Penn Jillette Shares the 'Psychotically Fair' Rules for His Magic Show
Penn & Teller
Penn Jillette, the magician, author and actor, 68, once again will helm Penn & Teller: Fool Us (Oct. 27 on The CW)—now in its 10th season—along with his partner, Raymond Teller. The series invites magicians to perform their best trick to try to mislead the two experts. Those who succeed win the right to perform with the duo in their celebrated show at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, which has just been extended for three additional years.
Parade sat down with Jillette to discuss Fool Us, their Vegas residency and, of course, magic.
Walter Scott: Penn & Teller is the longest-running headline act in Las Vegas. To what do you attribute your longevity?
Penn Jillette: I don’t have any idea. Teller and I are very rare in show business in that we are more successful than we planned to be, wanted to be, deserved to be. That’s very strange. We were happily buckled in to play 100-, 200-hundred seat theaters and do fairs, carnivals and so on. That was our goal and we achieved it. But we took this whimsical try off-Broadway, and then to Broadway. So, we ended up being about an order of magnitude more successful than we aimed at.
You’ve said that it’s important for you to do a magic show that’s honest and has respect for the audience. Has that contributed to your success?
That becomes an intellectual, emotional and—I’m using this word with a little bit of hyperbole—moral challenge. Magic shows were always—and I’m going to quote Jerry Seinfeld here, even though he told me I could take credit for the quote myself—“Here’s a quarter and now it’s gone. You’re an idiot and now it’s back. You’re a fool. Show’s over.”
Teller loved magic by the time he was five. I hated magic. When I was in junior high and high school, I was a deep magic hater. It got in the way of me seeing The Who on The Ed Sullivan Show. And they were always insulting, condescending, tacky and cheesy. I loathed it.
I met Teller, and Teller said this incredible thing, that magic could be an intellectual art form and magic could be respectful. We set out as though we were doing a thesis to see if you could do a magic show that showed no disrespect for the audience.
Keith Richards never comes out on stage and says, “I can play guitar and you can’t, ha, ha, ha.” The person who came the closest to that was Eddie Van Halen and he always did that with a wink and a smile. Magicians come out all the time and say, “I can do this, ha, ha, ha.”
This has changed completely in the past 20 years. Up until 20 years ago, magicians were all white males and predominately sexual and social outsiders and outcasts in high school. So that chip on their shoulder stopped the art from being like every other art form is, magnanimous. That’s all we wanted to see in magic. That’s it.
In addition to Fool Us, America’s Got Talent is a TV show that has featured a lot of magicians who end up in Las Vegas.
What America’s Got Talent does—and I’m not showing any disrespect for them, they say this out loud—[is] they watch Fool Us, call the people on and say, “Do the exact same thing you did on Fool Us.” Piff the Magic Dragon started out on Fool Us and got a place in Vegas. But that’s not really anything to do with America’s Got Talent. You want to credit Siegfried & Roy and a few other magicians.
Related: 'AGT' Loser Piff the Magic Dragon Reveals Why He Got Fired Repeatedly in His Early Career
Vegas has been the epicenter of magic easily for 45 to 50 years. When you have someone who is a successful enough magician to win on America’s Got Talent, even take America’s Got Talent out of the equation, they’re going to end up in Vegas. The fact that they have their own theaters and do their own full evening shows, that is 100 percent Siegfried & Roy. Who, we did not share taste, we disagreed on everything, but boy I loved them, boy I respected them and boy, we were good friends.
Penn and Teller: Fool Us is back for the 10th season. What can we expect this time around?
It seems impossible because we’re wicked old. This season I think is the best season we’ve done, and we have a surprise I contractually cannot talk about. Moxie, my offspring [18-year-old daughter], is on the show this year. Also, the pandemic made the producers broaden their scope and we’ve brought in some incredible magicians from China and India.
There’s also this thing, I guess it took 10 years, but magicians, the really good ones, have started to trust the two of us that we have a love and respect for them and will never be unkind. That has brought people who have avoided the show for 10 years thinking that it might be an unpleasant experience to actually come on.
We never know who is going to be on. That wouldn’t be fair. When host Brooke Burke did some of the introductions and said the names, our jaws dropped. It’s like America’s Got Talent is doing their show and Hendrix, the Beatles and Bob Dylan walk out to do a group song together. You just kind of go, “No, we never expected that.”
