Penn & Teller stopped by the Google NYC office to discuss their limited-run Broadway show, closing Aug 16th, 2015. 

http://pennandtelleronbroadway.com/

Moderated by Cliff Lungaretti.

Tell her, what are the origins of being silent on stage during your act?

You're asking me the exact same questions that the New York Times guy did, just as if they were right on the piece of paper.

When I was a teenager, I rebelled against the idea of magic patter, because it always seemed redundant.

A guy would be standing up there going, here I have a red ball.

When I was like 12, I did a Chinese magic act where I had a long mustache and a little hat and an orange velvet robe.

And I claimed to be 200 years old and lived in ancient China, because I didn't know how long ago China was ancient.

And as an audience member, I would find that insulting.

So when I started to get a little more idea what was going on, I thought it would be interesting to drop patter so that people would have to put together what they're looking at on their own.

And nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself.

So if I say, here is a perfectly ordinary pack of cards, you're going to mistrust me.

If I say, if I hand you the cards and go like this and you shuffle them, then you'll believe that that's a real pack of cards, even if it's fake.

So it was partly the idea of not doing redundant patter, and it was partly the idea of making magic more convincing.

Then eventually, I discovered that there's all sorts of cool things that happen, for me, because I'm not like an overpowering personality, undercutting the kinds of places.

I was working at frat parties at college.

And if I had tried to overpower those kids with their cups of beer, groping their girlfriends, they would have paid no attention to me.

I don't think they paid that much attention to me the way I did it, but it was more than I would have had otherwise.

I just set up a couple of lawn spots and did things like swallow razor blades and let them put that together and let them be a little bit creeped out by that.

And you feel like an idiot if you're heckling a silent guy.

And then eventually, working with Penn all these years, what I've discovered is there's something absolutely incredible that happens when you don't talk.

Everything becomes very intimate because you're looking at them, they're looking at you.

And that intimacy is really thrilling to me.

Now I saw your show on Thursday, and you mentioned on the show that you met Teller during his razor blade act.

The origin stories have been retold so many times, I don't think there's really any truth left in them.

I mean, When I met Teller for the first time, I was still in high school.

And so that gives you some sort of chronology on that.

Teller was a high school teacher while I was in high school, but different high schools.

And You taught Latin and English when I'm correct?

And I think probably, if I were, it all depends on what we're defining.

But probably the first trick I saw Teller do was probably not, as I say in the show, the needles.

But probably you were doing a thing called glorpie, I think, with a handkerchief, or maybe out of this world or something.

You might have been doing something backstage at the first Marshall X shows.

If we were actually to have a court record and read it back.

I might have seen you do something magical before that.

And I remember it as being in a library in New Jersey, 1 of these library basement community shows.

Probably the fact that I remember it makes it less likely to be true.

And I think the first thing I saw Penn do was ride a unicycle in a pair of shorts and mismatched sneakers, wearing no shirt but a tablecloth tied around his neck and juggling, right?

Yeah, I don't think that would've been right.

It was a classical music show at Amherst College where we both worked at that show.

But I still think the story that we met in Nome is much better.

Maybe it's time to just do a clean break and just keep that from then on.

Now, you're magicians who advocate reason.

Although, we weren't captured because we were good soldiers.

you find that is contradictory or complementary to your work?

I mean, magic is just a playful way of exploring how we ascertain truth.

Tellers are often fond of calling it the unwilling suspension of disbelief.

But it is a form where you don't invite the audience to go along with your fantasy, but rather you force them to.

And they should have a chip on their shoulder.

So every time you do a trick that's successful, you have taught everybody in the audience that some way that they ascertain truth is incorrect.

And that leads you to me, leads me to skepticism and to pro-science and works hand in hand.

Now, there have been 2 major schools of thought in magic.

I mean, the discovery of witchcraft, the first magic book, 1500s?

The first magic book talks about these being tricks, as opposed to real magic.

And then that thread of that way of dealing with magic, is tricks, or is the magician is an actor playing the part of a magician.

That kind of thing goes to Houdini and then goes to Amazing Randy and is a direct line hand in hand and friendly with the scientists.

And no sort of anybody that comes to you when you're that kind of magician and says, what you're doing is bullshit, the answer to that is yes.

And there's no argument whatsoever, you know.

If someone comes up to us after the show and says, you know, you didn't really.

And whatever the rest of that sentence is, the answer is, of course not.

Then there's the other school of thought that's followed by, Of course, all the people who claimed real powers from time in memoriam, religious figures and so on, up to the spiritualists of the 19th century.

And then we get into the 20th century, and you get Uri Geller.

And then you've even got friends of ours.

I mean, we disagree with them strongly, but they are friends of ours.

I mean, David Blaine and Chris Angel, who do stuff like say, well, you know, last week I was doing card tricks, but now I've been studying science, And now I can do something that was physically impossible before.

But we have had, and I really want to be careful about this because I don't want to misrepresent, especially David Blaine's position.

