A Couple of Eccentric Guys

I was in a Chinese restaurant in Philadelphia asking Wier Chrisemer about the origins of the Othmar Schoeck Memorial Society for the Preservation of Unusual and Disgusting Music. Chrisemer is the man to talk to about Othmar Schoeck. It was Chrisemer, after all, who brought Schoeck’s name to the attention of the general public, at least the general public of a portion of western Massachusetts. This was in 1970, when Chrisemer, then an Amherst College music major, was browsing in the record collection of the college radio station and came across an album of Schoeck’s music called “Lebendig Begraben,” or “Buried Alive.” Of such seemingly chance encounters, I reminded Chrisemer, is history made.

Listening to the album back then, Chrisemer had a strong suspicion why the music of Othmar Schoeck, a Swiss composer who died in 1957, was not familiar to him. “It was awful,” he told me. “It had no redeeming merit.” Chrisemer was also struck by the fact that Othmar Schoeck, whose picture was on the front of the album, could have been picked out of a large crowd as a Swiss composer of music that made you long for intermission: “He was in the standard pose of the composer leaning on his hand, but he had a rather fleshy face, and some of the flesh was hanging over the tops of his fingers.” Thus doubly inspired, Chrisemer decided that it would be appropriate to try to build Othmar Schoeck a cult following. When I was in college, I could have seen the logic in that myself. I think I can still see the logic in that.

Chrisemer figured that the core of Schoeck’s celebration would be two or three concerts a year at Amherst sponsored by the Othmar Schoeck Memorial Society for the Preservation of Unusual and Disgusting Music. The concerts did not go so far as to include any works by Othmar Schoeck. The pieces performed tended to be what Chrisemer describes as “arrangements of standard classical chestnuts for different instruments”—Beethoven’s Ninth for electric piano, prepared piano, saxophones, trash-can lids, recorders, electric bass guitar, nose flute, slide whistle, and chorus of four, for instance, or a Sousa march for a Baroque ensemble of recorder, harpsichord, cello continuo, and krummhorn. Chrisemer was serious about music—he abhorred the notion of basing humor on wrong notes—and eyewitnesses to Othmar Schoeck concerts have assured me that the most astonishing aspect of the arrangements was that they could strike a sympathetic ear as not simply funny but, somehow, just right.

In all but musical terms, the concerts were strongly Schoeckian. The program bore the logo of the Society, featuring a coffin to represent Schoeck’s death in an avalanche—the circumstances of the composer’s demise having been one of the embellishments Chrisemer contributed to a life that seemed a bit conventional for a cult hero. The program also included the Society’s motto—a German poem that went “Sehen wir Haufen von Hundedreck, wir denken an dir, Othmar Schoeck,” which Chrisemer translates as “Wherever we see piles of doggie-doo, O Othmar Schoeck, we think of you.” Chrisemer even went to the trouble of picking up a knockwurst at the Amherst dining hall before the first concert, keeping it in a drawer for longer than anyone has a right to keep a knockwurst in a drawer, and declaring it the Othmar Schoeck Memorial Knockwurst. At concerts, it was displayed in a separate room—resting in a custom-built case and guarded by a man who wore what looked very much like the uniform of an officer in the United States Coast Guard.

“In fact, I still have the Othmar Schoeck Memorial Knockwurst,” Chrisemer said that evening at dinner.

I calculated that the knockwurst would be about eighteen years old. “How does it look?” I asked.

“About the same,” Chrisemer said.

Running along with the musical numbers in an Othmar Schoeck concert were various “bits of business”— often, Chrisemer cheerfully admits, based on jokes that were not immediately comprehensible to most of those in the audience. In the final year of the concerts, when Chrisemer had graduated and was working in a stereo store in nearby Greenfield, Massachusetts, the bits included an extremely tall teenager riding across the stage on a unicycle as part of Chrisemer’s interpretation of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The unicyclist was someone Chrisemer had met at the stereo store —a recent graduate of Greenfield High School named Penn Jillette, who had completed his higher education at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College. Jillette also participated in the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by juggling some balls above a large bass drum and letting one drop onto the drum on the appropriate beat: “Oh, say can you see [BOOM] by the dawn’s early light [BOOM] . . .”

One of the people who had helped with the staging of that concert was a close Amherst friend of Chrisemer’s who was by then teaching high-school Latin in New Jersey. Even as a college magician doing a silent and rather arty act at fraternity parties, he had taken to using only his last name—Teller. (The act was silent partly as a means of deflecting hecklers and partly as a means of increasing its artiness.) In the lobby at intermission, the silent Teller, outfitted with a cane and dark glasses, sold Othmar Schoeck pencils.

It was the presence of Penn Jillette and Teller that had piqued my curiosity about the Othmar Schoeck concerts. Eventually, the two of them teamed up with Wier Chrisemer to form “The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society”—a show that blended Teller’s magic tricks and Jillette’s juggling and Chrisemer’s odd musical arrangements into an evening of neo-Schoeckian humor. Eventually, “The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society” transformed itself, without Chrisemer, into a theatrical performance called “Penn & Teller,” which had successful runs Off Broadway and on, and is now in Chicago on national tour. It’s a performance that critics find so difficult to describe that the Obie it won when it was Off Broadway was given to Penn and Teller for “whatever it is they do.” Trying to describe a show that somehow presents carnival stunts and magic tricks in a way that is funny and menacing at the same time, critics often fall back on the description of the principals which Penn himself offers at the beginning of the evening—“a couple of eccentric guys who have learned to do a few cool things.” Toward the end of the evening, Penn only adds to the confusion by saying, “The question we want you to ask yourself is not how we do these tricks but why we do them.” But the question that I wanted to ask—and the reason I was talking history with Wier Chrisemer in a Chinese restaurant in Philadelphia—was neither of those. It was “How did you guys get that way?”

Like most occasional Off Broadway ticket buyers, I am not drawn to magic acts. Until I ran across Penn and Teller, my only experience with magicians in some years had been a brief sidewalk encounter during which I asked Harry Blackstone, Jr., to turn my younger daughter, Sarah, into an elephant. The incident involving Blackstone took place a few years ago, when Sarah was twelve or thirteen. One spring afternoon, we happened to be standing in front of our house when a taxi stopped and Harry Blackstone, Jr., emerged. He was visiting a neighbor of ours named Charles Reynolds, who is a producer of magic effects, a scholar of magic, and a consultant on magic to productions ranging from Broadway musicals to touring rock acts. Charles, who had come out to greet his guest, introduced us. Even without being a close follower of the magic game, I knew that Harry Blackstone, Jr., is regarded as one of the finest magicians in the country—the leading exemplar of the formal tradition of grand illusion—so it seemed natural to ask him for a real stunner. Blackstone declined to turn Sarah into an elephant—“Either he couldn’t or he wouldn’t,” I’ve always said in my carefully balanced account of the incident—but he declined with great aplomb, pointing out to me that an elephant is one of the few beasts that require more upkeep than a teen-ager.

I admire the skill of a first-rank magician like Blackstone, but in general I’m not someone who is entertained by being astounded. Also, a lot of magicians have in common with a lot of people in children’s theatre the habit of performing with the sort of broad gesture that seems based on the assumption that the entire audience is one rather slow-witted person in the back row. When “Penn & Teller” first opened in New York, in 1985, at a small Off Broadway house called the Westside Arts, I didn’t rush right over. I had heard vaguely that Penn and Teller were magicians, and I had further heard that one of them didn’t speak—a report leaving open the dread possibility that he was a mime. It’s no secret by now that I would subject myself to a thousand hours of American Legion Hall magicians rather than endure ten minutes in the presence of the world’s most accomplished mime. In my less restrained moments, I have gone so far as to suggest that people performing mime in public be subject to citizen’s arrest, on the theory that the normal First Amendment protection of free speech has in effect been waived by someone who has formally adopted a policy of not speaking.

