Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! (18 page)

Dennis

Remember, this is the end of the eighties; quality voice recognition was still years away. This is an e-mail from a heavy cat, Dennis, about another heavy cat, rob. When these guys say they got something heavy, you best believe they got something heavy. Dennis piqued Arno’s interest.

On the day, rob ushered Arno into a room and sat him in front of two terminals. There was a bright light shining in Arno’s eyes, a microphone and TV camera inches from his mouth. That was just to make him uncomfortable. I never said every moment of the practical joke had to be comfortable, did I? On one terminal, a real-time, processed image of Arno’s lips appeared. On the other were printed several words.

rob explained that he had been doing some work in speech recognition and had achieved some interesting results. The camera was watching Arno’s lips to determine when he was speaking and use the movement of his mouth to aid in recognition. The computer would analyze his utterances using both the audio and the video. It would first be necessary to say each word on the second screen in sequence, to train the program to recognize Arno’s voice.

Arno said the first word, “Hello.” rob typed stuff on a third terminal. rob was acting. On the terminal Arno was facing, things flickered, and a graph and some numbers (“autocorrelation coefficients”) appeared. Arno said the next word, “Sanskrit.” More flickering, graphs, numbers. Arno said, “Hohokus.” I had said while we were setting the joke up, “If we can just get Arno to say ‘Hohokus’ into a microphone, we will have already won!”

The words disappeared, and several sentences came up on the terminal. Arno had to pick one of the sentences, and speak it. rob readjusted Arno’s head to make sure his lips were centered on the TV. There was no reason for this, but rob wanted to manhandle his boss. Arno read, “It’s a pleasure having you with us,” and, after a calibrated annoying pause, a synthesized voice said, “Please repeat.” Demos are supposed to fuck up. During this phase, the machine was supposedly deciding which of the sentences had been spoken. Finally, it got this right, and Arno moved on to “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” After two tries, the machine repeated this too. It was wobbly, but rob’s demo was moving along.

Now, rob said, we can have some fun. Arno was aware of the famous Eliza program. It was a computer program that pretended to be a shrink. That demonstrates a lot about computers and/or a lot about shrinks. To bring the idea up-to-date, rob had taken a videotape of David Letterman’s show, and digitized the guests’ answers and the host’s questions. Arno would play Letterman, on his own talk-show, and ask the questions. The machine would match each question to one actually asked on a past show, and then play back the closest appropriate answer. This was serious voice recognition and artificial intelligence. First, Arno had to select which guests he would like. His choices were: The author of
Dance, Dance, Dance, She Said
, Penn and Teller, or an actress from
Dynasty
.

We were taking a gamble here, but rob and Dennis said they knew Arno liked us.

Arno chose Penn and Teller. Our little psychological force had worked. If he had picked one of the others, rob would have pretended that the system crashed and asked him to make another choice, but it would be a better trick if he chose us himself.

Arno started with a menu of questions. Arno spoke one of them: “Which is Penn and which is Teller?” On Arno’s screen, after the graphs and numbers, a video image shuffled through several stills of us and finally an animated (and very lo-fi) image of P&T appeared, and my voice, scratchy but recognizable, said, “Don’t you learn anything? I’m Penn Jillette, and this is my partner Teller. Longer name, bigger person.” Arno asked several more questions from this menu and got the same kinda appropriate answers.

“Does Teller ever talk?”

“No, not to you.” Every answer was accompanied by the corresponding lo-fi video clip.

Now, the punch line. rob invited Arno to ask questions of his own. The theory was this would work because the computer could search for spoken words and phrases among the stored clips. This was the really amazing part. The computer would have to make it look like it understood the question and picked an answer that was closest to right. Each of Arno’s questions elicited a response, though some of them were peculiar.

“How long has it been since you became partners?”

“I think it was in San Francisco, about 1981 . . . That’s when Lou Reed came to the show . . .” rob acted frustrated and suggested that Arno rephrase the question.

