Can a magician be too old to die?
This was the question under debate backstage at the Penn & Teller Theater in Las Vegas after Teller, the silent half of the most famous living double act, suggested bringing back one of his favorite tricks.
The duo first performed it on “Saturday Night Live” in 1985 when Penn Jillette, now 70, locked Teller, 77, inside a phone-booth-size tank, filled to the top with water. Then he promised to not let him out until Jillette guessed a card picked by an audience member. It’s a race to avoid drowning, and the trick is intricately plotted, with escalating tension, several reversals and one dramatic return from the dead.
Even though it’s been a crowd-pleaser, Jillette said he thought they had aged out of it. “The suffering of a young man is heroic,” he told his partner in mid-June. “For an older man, it can be sad.”
Teller countered politely that little physicality was required of him, so surviving was not “a heroic gesture.” He described it this way: “It’s about the partnership,” he said, referring to their collaboration, which like “Jaws” and “Saturday Night Live,” reached half a century this year. “That might be an idea strengthened over time.”
Penn and Teller, who will be at Radio City Music Hall on Aug. 21, are one of the great success stories of modern show business. They revolutionized magic, demystifying and modernizing the form, while merging it with comedy. Starring in hits on Broadway and off, they also made two long-running TV shows, “Penn & Teller: BS” and “Fool Us,” which is starting its 13th season in the fall and is the most important launchpad for new magicians. Whereas David Copperfield and Criss Angel have faded in popularity, Penn & Teller are bigger than ever. Once billing themselves as “the bad boys of magic,” they have become its elder statesmen, shifting from ridiculing Vegas magicians to breaking the record for longest-running headlining show in the town.
But their greatest trick in 50 years might be simply staying together.
It’s a lost art. The age of the great star teams (Laurel and Hardy, Nichols and May, Martin and Lewis) is over. When Tommy Smothers of the Smothers Brothers retired, Jillette said the comic told him: “‘We’re passing this along to you.’”
SPENDING TWO DAYS WITH JILLETTE AND TELLER, together and apart, I wanted to understand the secrets of their happy artistic marriage. It probably helps that only one talks and the other is mute when they’re onstage. But they had unorthodox relationship advice: Try not to compromise, and avoid apologies. “Apologies extend the argument and are such a waste of time,” Teller said. “It’s tempting. Just stop, move on.”
Their fundamental insight is that remaining a team requires keeping apart. They used to never socialize together. And the few times they do now, they give each other space. Steven Banks, a performer known professionally as Billy the Mime, has been a friend since the 1970s, and recalled a meal with them where they did not say one word to each other. “I talked to Penn, then I talked to Teller and that was it,” Banks said.
Teller (whose given name, now legally changed, was Raymond Joseph Derickson Teller) said the most important tip he had received about artistic partnership came from the director Arthur Penn, who made their feature movie “Penn & Teller Get Killed” (1989). He advised Teller to say less during the process of creation. Teller described the advice as “‘Don’t say what you’re thinking. Let him unfold whatever he’s doing,’” and added, “That’s a thing I use to this day.”
Jillette takes distance even further, describing the partners as colleagues, not friends. Pressed to clarify, he said, “I don’t care much about my relationship with Teller.”
It’s worth pausing to remind you that magicians are professional liars — and Jillette delights in provocative statements. One of the first things he told me was that he hated magic. He said “The Aristocrats,” a 2005 documentary he and Paul Provenza directed about a very dirty joke, was really about the improvisation of Miles Davis (who is not in the movie). Jillette is sincere about these takes, but they also function as a kind of misdirection.
Whereas Jillette, wearing an earring and jeans with a peace sign, talks in digressive, full-paragraph monologues, Teller, dressed more unassumingly, speaks precisely and directly, gentle and economical in his answers, sensitive to the listener in a way that Jillette isn’t.
Jillette and Teller lean into their contrasts, onstage and off. One reason is that they believe these differences are essential. “If we’re the same, we might as well work separately,” Teller said.
MAGIC WAS A NICHE, SLIGHTLY DISREPUTABLE field when they started. There were men in tuxedos sawing women in half and then the mystical, hippie-dippy wonder of Doug Henning. Jillette and Teller bonded over a shared revulsion toward such cheesy showbiz.
Teller was a high school Latin teacher and Jillette a bohemian juggler who only attended Clown College after high school. Jillette is the kind of brainy autodidact who says he never entirely got over his inferiority complex of not going to college. They originally had a third partner, Weir Chrisemer, Teller’s best friend at Amherst. For their first show, Jillette dressed in shorts and mismatched sneakers, and Teller, with shoulder-length hair, wore tights and a unitard. It was Chrisemer, the son of a Lutheran minister, who wore the suit.
Asked if Chrisemer’s religious background played a role in the split from the two outspoken atheists, Teller said, “Probably,” then added, “Breakups are not pleasant and everybody feels bad.” Chrisemer didn’t respond to messages requesting comment.
The stylistic through line in 50 years of Penn and Teller is skepticism. Their act begins with the assumption that magic tricks are all bunk. Then the two trick you. The same way that David Letterman (who booked them twice a year in the 1980s) took you behind the scenes of the talk show to poke fun at the form while still engaging in it, their show introduced a kind of meta-magic that deconstructed the art’s conventions without taking away the surprise.