I was finally lured to the Westside Arts by the reviews—a collection of all-out raves. (In this magazine Edith Oliver called her notice “more fan letter than review.”) Some of the critics mentioned the dark, and even terrifying, side of the show. It begins with Teller suspended upside down in a straitjacket over a bed of spikes; it ends up with Penn on a darkened stage eating fire and talking about how at the Franklin County Fair he always felt himself drawn into the sideshow tent to see the freaks and fire-eaters while his high-school buddies waited outside. But what attracted me was the general agreement that Penn and Teller were terribly funny. In my experience, a funny magician is so rare that an innovative entrepreneur might be able to attract a crowd simply by announcing that he had one on the premises, in the way those roadside zoos next to filling stations along Route 66 used to put out signs saying “SEE ALBINO RACCOON.”

Like most people seeing Penn and Teller for the first time, I was struck by their appearance. Both of them were dressed in gray business suits and red ties. Penn is six feet six, nearly a foot taller than his partner, and happens to be that rare person to whom the word “shambling” can be appropriately applied—although he also crosses the stage at times in a style of locomotion he describes, quite accurately, as grooving. His hairdo included a sort of frizzy ponytail and another fistful of hair tumbling over his forehead. He wore clear polish on all but one fingernail, and that one was painted red. Penn referred to neither his hair nor his fingernail during the act, but when the subject of his being asked to cut his hair for a movie role came up a year or so later—in an interview with Kevin Kelly, of the Boston Globe—he offered a comment on his appearance that I think of as typical of his showier offstage remarks: “Hey! All I care about is my hair and fingernails! Everything else is just affectation.” A couple of years after that, I happened to be standing next to Penn while he was chatting with members of the audience during intermission—chatting with the audience during intermission is routine for Penn and Teller, as is hawking T-shirts in the lobby after the show—and a man who appeared to be just a shade over five feet tall asked him directly what the significance of having one red fingernail was. Penn looked down at the man and said, in the same cheerful voice he had used to answer other inquiries, “It means I once killed a man for asking personal questions.”

After I saw that first performance, it occurred to me that Penn’s fingernail was one of the few subjects he didn’t get around to onstage. The words just poured out of him—a constant, aggressive, consciously hip, often overbearing, occasionally hostile flow that sometimes sounded like the language of a man on the street corner up to no good and sometimes like the language of the world’s leading academic authority on Run D.M.C. Teller, on the other hand, said virtually nothing except what he said behind his hand as the voice of a creature called MOFO, the Psychic Gorilla. But he was no mime. He was simply a subtly expressive man who didn’t seem to feel the need to say anything. He was definitely a magician. In one elegant number, unlike anything I’d ever seen, he silently dismantled a rose by cutting away at the shadow cast on a screen behind it. In another number, he swallowed a hundred embroidery needles, a few dozen at a time, topped them off with some thread, and then pulled out of his mouth a thread glistening with needles. The swallowing of each batch of needles produced a series of squirms and grimaces that I can describe only as high peristaltic drama. For me, the expression signalling that the needles had reached their destination—an expression part triumph, part blissful relief—was the high point of the show. I have seen Teller swallow needles any number of times since, and I have laughed out loud at that expression every single time.

The show also included numbers that were built on such magic effects as levitating a volunteer from the audience and guessing the card that someone had chosen from the deck, but it didn’t feel like a magic show—and not simply because Penn announced explicitly at the beginning of the evening that the audience would not be seeing the sort of magic associated with “some greasy guy in a tux with a lot of birds.” For one thing, the show avoided the “make-believe,” as magicians sometimes call it, that what was taking place was magical—the make-believe advanced by the magician who ends each trick by drawing attention to the miraculously empty cage or the miraculously unsawed-up assistant with what Penn sometimes calls “Vanna White hand gestures.” Explaining toward the end of the evening that everything in the show is a trick, Penn said, “That woman we had floating up in the air, she wasn’t hypnotized. You want to try that at home, get a couple of chairs, clear your mind, study Zen, and you’ll break your ass!” Penn’s version of “Abracadabra!” was a muttered “Now I give the cards another false cut.” He referred to magic effects not as wonders but as cons or swindles. Early in the show, he and Teller did the traditional cups-and-balls trick with clear-plastic cups and a running commentary on precisely how the trick was being done—although after seeing that demonstration several times about all I know about the cups-and-balls trick is that I wouldn’t have the manual dexterity to do it.

Penn and Teller had a relationship with the audience that seemed to me less characteristic of magicians than of street performers—which they both once were. They treated the crowd with the cheeky familiarity of some itinerant juggler who shares with those gathered around him the unspoken understanding that at the end of the act he will not only ask for donations but also make fun of them for not donating enough. Street performers tend to include the crowd in a commentary on the performance that becomes a central part of the performance. Carrying that attitude to the Westside Arts meant that the Penn and Teller show was partly about being at a show. “Is it your birthday or anniversary or anything?” Penn asked one volunteer from the audience, who had already testified that he knew nobody connected to the show. “What I’m getting at, Joe, is there any reason that one of your wacky, wild, zippy, zany friends—and I know you’ve got ’em, Joe—any reason why them friends would have hired two hundred and forty-three unemployed Equity actors to sit in these seats and act like they’re watching a show just to blow your mind, freak you out, mess with that gray matter? Is it possible you’re the only one here that bought a ticket and everyone else is cast? No wonder we’re always sold out, Joe: it’s one ticket!”

A few months after I saw “Penn & Teller” at the Westside Arts, I had occasion to meet both Penn and Teller. They became involved in an educational film that my wife co-produced. Offstage, they seemed more or less consistent with their roles in the show. Teller talked, of course—lucidly, but not at length. Penn talked at great length, and sometimes lucidly. They were both analytical; it was obvious that their act, which seemed so free-wheeling, had been thought through to the tiniest detail. The educational film was about how artists create the illusion of depth on a flat surface, and Teller came up with a remarkable number of entertaining ways to demonstrate that phenomenon. Sarah met Penn and Teller, and thought they were both cool, although Penn made it clear that he found her taste in rock music a bit tame.

Before going any further, I’m afraid I have to report that Penn was once caught deflating his résumé. It’s not an infraction you come across much these days, but Penn is an unusual sort of guy. This came about because of the great pleasure Penn takes in describing the total rebel he was as a high-school student—a walking disruption, who was a lot more interested in playing punk-rock music and flaunting his long hair than he was in handing in the assigned homework. Describing his teen-age years to Kevin Kelly, of the Globe, in 1986, Penn said that he had been kicked out of Greenfield High School. Kelly phoned Edward Jones, the principal of Greenfield High School, who told him that Penn had graduated at the normal time with good marks. Penn just shook his head when I reminded him of the incident. “It was the greatest day in Ed Jones’s life,” he said. “He got his name in the Globe and he got to call me a liar at the same time.”