“How long have you been partners?”

“It’s been fifteen years of complete hell.”

“Have you won many awards?”

“Well, Teller took the Obie, and he’s going to win an Academy Award. Me, I’m holding out for a Nobel Prize!” Just our little hint for Arno that he might be being fucked with. He didn’t pick up on it—just coincidence.

“What do you do with rats and cockroaches?”

“That’s the way we have sex.”

rob played embarrassed and asked Arno to speak more clearly, keeping his mouth in the right position, “Do you use rats and cockroaches?”

“Oh, I like that on pizza, and Teller uses it on a hot dog roll or a hamburger bun.” It was kludgy but not more so than a lot of first-time demos.

rob acted flustered and suggested that Arno ask Penn & Teller to show him a trick, because rob and Dennis had loaded in a few good ones from the show, and the computer would show it.

After another peculiar reply, the computer sputtered and I finally said, “Well, we hung upside down on
Saturday Night Live
, and we dumped cockroaches right here on your show, but come with us, we have something special for you. Could the camera go handheld?”

On the video, Penn & Teller stood up and the camera followed us into corridor. It was kinda sorta like the Letterman corridor, but not quite. Arno should have found the hall a little familiar, but he was wrapped up in the new technology. I continued talking on camera, “Let’s go down this hall here. We’ve done a lot of stuff on television, and TV is not the most conducive medium to magic. We wanted something where things would seem to go from TV into reality . . .”

On the screen in front of him, Arno watched Penn & Teller open a door and approach a man sitting in front of several terminals inside, with a bright light shining on his mouth. “. . . So we worked out this little thing where a person was watching a video screen, and we could actually come in and interact with the person—”

Then Arno turned around, and was confronted with us live in the room with him.

It was pretty groovy. Arno just couldn’t understand for the longest time that it was all a scam. While Arno was saying words and sentences into the microphone earlier, Dennis had been in the next room controlling what Arno saw and heard on the computer. The “video clips” were live pictures of Teller and me in the next room, digitized and turned on at appropriate times. We were just ad-libbing and monkeying with Arno. Our crew for this video shoot were some of the greatest computer minds in history. They had run the cables and were operating the cameras and mixing the sound. It was the most overqualified crew in show business history. They had high-quality video feeding to Dennis’s machine and he was cheapening it and glitching it up before it was sent to Arno’s monitor. I had been ad-libbing the wrong answers for verisimilitude.

Arno was shook. It really did blow his mind. As he started to understand, he wondered if the author and the
Dynasty
star had been in other rooms with other crews. He was freaked. He told us it felt more intense than winning the Nobel Prize. I think that was something said in the heat of the moment, like saying “I love you” right before you cum, but it still thrilled us. We had learned our lesson; this is the right kind of practical joke. It was a gift to Arno from the people who worked with him and liked and respected him.

A few years later, Arno returned that thrill by an order of magnitude (that’s science talk). We were at a TED conference. Teller and I were doing a mini-opera with magic about the spiritualist who tangled with Houdini. We had put together a presentation with Tod Machover and his gang at the Media Lab at MIT. It featured the “sensor chair,” a new musical instrument, like a Super Theremin that I would play by moving my hands and body is space. It was pretty cool. I was there to wave my arms around in a chair and Arno Penzias was there to talk smart stuff.

During the TED conference, the whole town is filled with TED people, and during lunch at a small Chinese restaurant, I found myself at the table next to Arno’s. We pulled tables together and told them all about “LabScam.” We then talked about the “talks” (my arm waving) that we were giving and, just to be weird, I asked, “What joke are you opening with?” Arno laughed and moved on, but just for fun, I pushed, “You know, you really have to open your talk with a joke. You gotta break the ice.”