Because he makes the position very strongly, and he believes it very strongly.

And we disagree, but that does not give me the right to misrepresent what he says.

But in my understanding of what he says, and please don't take this as what Blaine says, but rather, you know find out in your own He believes that the magician's job is to have somebody leave the show with misconceptions about reality He wants to have it actually bleed into the real world and so that you leave and you think, well, maybe this could be this and maybe this could be that.

In other words, you leave his shows possibly believing things or considering things that he himself knows not to be true.

Now, he's never said that in those words.

The rule we try to follow, our ideal, and we fail at this, but our ideal is what I think of as the sawing a person in half principle, which is when you go to a magic show and you see someone sawn into halves, discounting people way off the bell curve, young children and people that are seriously mentally ill.

But people, the vast, vast majority of the people, just down to the noise on that bell curve, do not leave the theater thinking they've witnessed a murder.

Because that means that they understand at a very deep level that there was a trick.

And then you get to what's called mentalism, which is the term that magicians use for mind reading.

Because even the people who don't say, I can read minds, will say, I'm using principles of magic and psychology and study of human nature to be able to tell you which card you're thinking of, as opposed to, I forced a card on you and I knew what it was before the show started, which is the actual truth.

And some people would leave the theater thinking, after seeing a mentalist act, that they had witnessed somebody who was incredibly good at psychology or incredibly good at memory tricks or incredibly good at any of that.

That means you're leaving the theater thinking someone is able, someone on planet Earth is able to do something that previously you might not have thought they could do.

Or that that person could do something that maybe someone else can really do.

That's a very difficult rule to follow right across the board.

We're always rewriting stuff because people say to us after the show, oh, you can really?

And as soon as you say that to us, it means we have to go rewrite.

So we do a book test, which is kind of a jargony term for someone selects 1 book out of many.

Now, to sell that, if you're a bad writer, you sell that with, I can read your mind.

Or I can ask you questions, and the way you answer and the way you react, I can tell what you picked.

Or I can read your body language and tell what you picked.

Or I've memorized the whole book and I can tell by looking over here what you've picked.

All of those are really good stories, you know, but the way we do it is we are doing a trick and have no special powers, which means the trick has to be a lot stronger Because what you've done is you've stripped away all the misdirection, all the stuff you can think about.

And especially smart people, while you're saying to yourself, well, certainly can memorize the book.

And certainly, there's a lot of stuff that shows you that people react certain ways when they're lying.

And you can tell by the way they react to this.

And while you're thinking of all of that, I've just had a signal to me.

And so that makes the tricks much harder, much, much harder.

And you've also, the term in magic is closing the doors.

You're leaving the path how it's really done that way.

But at the end of that, you end up with something that's moral.

And I believe that giving people information that you know to be incorrect about the physical world is morally wrong.

It's also artistically kind of not very satisfying to smart people.

When I see a mentalist present something as though it's, maybe I really have powers, I really go, oh, yeah, right.

And I think that a lot of people do that.

And we try to write our show for people who are at, We can only write it for people who are as smart as we are, because we can't be smarter than we are.

But we try to write it for people who are at least as smart as we are.

Did you see there are 2 microphones in both of our aisles if you'd like to ask Penn and Teller any questions?

Let's go to Lucy in the Sky with traffic.

But yes, they're open if you'd like to ask a question, please come on up and I'll call on you.

Teller, obviously when you're on stage, you don't talk at all.

But was there any time when you were on stage and you were really tempted to say something?

Penn tells me that sometimes when I'm on stage in the dark and something has gone wrong or I've bumped into something, I will say, fuck a lot.

Thank you guys so much for coming out here today.

And I'm always really interested, after a trick gets done, you guys sort of huddle in together and start discussing how you think it was done.

And I'm always really curious, like, what types of things you discuss after you've seen a trick and you're working on trying to figure out how it was done.

Well, the show is called Fool Us, but far and away it should be called Fool Teller.

Teller's smarter than me and knows a lot more about this stuff than I do.

I'm mostly, what I'm doing, is trying to take what Teller's saying and find a way to say what Teller's gleaned in a way that is entertaining and also operates.

The difficult part of that show for me is I want to, After we've seen the trick, I want to give enough code phrases that especially young people, or people who are new to magic, but that's often young people.

I've pictured a 13, 14, 15-year-old person in my mind who is similar to what we would have been, who would be sitting there watching the show probably 2 or 3 times over in maybe a YouTube clip, listening to what I say carefully and doing keyword searches on all of that using, well, a search engine.

And be able to pull up the actual information that would give them the details.

Be able to do that while talking in a way that keeps it entertaining and funny for the families that are watching and just want to watch a magic show and don't want to get technical about it.

While we talk, we talk very openly about how the trick is done, obviously.

We're both mic'd, And the people in the control booth are listening to what we're saying.