Penn is not exactly a liar, but he is not absolutely wed to the facts of a story if they interfere with the general theme. The general theme of stories he tells about life in Greenfield is his rebelliousness, and he likes to begin those stories with phrases like “If I happened to be wearing eye makeup to school that day . . .” He is also attached to the allied theme of being uneducated in the formal sense, particularly compared with the erudite Teller—and, in “Asparagus Valley” days, with the equally erudite Wier Chrisemer. In 1977, when John Corr, of the Philadelphia Inquirer, paid a visit to an old mansion in Lambertville, New Jersey, that seemed to be serving as home for just about everybody with any connection to the “Asparagus” troupe except Chrisemer (“I have a limited tolerance for squalor”), Penn told him, “I’m the only one of the group who is not overqualified.” Onstage in the “Asparagus Valley” show, Penn not only identified Chrisemer as a magna-cum-laude graduate of Amherst but mentioned his S.A.T. scores. Penn says that when he and his partners formed “Asparagus Valley,” in 1975, they made a pact prohibiting any jobs outside show business—a pact he now sees as “my way of pulling them down to my level: I was the only one who had no other skills.”

Chrisemer told me that it was not exactly a pact and not exactly a prohibition, but Penn is not a man who has much use for qualifying phrases. Although he speaks admiringly of few performers, if he does admire someone—the comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, for instance, who also happens to be a favorite of Sarah’s—he tends to express that admiration by saying simply, “Bobcat Goldthwait is a god.” Penn also has a penchant for praising performances that you wouldn’t think were his sort of thing—the night-club act of Dean Martin, say, or the launching of a NASA space probe. Not long ago, I happened to be with Penn when the name of Liberace came up. Several of us were standing in a hall at NBC, waiting for a taping of “Late Night with David Letterman” to begin. Since the Westside Arts run, Penn and Teller have been regular guests on Letterman and “Saturday Night Live,” and they made their biggest television splash by emancipating a small bag of cockroaches on Letterman’s desk. At the taping we were waiting for, they were hoping to outdo that with a little trick involving bloodsucking leeches.

“I loved Liberace,” Penn said. “He was doing what the Rolling Stones tried to do, but he was doing it right.”

A couple of people nodded slowly. Someone muttered, “In a manner of speaking.”

Even Edward Jones has acknowledged that Penn was a character in high school. Penn remembers having the second-longest hair in the school. The longest hair, he has always been willing to admit, was on the head of Marc Garland, who now presides over props and other backstage matters for “Penn & Teller”—a position identified in the program as Director of Covert Activities. Penn’s admission does not in any way mean that he cedes Garland any leadership in the bad-attitude department. (“I was a troublemaker and he wasn’t.”) So far, Garland has been spared the experience of hearing his S.A.T. scores discussed from the stage, but in telling the audience the enormous contribution the Director of Covert Activities makes to the show Penn has been known to work in the information that Garland was elected president of the senior class. Penn says they became close only after the election. “He would never have been elected senior-class president if he had been my friend then,” Penn once told me, with some pride. Garland bears other marks of overt respectability. He acknowledges being a college graduate, for instance, and he is the son of a doctor. Penn insists that his association with Garland is the only way folks in Greenfield can explain the success of a rebellious cutup like Penn Jillette: “This talentless lump of flesh has been dragged to stardom by Marc Garland.”

“Penn was just outrageous,” Garland says now, recalling high-school days in Greenfield. “He had all this creative energy. He was out of his mind with ideas—maybe not even ideas, but ideas that he wanted to have ideas— and here he was stuck in this very straight, for him oppressive atmosphere. So he was the crazy: too loud, too much energy, too crazily dressed.” Even his choice of a sympathetic grownup to talk to was unusual—John Norton, who sold ice-cream bars out of a decorated truck called the Ding Dong Cart. An educated man who had worked as a parole officer, Norton answered Penn’s questions about books and discussed any subject Penn wanted to discuss and never mentioned Penn’s appearance. That must have taken some doing. As Norton remembers his first glimpse of Penn, “I saw this tall, gawky, fright-wig-hair sort of kid riding a unicycle and juggling. Which caught my eye.”

Penn had never been in much danger of becoming the typical American boy. He was an ungainly child, taller than his teachers before he got out of grade school. His parents were considerably older than those of his classmates; his only sibling, a sister, was twenty-three when he was born. His father worked for some years as a guard at the Franklin County jail, but quit at fifty-five to devote full time to trading in coins. When I met him, at the opening night of “Penn & Teller” in Boston, he gave me a business card that said “Why Don’t ‘Jillette’ Me Have Your Coin Business?” If I had any coin business, I would. Almost everyone who meets the elder Jillette and his wife seems to use the same phrase to describe them—“the salt of the earth.” Penn’s life toward the end of grade school was covered in a high-school essay he wrote in the third person for a sympathetic English teacher named Beverly Adler Lucey, who became a close friend: “He smiled a lot and was called ‘goofy,’ walked kinda funny and was called ‘Froggy’ (affectionately of course) and was rotten at sports, so he had for friends a kid who longed to play kickball but had 30 pound braces on his legs, a curly-haired kid who never knew why he hung around with Penn, and anyone else who could be conned into sitting out a kickball game. He had 47 strikes against him from the beginning—the major one of which was not being aware he had all these strikes against him.”

If Edward Jones had been a truly vengeful sort of high-school principal, he could have said something about Penn even more embarrassing than the fact that he had graduated in good standing with his class: he was never in any serious trouble. John Norton, the Ding Dong man, remembers him as “a lamb in wolf’s clothing.” According to Marc Garland, “Penn would hang out with all the guys who did drugs and were very harmful to themselves, and then he never did any of it. He was always under control.” Penn might maintain that he was too much of a weirdo to have hung out with anybody, but he wouldn’t deny having always had an abhorrence of drugs. He says that he decided at the age of twelve or thirteen never to drink or take drugs. At the time, he recalls, Frank Zappa, someone whose music and antics Penn admired, was talking against drugs “from a condescending point of view rather than from a goody-goody point of view.” At that age, Penn also blamed drugs for killing his one true hero, Lenny Bruce—although, he acknowledges, “I blame every other addict for his own problems.”

Penn has also publicly confessed a deep affection for his parents. Teller, too, dotes on his parents. “It’s such a wild thing they do,” I was once told by Teller’s mother, who actually doesn’t know quite how wild it is, since she can’t bear to keep her eyes open during the dangerous parts of the show. “You’d think they’d be hardboiled. But they’re not—not toward their parents.” Readers of a Playboy interview with Penn and Teller in 1987 must have been surprised to find that it ended with Penn saying, “Please let us say something nice about how wonderful our parents are”—just as fans who ask what a manic talker like Penn could be on are surprised to be told that he is on Diet Coke. In fact, Penn and Teller treat all older people with great respect. After the opening night of the show in Boston—an event that drew some rather exotic punk fans as well as a number of older people, many of whom had come on a chartered-bus trip from Greenfield organized by Marc Garland’s mother—Penn confessed to me, “I like both kinds of people with blue hair.” In a way, I suppose, the most surprising thing about Penn and Teller—performers who once called themselves “The Bad Boys of Magic,” and have been called by others hip and cynical and nihilistic, and even sadomasochistic—is that they are, in some old-fashioned ways, pretty good boys.

Teller has never even claimed to have been a rebellious teen-ager, but he’ll bow to no one when it comes to having been an outsider. Teller was an accomplished magician by the time he got to high school—which, as Penn once said about skill in juggling, is another way of saying, “I have a terrible social life. I’m not normal. I spend all my time practicing.” By his own account, Teller spent a lot of time alone in his room. “He always seemed to isolate himself,” Teller’s mother has said. The family lived in a row house in center-city Philadelphia. Teller was an only child—a late arrival to people who had reached the age at which they assumed they would be childless. Teller’s parents had met at art school in Philadelphia; his father eventually found work doing lettering for advertisements. Teller thinks of them both as bohemians who worked hard at doing what parents in conventional families do—father building a puppet stage for his son’s show, mother ordering a little magic set from “Howdy Doody” when her son displayed an interest in magic. The magic set was obtained when Teller was five. “From then on,” his mother said not long ago, “his whole life was in terms of magic. Even he is a mystery to us.”

