Penn Jillette and his professional partner, who goes by the single name Teller, have been working together for almost 50 years. But despite the natural toll aging takes on the human body, and Teller’s 2018 spinal-fusion surgery, the finish line is nowhere in sight for the Las Vegas-based duo whose singular blend of magic and comedy – with a bit of premeditated chaos thrown in – has arguably made the most entertaining show business act of the past half century.
“You know, one thing that’s so odd is that nobody, as they get older, starts writing more stuff. But we’ve been doing that. We’ve written more stuff, certainly in the past five years than we’ve written in any other five-year period of our career,” offered Jillette during a recent phone chat occasioned by the team’s May 16 and 17 dates at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Atlantic City.
One reason for their prodigious creative output, he reasoned, is that each episode of their popular, 10-year-old CW series, “Penn & Teller: Fool Us,” features a segment in which they perform. “But it’s also that we have a lot of crazy ideas we want to do in front of people. And, it’s really fun. I mean, most magicians write about 20 to 25 tricks in their career, and we’ve done 180.”
That’s not to mean that Jillette, 69, who hails from Western Massachusetts, and Center City Philly native Teller (his legal name for years), 77, haven’t ceded some ground to Father Time. For instance, Jillette—who is the tall one who does all the talking during their act—spoke of one type of trick they pretty much have retired.
“When I was young–which I can barely remember–I saw The Amazing Randi do a ‘milk can escape’ when he was about 50. He was perfectly healthy to do it. He was great to do it. But there are just certain things, as you get older, that don’t feel right.
“So there are a lot of tricks that we’re still capable of doing that we don’t do because they just don’t vibe out right. I don’t think that once you’re over 50, you can really do escapes. I always kind of thought, well, if ‘Saturday Night Live’ had someone [President] Biden’s age playing Biden, would that be better?’ I think the answer is no. And I think the same thing for magic. There’s something very, very sexy about a 25-year-old man being tied up and escaping, and that’s just not true for someone over 50, 55 or whatever.”
Of course, this being Penn & Teller, they found a work-around.
“The whole idea was we’re too old to do escape, so we escaped from rocking chairs,” he recalled about a sequence they created. “It worked very well. We’re just writing stuff that’s more appropriate to our age.”
As Jillette noted, he and Teller have devised and performed an astonishing 180 tricks during their time together. When asked to identify those of which he is especially proud, he didn’t hesitate before responding. The first bit he mentioned was the one in which an audience member is brought on stage and is transformed into Teller. The second one is their celebrated “bullet catch” illusion that had them simultaneously firing bullets into each other’s mouths. According to Jillette, a survey of critics voted it the greatest magic trick of all time.
Nonetheless, you won’t be seeing it at Hard Rock, nor at Rio Hotel & Casino where the team has conducted Las Vegas’ longest headliner residency since January 2001, or at any other venue. That, he explained, is because of the divisiveness the politicization of guns has created among Americans.
Another source of pride for Penn & Teller is “Fool Us,” a weekly series in which magicians perform illusions in hopes of stumping the pair as to how they did them.
“We are by far, and I mean by a factor of two or maybe three, the longest-running show on The CW,” he bragged. “And, it’s really great, because we’ve gotten to see such changes in magic in just that short period of time.
“We obviously can’t book the acts that come on because that wouldn’t be fair. But we can give a generic push, and we would tell the producers every year, get people in that do not look like us.
“Magic should not look like us. For a hundred years, magic has looked like us. It’s looked like middle-aged white guys, cis males who at least pass as heterosexual. And we want that to stop.
“A few years ago, we had a season where we had five women on, women who were not doing like a witch or dominatrix act, and were not assistants and were not part of a team, but five solo women who were dressed like men would be: Normally and not overly seductively. And all five of them fooled us.
“I think that needs to be noted. It was just a different way of thinking. We’ve had people who identify as every race. We had [a contestant] on last year who transitioned gender between their first appearance and their second. They came one year as a man and three years later as a woman.
“And very proudly, we’ve already had like four people on the show who started magic because they saw ‘Fool Us,’ and then came on and fooled us,” Jillette said. “And that’s pretty wonderful, you know? That feels pretty great.”