And Johnny Thompson, who I would say Teller is the second best magic mind alive today, and Johnny Thompson is the first.

Johnny works with us in everything we do.

And Johnny is just telling from the first 2 or 3 sentences.

He's looking at the producers and going, they've got it.

And then they watch us go down whatever road we're going down.

I try to speak up, because there have been a couple of times when I've seen something that Teller hasn't seen, or I've known a little something, a little nuance that Teller didn't know.

And I have made a very big mistake at assuming Teller knew something, like the flipper, that I knew and had on my desk at home and he didn't know about.

And I didn't mention it because I thought he must know it.

And then that 1 fooled us when it didn't fool me at all.

I just thought since it fooled Teller, it must have fooled me.

That's why I fooled myself, because I'm a fucking idiot.

But we talk about that and then try to make it as entertaining an expose as we can.

You know, the show is a lie, and I hope it's a lie that many people see through.

We're very troubled by all these talent show shows where somebody comes out and talks about someone's showmanship and their pitch and all this.

Pitch is tangible, but all this intangible stuff, like charisma and all of that.

And all I can ever do when I see even a moment of those shows, which is probably the most I've seen, is I picture my heroes like Sun Ra or Tiny Tim or Bob Dylan, or how well they do on those shows.

And it fills me with rage to think of those empty-headed assholes judging people who they aren't fit to eat shit off their shoes.

And so our show is very specifically, I believe, we have never had on the show the best act fool us.

The most successful act from the first run that we did was Piff the Magic Dragon, who got a whole show in Vegas and is now on America's Got Talent and has had a huge career that I think he would say was launched by Fool Us.

We gave him a standing ovation and loved him.

So what we're really trying to do there is whenever you see a magic show, you think there must be camera tricks.

And whenever you see a magic show, you think there must be

And whenever you see a magic show, you are right.

There's never been a magic show on TV that didn't use camera tricks.

And the camera trick is very simply multiple takes and putting the camera where you want.

1 very famous magician, his producer said to me, we don't use camera tricks.

And for the street magic stuff, just repetition gives you that.

If I throw you a deck of cards right now, and you take your video phone, and you go out on the street, and you, with no skills whatsoever, have someone pick a card, then tell them what card they picked, and you do that around 50 times, you might get lucky.

And if all you show is the time you got lucky, that could be a miracle that no 1 can figure out.

So people, although they may not have stated it that way, everybody knows that in their heart that everything on TV is jive.

So on Fool Us, because we're doing this silly little game show, you know in a really visceral way they can't do it more than once.

And you also know that it's being done right for us, right then.

And there's a sense that you feel, and this is, I hate to break it down like this, and we contradict this, but it's a shorthand.

You feel that the camera people are on the audience's side.

They're not trying to help the magician, because it's Penn and Teller's show.

Of course, it's much more complicated than that, But I think that's what you feel.

So what we're talking about during then is usually we're talking about how great the act was.

And we are hoping against hope to be fooled.

Because that's when it's the most fun for us.

And the other question that someone is going to ask, and I might as well answer, because it's right in the same sentence, is do we ever find out how they did it?

The answer is, the second they fool us, when we go to commercial, they run to us and roll up their sleeves and go, see?

I don't think there's been 1 person yet who stayed cool about that.

And John Lovick, who fooled us this season with a torn and restored piece of paper.

Handsome Jack fooled us with this simple, torn and restored paper, and it just drove me crazy.

So I kept emailing back and forth, and he kept dropping me little hints, and little more hints, and little more hints.

And it finally turned out, he explained it to me, and it was just plain old, normal sleight of hand of which we knew every single move.

He had just engineered it so that we couldn't perceive it.

I have to say this 1 more thing, which is the judges on those talent shows have nothing at stake.

And the very first time we did the very first show, the first guy came out and fooled us.

And so we end up getting sort of the best of both worlds, which is we get that tension of, OK, we'll figure this 1 out.

And any magician who comes out and says, just let magic wash over you, let it wash over you with a wave of mystery, nobody does that.

And this is maybe the first show that really acknowledges that at 1 level, magic is a competitive, uncomfortable thing to watch.

You don't watch it sitting back, letting it watch and wash over you.

You go, there's something that looks like it's totally wrong with the world.

Our friend Mike Close describes the magician.

He says, magician is a person who gives you the gift of a stone in your shoe.

And yes, we did notice that the trophy says FU on it, and it wasn't an accident.

And you can, of course, watch Fool Us every Monday at 8 o'clock on the CW.

In that movie about the amazing Randy that's on Netflix right now, like all the charlatans make the claim at the end of the movie that despite all the work he's done, they're making more money than ever.

Is that true, or are they just trying to come?

I believe everyone that we trashed on bullshit has done at least as well or better after we trashed them.

I think that information and truth on its own is worth something.

And the fact that some people disagree with us and give the attention that we give them and then go and follow someone I consider a charlatan.

I believe that's simply the marketplace of ideas.

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