Teller was interested in Edgar Allan Poe rather than Lenny Bruce. He went to Central High School, a legendary high-aptitude public school, and it never occurred to him not to go to college. He didn’t show up at school in the sort of clothing and haircut that would make him notorious. In fact, he was the sort of quiet, slight, rather shy young man who doesn’t make much of an impression on his classmates at all. What he did have in common with Penn, in addition to a high tolerance for practice, was an outsider’s instinct for finding an adult to talk to—in Teller’s case, an English teacher named David Rosenbaum, who ran the dramatic society. Rosenbaum, a magician himself, believes that a properly structured magic act is “a tiny drama reporting something that can’t happen,” but he and Teller often talked about principles that Rosenbaum could apply to any sort of dramatic performance. They still do. Rosenbaum is a strong believer in a theory of dramatic structure propounded by Aristotle and tinkered with a bit by Nietzsche—the tragic rhythm of mimesis praxeos (prologue), agon (conflict), mimesis peripeteias (reversal), pathos sparagmos (suffering and dismemberment), and epiphany. He has no trouble at all doing a close textual analysis of, say, “The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society” according to the theory—seeing a “two-level epiphany” in the combination of a knife-throwing parody and a rendition of Khatchaturian’s “Sabre Dance” that included Penn juggling plumbers’ plungers.

Rosenbaum is retired now, but he still goes into Central on Wednesday afternoons to meet with the magic club. He lives right across the street from the school, in an apartment that includes, in no discernible order, a non-reversing mirror and a clock that runs counterclockwise and a spittoon and a lot of pasteboard boxes and a heavy layer of dust. (“I’m allergic to dust, so rather than stir it up I leave it on the floor and walk quietly.”) He does some writing, and he works on his magic act, which he performs annually for the Lombard Swimming Club. After some years of discussion, Teller persuaded him to change the character in the act from a cheeky Irish teenager—the character that already existed when Rosenbaum got the act, many years ago, from a cheeky Irish teenager—to a Scottish magician whose body has been inhabited by the Devil. Apparently, Rosenbaum always had a certain resemblance to the common notion of what Satan looks like, and, with the trim of a goatee here and the addition of a devilish waistcoat there, he began trying to heighten the resemblance. At this point, he looks enough like the Prince of Darkness to throw a scare into people who might have once made some rash promises they’d just as soon forget.

Even in college, where Teller spent a lot of time working on his magic act, he saw his future life as something like the life lived by David Rosenbaum—high-school teaching, with some performing on the side. By chance, Penn says that he, too, saw the life of his grownup friend as a model: Penn could see himself making a living by doing something that didn’t take a lot of concentration, such as selling ice cream from a truck, and spending the rest of his time writing stories that were heavily influenced by Lenny Bruce. In fact, Penn eventually did drive his own Ding Dong Cart, but not for long. Teller, though, taught Latin for four years, with very little performing on the side. Having just been given tenure, he resisted Penn’s pestering before, in 1975, he finally agreed to take a one-year leave of absence to do magic, starting with a Renaissance festival in Minnesota. Teller thinks that without the push from Penn he might still be teaching Latin. Rosenbaum thinks that might be true—partly because Teller’s aspirations in magic went so far beyond being a run-of-the-mill magician. “Teller saw himself—and, I think, justifiably—as among the greats,” Rosenbaum told me. “The single name has something to do with that: there was a great magician named Heller and a great magician named Kellar. The kind of success that Teller’s vision insisted upon seems too grandiose to be possible. It looks like a fantasy. You need gall to think you can do it.” It isn’t clear that Teller had that kind of gall. Fortunately for him, Penn had gall enough for two.

I would describe Teller now as more of a grownup—more of a grownup, that is, than Penn. Teller has bought himself a house in Westchester. He lives there with a friend, and he enjoys, say, building a stone wall next to the garden. He often listens to music composed by people who are dead—and not as a result of a drug overdose. He almost never goes to more than one movie a day. All those are what I think of as grownup characteristics. Teller is seven years older than Penn, of course, but then these matters are not always strictly chronological. It may be that Penn will be more like Teller in seven years, but I rather doubt it.

Penn’s offstage life is easy to imagine. Think of what would happen if an exceedingly smart teen-ager were suddenly told that from now on he’s going to have no school, a lot of disposable income, and a job that leaves him free all day. You’ve got it. Penn goes to a lot of movies. He has a rock band. When I spent some time with him in New York last fall, just before “Penn & Teller” began its national tour, he was romantically involved (if that phrase can be applied to Penn) with an actress who happened to be off in California pursuing her own career, so he spent a lot of time hanging out with the guys. He and the guys would sometimes drop into record stores or the Times Square porn emporiums. Mostly, they went to the movies.

Penn and his friends may go to a movie any day of the week, but when he’s in New York he always goes to a Times Square movie house at midnight on Friday. It’s more than a habit; it’s a ritual. The ritual is called Movie Night. It begins at the Howard Johnson’s in Times Square at ten-thirty. Penn is partial to the Times Square Howard Johnson’s. That may be partly because he once washed dishes at a HoJo’s. It may be partly because eating at Howard Johnson’s sets him apart from the sort of people who go to restaurants that serve whole-grain bread—the sort of people he suspects of believing in the healing power of crystals and of not appreciating the wonders wrought by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It may be partly because when he and Marc Garland first went to Howard Johnson’s on Times Square at ten-thirty, after a Westside Arts performance, the service was so bad that the timing worked out perfectly for a midnight movie.

No announcements are made about Movie Night. Anybody who wants to participate simply shows up at the Times Square Howard Johnson’s at ten-thirty. The night I went, there were a dozen or so people—Penn, Marc Garland, a few film students from N.Y.U., a young woman who had done a piece for Rolling Stone on the movie Penn and Teller have made, and a comedy writer named Eddie Gorodetsky, who collaborated with Penn and Teller on a sort of how-to video called “Penn & Teller’s Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends.” A lot of the dinner-table discussion was about movies—particularly “Leonard: Part VI,” which the Movie Night regulars found so bad that they saw it three Fridays in a row. Everyone at the table seemed excited about the prospect of another Movie Night. “Actually, Movie Night is too big a part of my life,” one of the students said to the table at large. “It’s because the rest of my life sucks.”

The rules surrounding Movie Night are strict. Joining the gang at HoJo’s for a late supper of fried clams and then skipping the movie is not done. “It’s called Movie Night,” Penn reminded me when I said that I wasn’t sure I was up to going to a movie that starts at midnight. When the Motion Picture Association rating symbol flashes on the screen to indicate that a preview is about to be shown, all Movie Night patrons always say “Yessss.” (That custom started as a simple expression of anticipation, I was told by Penn, who added, “The fact that previews are better than movies is so obvious it’s not even an observation.”) If the title of the movie is mentioned in the movie, it is always greeted by Movie Night people with polite applause. I’m still not clear as to how that custom began, but I do know that it leads to a lot of applause in a movie like “Wall Street.” Perhaps the most important rule is that Movie Night people always sit in the first row. Penn told me that the Movie Night gang once arrived to find a young man sitting in the first row. Somebody explained to him that he was certainly welcome to stay as long as he understood that certain Movie Night rules would be observed around him, and that he’d be expected to help pass the candy that gets handed back and forth so constantly at Movie Night that its presence is practically another rule. He decided to stay, and became a regular.

