Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! (15 page)

Jose and his gang also watched over Teller, and they made it very difficult for any other performers to take over our corner. We had to give our imprimatur for anyone else to work. We shared our area with a harmonica player, an old sailor named Big Al. Occasionally a magician named Chris Capehart shared our space. Chris was one of the finest performers I’ve ever seen. Chris is still working, doing all sorts of shows and he’s great, but his street act was really something else. Chris is African-American, and back then looked really tough. He dressed for his street act in these weird jumpsuits with batwing arms. I don’t if his mom made those outfits for him or a girlfriend or a friend or if he sewed them himself. I never asked him. He didn’t talk during his act, but he wasn’t silent like Teller. Chris whistled. He whistled for the whole show. He was a whistling, scary guy dressed like James Brown in the “hot pants give you con-fi-dance” period.

Chris did the “Miser’s Dream,” a standard magic trick where you pull coins out of all sorts of places and drop them in a champagne bucket. Teller uses a fishbowl instead of a bucket and then turns the coins into goldfish in the P&T show. Some magicians use a beautiful classy bucket and some use a beat-up bucket more like a spittoon (as though I’ve ever seen a spittoon). Al Flosso, one of the best ever at the “Miser’s Dream” would bring a child up and do the routine with him, pulling coins out of the child’s ears and nose and armpits. Flosso was the best. Very much a “Go away, son, you bother me,” W. C. Fields type.

Chris, with balls much too big to fit in his beat-up champagne bucket, would walk around with his wings flapping, whistling and gathering a crowd. With all the people standing around him, he would pick the biggest, strongest, meanest Caucasian man in his front row and get in that man’s space. Then he would get in his face. He would stand too close to him, whistling and making eye contact. He had done no magic yet. It was just uncomfortable. He would hang there a little too long and then reach up and slap the guy lightly in the face, not a painful slap, no one was hurt—but it was a real violation of personal space and a racially charged gesture. It was a heavy moment. This is on the street. This isn’t a theater. There’s no one around to make it okay. His mark always had friends standing nearby, and Chris was always alone. The reaction was strong, and as his audience member recoiled and considered how he was going to kick Chris’s ass, a magic coin fell from where the man was slapped and jangled into Chris’s bucket. It was a magic trick. The slap had produced a coin from nowhere. There was a pause and then the crowd would react huge. This was a coin that meant something. The guy would give Chris a dismissive relieved laugh. The guy thought it was over, but it wasn’t over. Chris kept eye contact and kept whistling. It was unbelievable. He’d reach up again, but this time he wouldn’t slap—he just flick the same guy’s nose, and another magic coin would fall. “Fine, that’s funny, magic boy, now quit it.” Chris wouldn’t. He would continue to pull coins from all over the guy, until everyone was laughing. The guy’s only way out of this uncomfortable position was to let it all go, and be the child in the magic act. He had to trust Chris. He had to like Chris. He had to laugh. There was no other choice. He had to be the little boy, to this whistling, jumpsuited, batwinged, crazy African-American authority figure. There was subtext and there was tension and then it was all okay. When we achieve world peace, Chris’s act will deserve some of the credit. Chris’s act identified the problem and then solved it. I watched him do it a lot, and every time my stomach tightened up and every time it worked. He and I had long talks at Burger King after our shows. Chris is very successful now. He works cruise ships, clubs, and even children’s parties, and every time I see him, my heart goes back to those days on the street. What a genius.

Chris, Big Al, Teller, and I would talk to the police on that beat and do little tricks for them and make jokes. Our shows would have been illegal if we were panhandling, but there was no law against entertaining for money. The police liked our acts. Once I got a few policemen to line up behind me for the whole show. During my threatening money collection speech, that show I ended by gesturing to the line of policemen, saying “and they’re on my side.” On my cue, all the police pulled out their billy clubs and brandished them. It would have been a lot funnier if they hadn’t been laughing. Amateurs.

I made a shit-ton of money working the streets. Teller and I bought all the equipment for our theater shows with that money. My parents bought me a sound system with the money they had saved for my college tuition, but most of the rest we made there on the streets. We had spotlights and dimmer packs and all the stuff we needed for our theater show. We could produce our shows ourselves with our own money.