Arno said he couldn’t tell jokes. I figured if Arno could teach me superficially about the 3K of cosmic background radiation that won him the Nobel Prize, I could teach him to tell a joke. He agreed to let me try over lunch to teach him to tell a joke.

I told him my version of the “Orange Dick” joke. Here are the beats, the bare bones a comedian would build on:

A guy has an orange dick.

He goes to a doctor.

Doctor examines him, asks a lot of questions about lifestyle, work and diet, but can’t figure out why the guy’s penis is orange (this is the body of the joke).

Finally doctor asks him to detail his average day, and the guy does so. He describes his typical day and ends with, “I get home, open a bag of Cheetos, turn on the Playboy Channel . . .”

It’s a fine joke. I told Arno those were the only beats he had to remember, but he would fill in all the details on the fly. Those were the parts of the joke that had to be all his. He needed to have the doctor ask questions about where the guy worked and his girlfriend and diet, but all of that would be done on the fly in Arno’s own style. The most important part of the joke was that at the punch line his voice had to go up and trail off. His right arm should go up with his voice and hang there on the ellipsis. I don’t think it matters very much for this joke whether the Playboy Channel or the Cheetos are last, as long as the audience gets to put the image together during the ellipsis. As long as the right arm and the pitch leads them to the right altitude for the punch line.

Over lunch, I had Arno tell me the joke over and over. He just kept telling it, and I kept correcting him, telling him to use more details or less and kept working on the punch line. I coached him to make sure that he had something else on the list in his mind. He had to have masturbating on the list, he just wasn’t to say it, but his voice had to lead to that. The punch line is really the silence. The punch line must be the offbeat—it’s gotta hit you where you ain’t. Arno starting taking this joke very seriously and really working on it. He had really no experience telling jokes, but he was focused and trying.

We both knew we were kidding; he had no intention of telling any joke in his Bell Labs talk at TED. That would be inappropriate, but we both made believe he was going to and really had fun pretending the dumb guy was teaching the smart guy something. Some of what I was explaining was real information and some was just fun bullshit. It was friends playing over lunch.

We went our separate ways after lunch, and I didn’t see him again until I was in the auditorium for his talk and he walked onstage. The TED audiences are heavy. I believe Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were both in the audience for Arno’s talk. Jonas Salk was there in the front row. Can you imagine being onstage with Jonas Salk in the front row? I did a fake séance and waved my arms around with Jonas looking at me. He saw me at a restaurant and complimented me on all the magic and monologues he’d seen me do. I told him to shut the fuck up, in those words. He wasn’t allowed to talk about stupid shit like our shows, when he had fucking helped eradicate polio. He laughed and talked about some bit we did on
SNL
. “What are you doing watching fucking TV? What, have you cured all diseases already? Fuck you, shut up, get to work.” I had to run and get my parents and sister on the phone and tell them I talked to Jonas Salk. I’ve met Lou Reed, but Jonas Salk, motherfucker. I just kept looking him in the eyes and trying to imagine what it felt like to help save that many lives. I can’t imagine it. I guess Jonas could have talked about it to Norman Borlaug, but it’s a short list. There’s a lot of debate about the Salk vaccine, but no matter whom you give what credit to, Dr. Salk was part of it. Doing card tricks for a living is stupid no matter who you’re talking to, but look Jonas Salk in the eyes, and it seems everyone else is doing stupid card tricks for a living.

Arno walked onstage with that kind of audience. I wasn’t fit to eat shit off anyone’s shoes in that crowd, but I was about halfway back on the aisle. I was still giggling about our goofy lunch when Arno began to speak. He started with something like, “I had lunch with Penn Jillette and he told me a great joke and tried to convince me to start my talk with it this afternoon.”

Jonas Salk started heckling, something like, “Tell the joke.”

Arno said that it was a great joke, and people should ask me to tell it to them during the break.

Someone else heckled him to tell the joke. Arno explained that it was an inappropriate joke and it was time for his prepared talk, which would take up all the allotted time.