Neither the drawn-out affirmative that greets previews or the applause at the mention of the title draws any attention from the rest of the audience. You’d have to do a lot more than that to be noticed at a Friday-night midnight show in Times Square. The patrons are not shy. Some of them play their beat boxes right up to the time the lights are lowered. A lot of them comment freely on the movie while it’s going on. Hooting is a common form of response to whatever’s happening on the screen. Just before the movie starts, the theatre looks and sounds a bit like the subway station underneath it—people milling around, radios playing, an occasional argument breaking out. I’m told that every so often, just before the lights dim, Eddie Gorodetsky leaps up from his front-row seat, turns around to face the audience, and, in his best film-festival manner, delivers a film analysis that starts with something like “Tonight’s film is a delightful comedy romp . . .” Apparently, the Movie Night crowd loves it, partly because nobody else pays the slightest attention.

I agree with Penn that building an act on extraordinary skill at what he sometimes calls “cheap circus schlock”—juggling, acrobatics, clowning, magic, sword-swallowing, fire-eating—is an outsider’s game. The homecoming queen and the president of the student council simply have better things to do. Penn spent a lot of his childhood practicing. He has often said that he did nothing but practice juggling from the age of twelve to the age of fifteen, at which point he discovered that it wasn’t cool. Then, apparently, he spent only most of his time practicing juggling, leaving some time to practice the unicycle. In Greenfield, Penn happened to live next door to brothers named Colin and Michael Moschen, and in high school the three boys had a juggling act that played the occasional nursing-home date or school assembly. Michael Moschen is now a renowned juggler, who has been called by the Times “a sculptor in motion.” Although it’s not easy to imagine Penn as the partner of a juggler whose act is so rarefied that he is sometimes described as a “movement artist,” the two of them once spent months in a cheap East Village apartment trying to perfect an act highlighted by the passing of nine clubs between them. “We had heard that no jugglers had ever done that before,” Penn told me, “so we figured that as soon as we passed nine clubs the world would beat a path to our door.” Eventually, they did pass nine clubs between them, and, as it turned out, nobody much cared. Penn took that as an early lesson in the ways of show business.

Moschen and Penn ended up doing their act at Great Adventure, in New Jersey, and then Penn worked on the street in Philadelphia as a single. By all accounts, Penn’s street act—which featured the juggling of knives the size of smallish broadswords—was spectacular. In 1977, when he was performing next to a hot-dog stand in the New-market shopping area of Philadelphia, a piece in the Inquirer said that he was “the best thing to hit the scene since hot mustard.” It also said that he drew crowds because “he is too obnoxiously loud to be ignored,” and that he spent money “as fast as he makes it on movies.” According to Teller, Penn had a perfectly structured street act—“the tightest and most magnificent twelve minutes that anyone had ever seen on the street.” Penn was loud and he was funny and he was good at the delicate game of separating spectators from their money at the end of the act. “Remember,” he’d say as he passed the hat, “I’m six-six, I have three very sharp knives, and I have an excellent memory.”

Penn no longer juggles at all in “Penn & Teller.” His last juggling number was cut between the Westside Arts run and Broadway. “My father hates that,” Penn told me when I mentioned the absence of juggling. “He thinks everyone will think that I can’t do anything except talk.” I suspect that Penn has some lingering sympathy for that viewpoint himself—although he and Teller are dismayed when they’re mentioned as part of the New Vaudeville, a group of performers who tend to base their acts on mastering the traditional carnival skills. (Teller once dismissed the New Vaudeville as “a bunch of aging hippies looking at old pictures of W. C. Fields.”) From childhood, he and Teller, both obsessive practicers and incurable perfectionists, seem to have operated in the belief that any performance rests on an extraordinary level of pure skill. Just before the national tour of “Penn & Teller” opened in Boston, Penn mentioned to me that Teller was now better at the needle trick than he had been when I last saw the show—on the opening night of the Broadway run. I said that was hard to believe. Teller has been doing the needle trick since college. One statement in Penn’s monologue that may be literally true is that seeing Teller do the needle trick fourteen years ago was what convinced him that he absolutely had to work with Teller. Even before Broadway, Penn had seen Teller do the needle trick a couple of thousand times. “It’s better,” Penn insisted. “Teller manages to get more across with subtler moves. He’s been working on it.”

It’s natural for street performers to extract humor from the fact that whatever skill they have managed to master in those years of practicing is not generally considered worth anybody’s time. Even now, about the nicest thing that Penn ever says about juggling or magic or ventriloquism or acrobatics is that they are “intrinsically boring.” Penn’s juggling act always included a harsh view of where juggling stood among the minor theatrical arts, and a harsh view of those who did it in public. When he did his trademark knife-juggling number in “Asparagus Valley,” he used to say, “What I think about when I’m watching a routine like this is what kind of mental or physical inadequacies would force a person to take up such a self-destructive, exhibitionist form of overcompensation.” In fact, the relationship that street performers strike up with their audience is based partly on the assumption that everyone involved is hip enough to realize that in the great scheme of things light entertainment of any kind is not of earthshaking importance. At one point in the current version of “Penn & Teller,” Teller’s insistence on staying submerged in a water tank until Penn is able to divine the proper card seems to have led to his drowning, and Penn says that you have to admire “the little creep” for being willing “to die for a principle he believed in, albeit an insignificant card trick.”

Now that magic has supplanted Penn’s juggling and Chrisemer’s performance on the pipe organ and the xylophone as the foundation the show is built on, all of Penn’s disdain for the intrinsically boring skills has been channelled into an attitude toward magic that is often expressed by the description of “Penn & Teller” as “the magic show for people who hate magic.” In the show and in interviews, Penn goes out of his way to make fun of magicians like Doug Henning and David Copperfield; in a recent Penthouse interview he said that for the past forty or fifty years magic in this country had been “controlled by retards.” It makes sense commercially, of course, for Penn and Teller to put some distance between themselves and the greasy guy in a tux with a lot of birds. One thing that Richard Frankel, the producer who brought “Penn & Teller” to New York, insisted on was that they drop the sobriquet “The Bad Boys of Magic”; he considered the very word “magic” box-office poison. As it happens, though, Teller does believe that conventional American magicians are mired in a style of magic that was fresh and interesting only around the time it was invented—in the mid-nineteenth century, by the French magician Robert-Houdin, who revolutionized magic by discarding the magician’s traditional flowing robes and mysteries-of-the-East presentation in favor of modern devices and the same sort of evening clothes that the gentlemen in the audience were wearing. Penn and Teller see their style as rejecting the assumption that “the people in the audience are ignorant savages who will fall at our feet and worship us for performing supernatural miracles.” Penn may enjoy describing the “Penn & Teller” approach to magic as tipping the gaff; Teller can also describe it as the same sort of departure that was made by Robert-Houdin.

Before Penn and Teller perform the cups-and-balls trick with clear-plastic cups, Penn talks about an enraged magician (“some guy who works cruise ships”) who confronted them in the lobby one night and accused them of betraying their colleagues by revealing tricks. I asked Charles Reynolds if some magicians were genuinely upset by such revelations—we were having lunch so that I could exploit the rare privilege of having an authority right in the neighborhood—and he said that they were indeed. He later sent me a two-issue interview on the subject in a newsletter called Stan Allen’s Inside Magic. In the interchange, Penn and Teller maintained that they actually gave away virtually nothing that the audience didn’t already know (“If anybody is performing magic thinking that when they handle a deck of cards people think they’re handling them in a completely fair and normal way, they’re just kidding themselves,” Penn said. “If you don’t know that anyone else knows where Argentina is, that’s your problem”), and some readers maintained that Penn and Teller were, among other things, “insulting, egotistical, stuckup geeks.” Charles himself believes that Penn and Teller are an over-all benefit to the trade, since they send audiences away from a magic show in a happy state. He thinks that many magicians of the first rank share that belief, even if they sometimes find the constant magician-bashing tiresome. In Charles’s view, the magicians who become furious when Penn explains how a card is “forced” or how a cup is “loaded” have an outsized notion of how much people in the audience learn from having a trick explained to them, and how much they care.