Teller described the birth of this aesthetic at a diner during a 1975 road trip. He had crumpled a napkin into a ball, placing it under a cup, rolling it out and using that misdirection to distract from a second ball. He did this repeatedly, until he was so focused on the ball rolling that he no longer noticed the other one. He had tricked himself. Then an epiphany: They could do the trick with transparent cups and still fool people.
“This fiddling with napkins got us to a deep idea,” Teller said. “What if we take people behind the scenes and make the behind-the-scenes thing even more amazing than the presented trick?”
TELLER LIVES LESS THAN HALF AN HOUR from his namesake theater in a kid’s idea of a magician’s home. The roof is a giant three of clubs, shelves are lined with books on magic (and hide a secret passageway), and a silver front door features intimidating bars shaped like eyes and a mouth. Sitting in a room filled with art by his parents, he pointed to a photo of Houdini, the inspiration for the water tank trick, with his wife. Teller said that we don’t really know their relationship except that they had no children, before adding: “They were good colleagues.”
Teller credits his first Howdy Doody magic set at age 5 for the birth of his passion. Jillette also likes to tell a formative story with a first set, but his is darker, about a loss of innocence. After persuading his parents to buy an ESP book promoted by the Amazing Kreskin because he was interested in science, he was stunned to discover it was pointless nonsense. Greatly disillusioned, Jillette dropped his interest in school, his grades plummeted, and he focused his energies on becoming a juggler, which led to working with Teller.
When I asked Teller what this contrast in origin stories says about them, he answered blandly. I pressed him again, and he took a long pause, letting the silence linger for an entire minute. His eyes welled up, and a large tear faded down his cheek. This show of emotion was so dramatic that I considered whether it was itself a trick. Then he started speaking slowly, choosing words carefully.
“We always claim we are not friends, but of course we are,” he said. “When Socrates defines love, he talks about that being two completely different elements coming together like a male and female producing a child. And the product of that is the beautiful thing.”
THAT EVENING, I SAW THEIR NEW SHOW. It featured a few old tricks (like a beautiful one by Teller turning silverfish into coins) and many more created in the last year. Teller threw confetti at his partner’s head and he acted flamboyantly irritated. At one point, Jillette told the crowd, “I don’t agree with Teller about just about anything.”
Another provocation. In the way that longtime married couples become more alike over the decades, Jillette and Teller now share many if not most opinions. They agreed to stop doing their famous bullet catch out of their horror at the prevalence of mass shootings. And a spectacular trick in which they burn the American flag to make a point about free speech was abandoned because the sight of the flag, both magicians said, was immediately associated with Make America Great Again.
Jillette has changed more, getting married, having children and shifting politically from his days as an outspoken libertarian. The coronavirus pandemic had an impact. He was rattled when asked by a libertarian group to lead anti-mask rallies in Las Vegas. So did his appearance on “The Celebrity Apprentice.” He described the show as an elaborate fake, saying he regrets referring to the current president as “Mr. Trump.”
Teller decided not to have a family. His father once told him to never get married. And he said that having children prevented his father, a professional graphic designer and prolific painter, from becoming as great an artist as he could.
I asked Jillette why he said onstage that he rarely agreed with Teller when it’s clearly not true, and he replied, “It’s useful.” He brought up how bands get emotionally sloppy and break up over petty relationship issues. “I’m mad at Lennon and McCartney for falling in love and putting that in front of the job,” he said, changing the tone in his voice.
“There’s no one I trust more,” he said of Teller. “There’s no one I respect more.”
When Teller had bypass surgery, Jillette visited him every day in the hospital. The first person who wasn’t family to hold Jillette’s babies was Teller. When Jillette and Teller won a recent magic award, Teller used the speech to clarify that while people think he does most of the magic, that’s not the case. “Penn and I are two people but one thing,” he said.
And yet, Jillette said, he doesn’t like to talk about their closeness, the growing together, the bond. After more than four hours of talk, he suddenly became restrained: “There’s no one who’s a bigger fan of telling not showing, but not here.”
Why not? “Because it’s rich and deep.”
The water tank is one of the few tricks to reveal them conspicuously leaning on each other. For most of their show, they face the audience and don’t even look at each other. When Jillette fails to guess the correct card, he wants to let his partner out of the tank to save him, but even though Teller appears to be drowning, he refuses to be rescued, because that would violate the rules of the trick. Work comes first, even in the face of death.
That’s a theme that dates to their first professional theater show: “The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society,” which ended with Teller dying and Jillette shrugging it off, adding: “No use crying over a dead magician.”
They were young then, and being playful about death was easier. Teller said that other people had dramatic responses to death, but that he stayed calm. Jillette said, “I have no skills at that.”
As they discussed the water tank, Jillette listened to Teller’s argument for bringing it back but remained unconvinced. He ended the debate in a way that only someone with a long history of arguing with a friend could. He predicted how it would unfold, describing in detail each beat, before saying they would eventually conclude they have so many tricks in their repertoire that it’s best to move on, which is exactly what they did.
Jason Zinoman is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times and writes a column about comedy.
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