in 1975, the duo celebrated their golden anniversary, nearly to the day, at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival on the outskirts of Minneapolis last month. The Las Vegas-based comedians were greeted by a throng — nearly three times the size as the 1975 crowd and mostly older — who had waited for eight hours on a hot and humid Midwestern day to attend the performance.
“The pants I wore 50 years ago somehow still fit me,” Jillette tells The Times over Zoom from his home in Las Vegas.
Back then, Jillette entertained audiences by juggling knives (“I was a very, very good juggler and very much into comedy and writing”). This time around, not having used them in years, he dusted off his old trunk, props and tricks (specifically Teller swallowing a bunch of needles and thread and bringing the needles up threaded) from 50 years ago with no problems.
“It was strange to play that same thing,” says Teller (born Raymond Joseph Derickson Teller) in a separate Zoom interview later that afternoon. But, he says, it’s a trick that’s so tried and true that if the sound system goes out or there are additional production issues, it still works.
As much fun as it was to bring it all back home and pull out old favorites, Penn and Teller hate nostalgia.
“Teller and I have been called by friends the least sentimental people who have ever lived,” Jillette says. “I take Bob Dylan’s [1967 documentary] ‘Don’t Look Back’ to heart. But all that being said, performing there was pretty sweet.”
“I think it means more to people outside of us than it does to ourselves,” Teller says. “It’s all just another gig.”
Back in the day, Penn, now 70, and Teller, 77, had intended to reimagine magic by bringing a comedic element into it. Before their careers in magic, Jillette was a juggler and Teller a Latin teacher, which allowed them the freedom to bring their diverse interests into their show. They weren’t bound by the unwritten rules and restrictions that constrained magicians. They had a different type of showmanship that blended magic with comedy and rock ‘n’ roll flair. Yet, at the same time, Penn and Teller performed with earnestness and never judged their audiences. The approach opened them, and in turn, magic, to a broader group of people.
“The idea was, could you do magic without insulting people?” Jillette says. “And, more so, could you do so with respect and without lying to your audience. And it’s all playful. It’s just a gentle exploration of a silly kind of truth.”
To him, most magicians aren’t like that. Instead, Jillette says, they treat audiences as if they lack intelligence and want to “have something over on them,” and that is something he finds “appalling.” Instead, Penn and Teller always saw the relationship between them and their audience as symbiotic. “Magic actually is the playful study of epistemology,” Jillette says. “That’s what stage magic is supposed to be. It’s respect, consent and truth.”
It’s why the duo continues to endure.
The boisterous Penn, left, and reticent Teller are a throwback to an era when the team was greater than the individual performer.
(Joan Marcus)
“I’ve had a guy come up to me and say, ‘My parents took me to see you when I was 7 years old. And this is my 7-year-old son,’ ” Teller says. “It’s something that really moved me. I feel like I’m a member of their family.”
At the same time, if history has taught audiences anything, they’ve learned they have to be careful about putting faith in these illusionists. In a sense, Penn and Teller are a throwback to an era when the team was greater than the individual performer.
What’s made Penn and Teller work together is the yin-and-yang of their public personas. Jillette carries himself with the brashness of Rowdy Roddy Piper yet is keen on presenting himself with an element of mystery, much like Dylan (on our Zoom call, a poster of Dylan’s 1978 film “Renaldo and Clara” is in clear focus behind him). Even so, whether it’s discussing the merits of Dylan’s catalog, recalling encounters with Lou Reed as the president of his fan club (“He said I had to stop that because we became very close friends”), Jillette is boisterous and outgoing. Meanwhile, the reticent Teller serves as the perfect foil.
Collectively, what’s allowed them to flourish is putting their show ahead of anything else. Despite maintaining somewhat of an illusion that they’re not friends offstage, there’s a mutual admiration between the two. During the separate conversations, there are moments when they reveal that they are pals in the context of describing their laser focus on putting together the best show possible. A magician doesn’t reveal their tricks or let emotions be shown easily, but after working together for so long, the two speak of each other fondly, more like brothers than business associates (“After I had quadruple bypass surgery, Penn visited me every day and came to me with ideas,” Teller says. “Nothing was going to heal me faster than working on a magic idea, so I guess you can say we’re secretly friends”).
Making sure the show is the best it can be, matters more to them than individual accolades.
“There are long bits during the show, during which I’m really just helping Penn as an assistant, and that’s fine,” Teller says. “And there are long moments in the show where he’s, like, playing music for something that I’m doing. The only thing that matters is the value to the show.”
For most of the history of the medium, magicians have entertained audiences through a variety of means, most notably tricks, effects, sleights of hand or illusions of seemingly impossible feats. It’s the excitement of engaging and building the best show possible that’s served as Penn and Teller’s ultimate motivation and ultimate bond, even if they have had their fair share of creative squabbles over the years, and sometimes the arguments go on for months.