From what Charles told me, I gather that anybody willing to read enough books can find out how most magic tricks are done—which still leaves the problem of doing them, of course. According to Charles, virtually all magic acts lean heavily on the same dozen or so basic effects—what varies is simply what magicians call the presentation—and almost all those effects were being produced in Victorian times. It’s rare for a magician simply to invent an effect, Charles told me, but Teller apparently invented the effect in which he destroys a rose by cutting into its shadow. (“I can recall some night when I was probably sixteen or seventeen,“ Teller told me when I asked him about the origin of the trick he calls Shadows. ”I was doing the sort of thing that I used to do in those days, which was sitting around alone by melodramatic candlelight. I had this set of Playskool blocks, and when I piled the blocks up I noticed that the candlelight was casting a shadow on the wall, and the idea just occurred to me to go up and touch the shadow and flick the blocks at the same time, so the blocks would tumble down. And they clattered down with this wonderfully skeletal sound. And I thought, God! There’s got to be something to do with this!”) Charles believes that Teller’s Shadows and Harry Blackstone’s Floating Light Bulb are the two outstanding moments in American magic.

The needles trick is not unique, Charles told me, but Teller is the first magician to give it national prominence since Houdini used it as one of the featured effects of his show at the Hippodrome in 1918. (On what was then the largest stage in the world, Houdini said he would perform both the largest and the smallest feats of magic; the other featured trick was the vanishing of an elephant.) In a book Charles wrote with Doug Henning he said that there is some dispute about where Houdini got the needles trick. Houdini himself once said he got it from a couple of Hindu conjurers at the 1893 World’s Fair, in Chicago; others have concluded that he picked it up from a sideshow entertainer called Maxie the Needle King. Since Houdini’s time, some magicians have done the trick with razor blades, on the theory that razor blades would be easier than needles for the audience to see—a variation that David Rosenbaum finds less satisfying, since the “story” of needles appearing on a thread is much more satisfying. A magician named Marvin Roy does the trick with tiny light bulbs, which emerge lighted on a wire. Charles says that the secret of Houdini’s needles trick has been explained in any number of magic books; in 1898 Houdini’s own magic book offered it for five dollars. Apparently, though, Teller figured out a better way to do the trick, and, according to David Rosenbaum, if Houdini saw Teller perform it now he wouldn’t know how it was done. As Penn said in Boston, Teller has been working on that trick.

The needles trick is not actually one of Charles’s favorite effects—he sometimes refers to it as “oral magic”—but he admires Teller’s presentation of it. In fact, he has great admiration in general for Teller as a serious magician. Penn, of course, also sees Teller as an extraordinary magician—the sort of magician who can invent Shadows because he begins by thinking of what he wants to do and then works backward to figure out how to do it. “Shadows is a pure statement of Teller’s taste,” Penn once told me. “Fire-eating is a clear statement of me. And they’re back to back in the show. The fact that his is better I’ve been able to put aside.” When I mentioned to Penn one day that Charles Reynolds thinks of Teller as among the finest half-dozen magicians now working, Penn said, “Teller’s one of the three best magic minds alive today, and the two others don’t have taste.”

“We were very grandiose,” Penn said. “Wier was intellectually grandiose, Teller was artistically grandiose, and I was just grandiose.”

Penn, Eddie Gorodetsky, my wife, and I were at Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem the afternoon after I attended Movie Night. The plan was to have lunch, then drop Penn and Gorodetsky in Times Square on the way home so that they could go to another movie. Penn was recalling the days when “The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society” was formed. “I had unbounded energy and unfounded confidence,” he went on.

“And unprofessional makeup,” Gorodetsky said.

At Chrisemer’s suggestion, Penn had looked up Teller in New Jersey, and they had taken to having dinner together whenever Teller came into New York—long, necessarily cheap dinners that revolved around acid analyses of whatever was being offered up in the way of entertainment in New York. The assumption that they could do better than the performances they were discussing was an unspoken premise of the dinner-table conversation, and by the time Penn and Teller drove out to the Renaissance festival in Minnesota it was understood that in addition to doing their separate acts they would be working together on writing a show. The show’s name came from a stretch of the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts that got its sobriquet in the days before absolutely everything was grown in California—the Asparagus Valley.

I finally went to a Renaissance festival last fall, after years of hearing them described as a triumph of American packaging. The one I attended, which is organized as a benefit for the Kansas City Art Institute, runs seven weekends every fall on some land next to the Agricultural Hall of Fame, fifteen miles from Kansas City. It turned out to be much more elaborate than I had expected. Stretches of what appeared to be three-quarter-scale ersatz-timbered buildings held dozens of booths serving “feasts fit for ye kings” and the Budweiser and Coke that in Renaissance festivals comes under the category of “drynke.” There was an outdoor arena for jousts that took place twice a day. There were a hundred and thirty crafts venders, with names like “Ye Olde Wood Turnery” and “Ye Olde Bellsmith.” The entertainment included acts like Simpkin the Foole (Ballad Monger), Seymoure (Churlish Loute), and what is often spoken of as the most successful act on the Renaissance-festival circuit—a couple of antic Shakespearean duellers called, I’m afraid, Puke & Snot. Businessmen in Friar Tuck costumes sold peanuts for a Kiwanis Club project. A lot of young people who were costumed as Shakespearean fools or members of Robin Hood’s band roamed the grounds making smart-aleck remarks in vaguely English accents. A sign just outside the entrance said, “Be Ye Wary of light-fingered varlots in the presse of the crowde.” The weekend I was there, the paid attendance was twenty-four thousand three hundred and six.

Like most of the places where Penn and Teller worked on the street, Renaissance festivals provide a protected environment for street performers, so that a juggler can concentrate on the clubs rather than keeping one eye on the lookout for cops or for the three acrobats who seem to think the corner belongs to them. The strollers are there to be entertained, and they can even find a schedule of entertainment in a program. Turning a sword-swallower or an acrobat into a Renaissance sword-swallower or a Renaissance acrobat is just a matter of a leather vest here and a rope belt there. In fact, Teller, who was still in his grandiosely arty phase, was already accustomed to working in a more or less Renaissance costume—black tights, a black turtleneck, and leather boots. (Penn and Teller have never been able to decide who had the more pretentious act in those days, although Penn claims that Teller’s silence skews the comparison: “He could be redoing parts of the Iliad in his linking-ring routine, and because he didn’t speak it didn’t come across well enough for him to get busted on it.”) Penn made an easy transition to Renaissance-festival patter. “Basically, it’s just anachronism jokes,” he once told me. “A Renaissance festival is nothing but ‘ye olde Michael Jackson.’ ”

As “The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society” was struggling to establish itself—scrambling for small theatres, trying to get on the college circuit—Renaissance festivals became the fallback occupation of choice for Penn and Teller. Even Wier Chrisemer appeared for a while in a Renaissance festival. Just how he managed to give a Renaissance twist to the xylophone is lost to history; he claims to have forgotten. At a Renaissance festival, top acts are paid by the management as well as by the crowd, and an effective street performer can prosper. Eventually, Penn and Teller were taking in several thousand dollars a weekend—more, Teller thinks, than any other act on the circuit except, of course, the nonpareils, Puke & Snot.