When I was twenty, I went to an accountant and asked what I should do about paying taxes (all taxes are theft!) on the money that I made street juggling. He asked me how much I made and I told him. He said, “If you say you made that much money street performing, they will arrest you as a drug dealer.” Even he thought I was a drug dealer and wouldn’t work for me. So Teller and I bought a van with bundles of tax-free singles.

Some of the tricks we’re doing in our Vegas show now, we’ve been doing since those street days. We’ve done them tens of thousands of times. Our Vegas show is made up of bits we’ve been doing for more than thirty years right alongside bits we’ve been doing for a few weeks. People ask how we can stand doing the same show every night. Do we put the new bits in just for ourselves, to keep it fresh? Nope. There is no need to keep it fresh. It is fresh. It’s
Groundhog Day
.

There is a myth that improvisational comics are in tune with the audience and really reading what the audience is doing and reacting to that. Bullshit. I’ve done appearances that are improvised and I have no knowledge of the audience except an occasional laugh. I’m just trying to save my ass any way I can. The focus is on survival, not the audience. I’m trying to keep it moving and get laughs. When I’m doing a bit I know how to do, I can tell you everything about the audience. I know who is smiling and where the big laughers are. I know every word I’m going to say and when I’m going to scratch my nose, so I can really feel the audience and go with them. The first time I do a bit, I do big gestures to make sure everyone gets the joke. After a thousand times, I’ve made everything smaller. As small as I can, so the audience can’t even tell how they know what I’m thinking. Repetition in front of different audiences gives me the information about how subtle I can make things. We’ve lost a lot with vaudeville gone. There were people who wrote a twelve-minute act when they were sixteen years old and performed it multiple times a day until they died. They learned things about how people learn things that no one else will ever know. They knew about language and pronunciation and breathing. I tried to see as many of those acts as I could. There aren’t many people around today who can do a real twelve minutes of
Groundhog Day.

We have a bit we call “Water Tank.” The gist is that Teller holds his breath completely submerged in a tank of water, which is locked from the outside, until I find the right freely selected card. I find the wrong card and he drowns. After he’s dead, the right card appears on his dead face underwater. It’s a great bit and one that was responsible for one of my stupidest showbiz decisions. We were asked to appear on
The
Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
. I’m talking the real fucking
Tonight Show
. We were going to be on with Johnny. I was going to sit on the couch next to Johnny. The couch that meant showbiz. This was going to be it. We wanted to do the “Water Tank.” Johnny’s people said that after we showed the card was right, before we went to commercial, Teller would have to pop out of the tank and wave to show the audience he was okay, and then we’d go to commercial—just a quick wave on the pull back. We said that we wanted to leave Teller dead going to commercial. They said wave. We said that everyone knew Teller wasn’t really dead and we’d go to commercial with him lifeless floating in the tank; that was the respectful way to do it. They said theirs was a happy show, and waving made everyone happy. We pretended to have integrity about something where integrity doesn’t matter and we hung tough. They said that they wouldn’t hang tough. They wanted us on the
Tonight Show
, and they wanted us on our terms . . . okay—but we couldn’t do it with Johnny. We could do our bit, as we wanted, but we’d do it when
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
was guest-hosted by Jay Leno. We won. And then because we’re loser assholes, we changed to another bit for some reason I can’t even remember and went on with Jay, without doing the “Water Tank” at all. No waving, no not waving, no “Water Tank.” We love Jay and he’s been great to us, but it meant although we were on
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
we were never on
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
with Johnny Carson.

I never met Johnny Carson face-to-face. But we did e-mail and talk on the phone a lot. I take about one real day off a year, but one year I took more than a week off, in Newfoundland with my bride-to-be. Everyone was told that I was not to be contacted. Not for any reason. I was with my love and the moose and that was it. We got to our hotel room in St John’s and the phone rang. “Sorry to bother you, Mr. Jillette, but this is Johnny Carson.” I froze. The voice was perfect. This was after he’d retired, and my heart flew, my heart banged, my heart stopped. “Is this a bad time?”