Related: Meet One Of The Few Illusionists Who Managed To Stump Penn and Teller
You don’t know who the acts are until they appear?
We can’t because otherwise we would have some leg up; it would be unfair. If there’s nothing else, our show is almost psychotically fair. I have people that whenever they come to Vegas, they stay at my house, and they’ve showed up on Fool Us without me knowing. I’ve had friends I was talking to at their house in the morning and they came into Vegas, and they came onto our show in the afternoon because they were lying to me. We are kept sequestered; we have no idea.
How often do you get fooled by the magicians and do women fool you more than men?
It’s between 26 to 27 percent. That’s slightly by design because the producers like it if one a show more or less fooled us. They look around and pace it in that way.
The gender thing is really interesting. There were no people that didn’t look like me in magic in the ‘90s. When we started Fool Us, we said to the producers, we want to be inundated by people who don’t identify as male and by people of color. And if we don’t see them every show, we’ll get different producers.
We’ve been completely successful, but I don’t want to take credit because the internet is much more important than that; I love the fact the internet is filled with how to do magic tricks. I love that secrets are given away because that allows people who don’t look like me and don’t have the right class ring to get into it.
Your book Random was released in 2022 and is a crime caper about a man who lets the roll of the dice make choices for him. Do you believe in luck?
No. I believe in random, and I believe in assigning importance philosophically to random, but that’s different than luck; there’s no such thing. I mean as a force. Now, if you look at where I am and the level of success I’ve had in a colloquial use of the word luck, it’s nothing but. I should not be as successful as I am.
The CW
COVID shut Vegas down. What did you do during that time period?
I’m very tempted to lie to you. Since I was 12 years old, I had never gone more than four weeks without doing a show. I went 423 days without doing them. I missed it, but not pathologically, which surprised me about myself. I thought I had some sort of pathological desire to be in front of people and on stage. I think I did 30 years ago. I think if I wasn’t constantly in front of people, I had emotional problems. That’s gone away.
I mostly was concerned about my children. They were teenagers and teenagers locked up with their parents for those incredibly formative years when they should be rebelling against their parents and be with friends and finding their own identity. That broke my heart and I obsessed on that.
But I learned a language, I wrote a book, I exercised, I filled my days completely. As much as I love being in front of an audience, and I do, I also really enjoy being alone working on a book. I’ve written 11 books. There’s this very odd kind of intimacy that you’re going to do something alone and then a stranger is going to do something alone and your hearts are going to touch. I don’t know of many things as purely human as writing a book.
Bob Dylan’s name is behind you on a poster and you mention him a lot when you do interviews. What’s this fascination with Bob Dylan?
When you ask the smartest people I know about the greatest literature of all time, they say William Shakespeare, Robert Burns, Bob Dylan. It is the three everybody mentions.
Because I have no education whatsoever—and because of my lack of willpower—I haven’t been able to really get Shakespeare into my heart. I get it in my head but not in my heart. Robert Burns is impenetrable to me. But I started listening to Bob Dylan when I was 14. Since then, I don’t think I’ve gone more than 20 days in my life without listening to Bob Dylan. [He] is a touchstone throughout my life.
Why do you always have one red fingernail?
It was a way to mock my mother and became a way to show respect to my mother. When I was young, I was a juggler. I was pretty good. I was doing shows all the time. My mother saw me doing these shows and she said if people are looking at your hands all the time, which they are, you should make your hands look nice. She of course meant wash your hands once in a while, you filthy teenager. I took her nail polish and put it on one finger. I kept that to mock her.
Then as I became more successful, when I would go on Saturday Night Live or Letterman, my mother was still alive. I would do this [demonstrates showing his red nail on camera]. It was an easy way to show her I was thinking of her, but I was thinking of her all the time. It was just a little joke between the two of us. Then several years ago, I heard Moxie telling someone that I did it for her. My mom would have approved of that lie, I think, completely. I should add in there, I was and am a real mama’s boy. I was closer to my mom than anybody in the world.
*Interview conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike.
Next, Penn Jillette on Magicians, Intelligence and Now You See Me 2