Getting “The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society” on the boards for the first time proved relatively easy. Some friends of Teller’s had access to a tiny theatre in Princeton, and “Asparagus” played a two-weekend engagement there in November of 1975. In the hope of attracting some press attention, Penn, who had been put in charge of publicity, concocted an appropriately grandiose stunt that was a parody of the spectacular jumps then bringing a lot of notoriety to Evel Knievel, the daredevil motorcyclist. Penn’s stunt was called Asparagus Penn’s Unicycle Jump for Life and was described as an attempt to jump over five Volkswagen Rabbits on a rocket-propelled unicycle. “I had a lot of phony figures on what would happen when the rockets kicked in when the unicycle hit thirty-five miles an hour,” Penn told us at lunch that day at Sylvia’s. Chrisemer had composed some ersatz aphorisms like “One Man One Wheel.” Apparently, the irony of all this was lost on the people who showed up to watch Asparagus Penn’s Unicycle Jump for Life—and there turned out to be a lot more of them than anyone could have predicted. The organizers of Asparagus Penn’s Unicycle Jump for Life sometimes estimate the crowd as having been in the thousands, but they all would probably acknowledge that the memories of disaster survivors are not completely trustworthy. According to Chrisemer, “everyone in the world was there to see Penn spill his blood, and they were greatly disappointed when he didn’t.” The Volkswagen dealer who had lent the Rabbits was also disappointed, since the crowd took out some of its own disappointment on his cars. Penn remembers falling off the ramp, being surrounded by angry drunks who were kicking him and spitting on him, and being rescued by an ambulance team that had been asked to the event strictly for reasons of verisimilitude. Penn told us that Teller offered the best analysis of Asparagus Penn’s Unicycle Jump for Life only a day or so after the event: “Well, we wanted to see how far deadpan humor could go, and we found out.”

You’d think that Asparagus Penn’s Unicycle Jump for Life might have ended Penn’s career as a press agent, but he savors a story about how he went about trying to get “Asparagus” reviewed a year after the Jump, when it opened in a hundred-seat house called Theatre Five, upstairs in the Walnut Street Theatre complex, in Philadelphia. Theatre Five was the show’s first extended booking. There was even an opening-night party, featuring cookies baked by Teller’s mother. Penn says that, having no idea how reviewers happened to show up at openings, he looked in the Inquirer for a byline on a review, came across a review signed by William Collins, who was and is the Inquirer’s first-string drama critic, and simply walked into the office and demanded to see him. (A person who is less protective of the general theme of a story than Penn is might point out that the meeting actually took place on a return engagement of “Asparagus” in Philadelphia two years later, when Penn’s experience with reviews already included two or three reviews of the show by second-string Inquirer critics, but Penn might suggest that such a person’s wild, wacky friends could have gone to the trouble of planting earlier reviews in the morgue of the Inquirer just to mess with his gray matter.) According to the story, Collins came out of his office to meet Penn—who was dressed in his usual costume of black leather jacket, jeans, and motorcycle boots—and, after being told about “Asparagus,” asked why he should review it. Penn responded by picking up one of the spikes that newspapermen sometimes keep on their desks as a sort of old-fashioned vertical file, jamming it up his nose (“It’s like the old carny trick of driving a nail up your nose—not a trick, really, just a skill”), and spinning it around by the papers at its base. Collins decided to review the show.

“Well, I do think I’d remember it, because that would certainly have been the most unusual approach anybody has ever made,” Collins said when I asked him about the spike story one day. Not being one of those Ed Jones types who can make their day by calling Penn a liar, Collins added, “I’m not saying it couldn’t have happened.” Collins does remember writing a rave review of the show. He also remembers that when he returned to “Asparagus” one evening with his entire family Penn, giving no indication that Collins had been spotted in the audience, began talking about how helpful the review had been, and then said, “I hate to tell you how much we had to pay for it.”

The fact that the “Asparagus” players “had absolutely no respect for any institution”—or any theatre critic, for that matter—impressed Collins. He was also impressed by the odd combination of characters onstage. Chrisemer, who came across as what Collins called “the starchy one,” spent a good part of the evening sitting rather stiffly at his keyboard. Teller was wearing the black Renaissance costume of the arty magician. (Teller, rather than Penn, was the one with long hair in those days. In a later version of “Asparagus,” Penn at one point flips up the back of Teller’s hairdo and says, “Hey, Teller, the sixties are over, and we lost.”) Penn was almost as voluble as he is in the current show, but much less overbearing and cynical. His costume—cut-off shorts, a T-shirt, and mismatched sneakers—reflected his role as a prankish but almost naïve schoolboy. “There was something extremely unsettling psychologically about the combination of people,” Collins told me. “That’s what stopped me in my tracks. It had a kind of Pinteresque subtext.”

The effect was not accidental. When I asked Teller what he thought “Asparagus Valley” was about, he said, “‘Asparagus Valley’ had more to do with living with the idea of being different and enjoying that idea. The three of us dressed in complete contradiction to one another, and didn’t acknowledge that at all. The fact that these were three people you wouldn’t invite to the same party was always strongly commented on in reviews. And the fact that they were working apparently smoothly together, exploiting what were obviously their freakish individual natures, was, I think, really one of the central themes of it.” Teller also believes that “Asparagus Valley” had “the formal elements of a religious ceremony.” There was organ music, of course, and Chrisemer, the son of a Lutheran minister, delivered one monologue that always struck Teller as sounding very much like a sermon. The finale of “The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society” featured Penn—costumed, as Chrisemer puts it, “as a simple stalk of asparagus”—leading the audience in a song that was sung to the tune of the hymn “He Leadeth Me!” and had as its only lyric, repeated over and over, the word “asparagus.”

“Asparagus” was “a play about theatrical risk,” according to James Freydberg, the producer who took it to San Francisco after seeing it in Philadelphia. “What it said was that all entertainment is a risk—playing a violin concerto on the xylophone as much as swallowing fire,” he told me not long ago. “It was also about how what you see is not really what’s happening. It was a brilliant play. And if you didn’t get it on that level it was simply enormously entertaining.” Enormously entertaining was enough for most people who saw “Asparagus.” The word “goofy” was often applied to it, in a nice way, and so was the word “zany.” I’ve watched a videotape of “Asparagus”—made in San Francisco, where the version produced by Freydberg ran for two and a half years. It’s a jolly evening. One of my favorite moments is in a number called the Mystery of the Peking Snow Duck. Chrisemer, dressed in a Chinese costume, shows the audience a rabbit, which he identifies as a Peking snow duck. (Penn, of course, says, “That’s no duck.”) As Chrisemer covers the rabbit with a cloth, Penn says, “You as audience members have only one responsibility—”

Suddenly, in the back of the house, Teller appears, wearing a gorilla mask —a mask that many years later was recycled as the head of MOFO the Psychic Gorilla—and banging cymbals together. When the audience turns to look at Teller, Chrisemer calmly picks up the rabbit, walks offstage, and returns with a balloon that he places under the cloth. As the suckers turn back to the stage, realizing that they’ve been tricked with a gross example of what magicians call misdirection, Penn finishes what he was saying about the audience’s only responsibility: “At no time allow your eyes to wander.”