Initially introduced by Weir Chrisemer, who performed with them in the 1970s, Penn and Teller officially solidified their two-man act by the beginning of the 1980s. As they crafted their act through alternative locations Off Broadway, the duo broke through to the mainstream in 1985 on “Saturday Night Live,” where they performed their trick in which an audience member had to guess the correct card to spare Teller from certain death. Additional appearances on “Late Night With David Letterman” boosted their profile, and they won an Emmy for their 1985 special “Penn & Teller Go Public.”
By that point, Penn and Teller weren’t just content with their place in culture but also in their career.
“The dividing line is, ‘Can you earn your living doing what you passionately love?’ ” Teller says. “If the answer to that is yes, you’ve won the game. So the game was over for me in 1975 when I started street performing in Philadelphia with Penn and came home with enough money to pay the rent, buy food, and buy clothing.”
Today, when most of their peers have retired or died, Penn and Teller continue to keep themselves in front of audiences. Through their collective creative restlessness, they refuse to rest on their laurels. When they could have easily sat back and phoned in greatest-hits tours in places like Egypt, India and China, they instead have pushed themselves to make sure their show was better and to entertain as many people as possible. And that includes dusting off some of their hits from time to time.
“We have the luxury of saying we haven’t done that bit in the long run, right?” Teller says. “Why don’t we revive that and then take a fresh look at it? And we do.”
In the early 2000s, when the two appealed to an older crowd with their Showtime program “Penn & Teller: Bulls—!” That show was centered on the duo’s libertarianism (which softened considerably during the pandemic) and called out what the title of the show implied.
But for the past 13 years, the duo’s CW program “Penn & Teller: Fool Us,” in which other magicians attempt to fool Penn and Teller, has introduced them to a younger audience and inspired them to think of new tricks. Penn and Teller also implored the show’s producers to feature magicians from underrepresented groups, hoping to disrupt the decades-long reality of magic being dominated by white males.
“Magicians in the 20th century were a misogynistic, painful group,” Jillette says. All you need to know is the Magic Circle in London did not let women in until the ‘90s.”
“There are people of color, there are women, there are trans people who do magic, and that’s really nice,” Teller says. “We’ve also seen very old people and really young people. There are 7-year-old card magicians who do stuff that I can’t begin to imagine being able to do.”
The origins of “Fool Us” came from a pure place, they say. Repulsed by other talent shows where gatekeepers insulted contestants, the duo came up with a concept where the only objective was to fool them with a single performance. And it worked. “Some of the best magicians haven’t fooled us,” Jillette says. “Some that are not to my taste have. Everybody [the contestants] is treated with respect.”
“We have the luxury of saying we haven’t done that bit in the long run, right?” Teller says. “Why don’t we revive that and then take a fresh look at it? And we do.”
(Joan Marcus)
Having been on “The Apprentice,” Jillette knows a thing or two about deception outside of performing magic — specifically the charade of a competition television show. Calling it “a joke,” Jillette doesn’t mince words when it comes to the current president. Ripping him for being “the only person to fail to run a casino,” Jillette isn’t afraid to lift the curtain of that show, on which Teller made cameos as well.
“Him acting successful was a goof,” he says. “He had no boardroom; they built a set for him. He had no assistant. He wasn’t doing anything and was ripping people off, and not even that very successfully. When you have no morality and you’re not successful, it’s remarkable that with a lack of shame and a lack of morality, he became president of the United States, which goes against my entire worldview.”
Unlike some career-minded magicians, Jillette insists that he and Teller had no ambitions beyond entertaining audiences. He is adamant that he’d be as content performing on street corners as he would at the duo’s residency at the Rio in Las Vegas in a theater that bears their name. Jillette says success to them is that they’re still performing and still working.
“We have never had goals and we’ve never had market plans,” he says. “We just get ideas and do them.”
“I don’t understand why people get into this to get out of it,” Jillette says. “Johnny Carson retired when he was at the peak of his game, and Frank Sinatra kept going until he declined. Let’s put it this way: I want to be Sinatra. I still want to go on stage when I suck.”
(Francis George)
That said, only two of the bits they perform are over five years old. The two are constantly writing and developing new bits, trying to keep the show as fresh and relevant as it was when they exploded into the pop culture lexicon.
“T.S. Eliot said old men should be explorers,” Jillette says. “We do the new stuff because we want to do the new stuff. I like the stuff we’ve done, and I don’t change stuff to keep myself amused. I change stuff because there’s stuff I want to say.”
Following their show at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, Penn and Teller went immediately to their next show, which was at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall. There it was, the journey of 50 years captured in back-to-back shows.
“I don’t understand why people get into this to get out of it,” Jillette says. “Johnny Carson retired when he was at the peak of his game, and Frank Sinatra kept going until he declined. Let’s put it this way: I want to be Sinatra. I still want to go on stage when I suck.”
Teller agrees but sees his demise a bit … differently.
“I’m expecting my demise will be something like this,” he says. There’s a box in the middle of the stage. Penn comes out and says, ‘Good evening. My name is Penn Jillette, and this is my partner, Teller. He opens the box, looks, and he says, ‘Oh, he’s dead. The show is over.’ ”
What’s more magical than that?