“No, this is the best time of my life.”

Johnny had gotten my number from the Amazing Randi and he was calling to compliment me on
Penn & Teller: Bullshit!
He said things about our show that you’d have to be more of an asshole than me to type here. Very complimentary. I reminded him that he was Johnny Carson and that was a bigger deal. We talked skepticism and atheism. We talked showbiz. I told him I was working on a documentary about the dirty joke known as “The Aristocrats.” He said it was his favorite joke. I said I knew that. I was respectful enough to not ask him to do our movie. He knew I wanted him, and he would certainly have done it if he wanted. I stayed in touch with him, writing e-mails about our movie and how it was going and about atheism. I was writing to fucking Johnny Carson. I told him our movie was going to open at Sundance, and he asked whether the movie’s director, Paul Provenza, and I would come to his house in Malibu after the festival and screen it for him. Holy fucking shit.

We did Sundance and we were a hit. A big fucking hit. There was only one thing more exciting than showing our movie for the crowds at Sundance, and that was the prospect of showing our comedy movie to Johnny Carson. It would be the end of this project. The morning after our debut at Sundance, Provenza and I were having a hot chocolate to celebrate our success. My cell phone rang. It was Randi telling me that Johnny Carson had died. Provenza and I sat and cried into our hot chocolate all morning. The joy was gone. We pulled back the print and added “For Johnny Carson” to the end of the movie. Okay, so fuck you, we made a great movie and people loved it, but we never got to show it to Johnny. Life speeds by and no matter how much joy there is, there is sadness.

If we had let Teller wave at the end of the “Water Tank,” I would have met Johnny Carson, but we talked on the phone and we wrote e-mails, and maybe that’s okay. It’ll have to be okay.

The first time we did “Water Tank” was on
Saturday Night Live
with Madonna hosting. There are a few moments in it where the audience has to know that I’m worried I won’t be able to find the right card. If you watch the
SNL
performance, I play it big. Wicked big. Stupid big. I don’t trust myself or the audience. I make sure I get the laughs.

Ten years later, we had done the bit thousands of times, and we were playing much bigger places. I was able to get the back row of a 5,000-seat theater to understand with less than I used to get a close-up on TV to be clear. With my style and my movement, one little move of the head could get a bigger reaction from the back row than a full body turn. And those people wouldn’t even know how they’d figured out what I was thinking. Thousands of times had taught me how to really communicate. It takes so little, but it takes time to get that little.

Electronic media had forced a lot of novelty down our throats at the expense of skill. Novelty at the expense of nuance. I thought Andy Warhol said something like if they were going to do pretty much the same situation comedies every week on TV, why didn’t they do the exact same situation comedy every week on TV and get good at it. Since electronic mass media, there’s this sense of “new” that really bugs me.
Saturday Night Live
is a scripted show that’s more a sitcom, with returning stars and premises, than it is improvisation. Imagine if the brilliant men and women who did the first
Saturday Night Live
shows had done that same first George Carlin show every night for ten years. Imagine if all their tension had gone away. Imagine if they knew how big every laugh was going to be and exactly where to stand. Imagine no cue cards. Imagine no unneeded pauses and no mugging. The situation comedies don’t explore the depth of plot or those characters in a situation with all the depth that learning can bring; instead they get good at using those same characters in slightly different situations. I guess that’s why it’s called situation comedy. People get good at forms and not ideas. It’s fun to do and it’s fun to watch, but I love watching things that have been done just that way a thousand times before. I think the performers learn stuff that no one would have ever thought of.

Lance Burton, Master Magician, has a dove routine in Vegas. He’s magically pulling birds out of his jacket. Everyone knows he’s pulling them out of his jacket; there’s no other way to do the trick. He comes out onstage looking twenty pounds heavier than he looks when all the birds have flown magnificently to the back of the theater. Lance did that show seven nights a week, two shows a night, for decades. Other stuff in his show changed, but that dove opener was the same every night. Exactly the same. Every move. Every smile. How could he stand that? Well, he could stand that because he was living Groundhog Day, and he loved it. Lance had a chance to get good at something.