The Mystery of the Peking Snow Duck is about as close as “Asparagus” gets to a “Penn & Teller” theme that Teller describes as “using your head in a world full of flimflam.” There’s no talk of cons or swindles. Nobody seems in danger of being stabbed or drowned. There are, as Freydberg points out, plenty of risks, but they seem daredevil rather than menacing. There’s a straitjacket number, but those trying to escape are not suspended over a bed of spikes. In “Asparagus,” Penn does virtually the same monologue with his fire-eating number that he does in “Penn & Teller”—talking about being attracted to the sideshow tent, and about how carnival fire-eaters gradually, knowingly make themselves sick through the accumulation of the tiny amount of lighter fluid that is invariably swallowed in each performance—but the number is done on a lighted stage and the show does not close with it but with Penn at his goofiest leading everyone in the “Asparagus” anthem. One number in “Asparagus,” based on translating “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” into German and back into English, does include a long, uncomfortable scene that begins with Penn taunting Chrisemer for being a spoiled college boy—a scene that both participants apparently found easier and easier to play as frictions surfaced toward the end of the run. In general, though, there was something jovial about “The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society.” It had some of the collegiate tone of the Othmar Schoeck concerts—what Chrisemer calls “a wide-eyed innocent craziness.” In attempting to describe “Penn & Teller” as it finally evolved for Broadway, critics have reached for a lot of adjectives, but I doubt if anybody has ever called it innocent.

As the San Francisco audience for “Asparagus” began to thin out, toward the end of 1981, Freydberg wanted to try bringing it to New York. Chrisemer was willing. Penn and Teller were not. They were leaving the show to do a sort of play they had written, “Mrs. Lonsberry’s Evening of Horror,” but doing the play was a way of leaving Chrisemer. When I asked Teller what caused the split, he said, “Wier wanted a life. He wanted at some point to go home to his girlfriend and try out a new dish from Julia Child. He wasn’t as crazy as we were.” Chrisemer, who was more interested in concocting musical numbers than in being a virtuoso of the keyboard, did not seem monomaniacally concerned with working on the details of the show—at least compared with people who had spent great chunks of their childhood alone in their room practicing. The way Chrisemer might have put it is that he didn’t subscribe to the proposition that practicing was the one true path to enlightenment. According to Freydberg, when it became apparent that the show needed some help he and Chrisemer wanted to bring in a director to have a look at it; Penn and Teller wanted to practice more. In Freydberg’s view, Penn wanted Chrisemer to have not simply the same commitment to perfectionism that he had but the same style of life—an impossibility for Chrisemer, who made no effort to hide his distaste for punk-rock music and Howard Johnson’s cuisine. Penn and Teller both say that they were getting restless—unsatisfied with “Asparagus” and itching to write a play. Their instincts were to try something both harsher and more outrageous. Even while they were doing “Asparagus Valley,” Chrisemer had begun to feel a pressure from his partners to turn toward darker material—material that he found “theatrically uninteresting.” When it came to subject matter and language, there was a serious problem between Chrisemer and his two partners that sounds rather old-fashioned these days—a problem of religion. Chrisemer is not only the son of a Lutheran pastor but a regular churchgoer and a choir leader. Both Penn and Teller have an active dislike of religion. In conversation they tend to lump it with spiritualism and psychic spoon-bending and a belief in channelling—all of which they dismiss as scams whose supposed miracles are easily explained tricks. “Religion was not only all bunk to them but they made no distinctions,” Chrisemer has told me. “To them, Falwell and Bonhoeffer are all the same.”

When the San Francisco run of “Asparagus Valley” closed, after nearly a thousand performances, Chrisemer wandered around for a while. He eventually settled not far from the house in New Jersey where he had gone to join Penn and Teller and Marc Garland in putting together the original “Asparagus.” He now works for AT&T, answering questions that customers have about computers. Although he sometimes says that in the long run the breakup was probably for the best, he also says, “I still smart sometimes.” Penn had told me that Wier Chrisemer was the funniest person he had ever known—I suppose even Bobcat Goldthwait was included in that, since Penn never qualifies—and I found him to have a quick, dry wit. He hasn’t talked to either Penn or Teller in some years, and he has never seen their show—even though, by chance, he was in San Francisco recently while “Penn & Teller” was there on national tour.

“My wife was out there at the same time,” I told Chrisemer one day on the telephone. “In fact, she ran into Penn in the lobby of her hotel. He was looking for someplace to get a manicure.”

“A manicure?” Wier asked, sounding puzzled.

“He has one red fingernail,” I explained.

Chrisemer paused a beat, and then said, “Is it supposed to get better?”

“Penn told me that he’s the worst director in the history of the world,” I told Teller one day when we were discussing “Mrs. Lonsberry’s Evening of Horror,” Penn’s first and last directorial effort.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Teller said. He paused to give the matter some thought. “Surely there are people who directed Whoopi Goldberg movies who are worse than Penn.”

“Now that I think of it, I saw a Whoopi Goldberg movie called ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash‘ on an airplane once, and you may be right,” I said. “And I speak as someone who didn’t see ‘Mrs. Lonsberry’s Evening of Horror.’ ”

Apparently, Penn was bad enough. Apparently, it was not a standout evening for Teller, either. He appeared (and spoke) as Julian Lonsberry, the son of a woman who gives séances for suckers—who are played, more or less, by the audience. Teller now says that “Lonsberry” was “a difficult, excessively cerebral show,” and that’s about the best thing anybody has ever said about it. Freydberg says that he considered it simply an extension of the dispute Penn and Teller were having with Wier Chrisemer about the theatrical value of horror and blasphemy. (“They got carried away with taking a shot at him.”) The San Francisco Chronicle, comparing “Mrs. Lonsberry’s Evening of Horror” unfavorably with the “bright and smudge-free” show that Penn and Teller and Chrisemer had presented in “Asparagus,” said “Lonsberry” had been ensnared in “its own labored premises.” It closed immediately—in Penn’s words, “a dismal failure.”

Teller now says that the disaster could have been worse. As producers, he and Penn had budgeted the show so that they could lose only what they actually had—basically, what they had saved during the long run of “Asparagus.” But Penn was, by all accounts, devastated. In Teller’s view, “it took him almost a year to recover.” Much of the recuperation took place on the Renaissance-festival circuit.

“Minneapolis is where I understand us to have created the show,” Teller has said. This was when Penn and Teller were back at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, in the late summer of 1982. They were working as one act, called “Penn Jillette and/or Teller,” rather than as two singles, but otherwise, despite the long run of “Asparagus” in San Francisco, they didn’t seem much further along the show-business road than they had been when they drove out to Minnesota together seven years before. At a comedy club that happened to have an evening free, each of the two most popular acts at the festival—the other act, it almost goes without saying, was Puke & Snot—did a forty-five-minute segment. With forty-five minutes to fill instead of the twenty-five they ordinarily worked at a festival, Penn and Teller began to put together what eventually evolved into “Penn & Teller.” They had a core of numbers from “Asparagus”—Teller’s Shadows and his needles trick, Penn’s knife-juggling and his fire-eating. They salvaged what they could from the wreckage of “Lonsberry”—some of the darker language, the levitation of someone chosen from the audience, a complicated psychic trick that produces the Bible verse some volunteers had seemed to arrive at randomly. Without Chrisemer—without his antic musical numbers and his starchy presence on the stage and his neo-Schoeckian taste in material—the “cheap circus schlock” of “Asparagus” became colored more by Teller’s lifelong interest in menace and Penn’s growing interest in using your head in a world full of flimflam. The dominant voice was no longer that of a man of precise diction sitting at a pipe organ but that of a smart-aleck street performer holding some very large knives. As the tone evolved, it was as if Lenny Bruce and Edgar Allan Poe had formed a vaudeville act and one of them could juggle.

Penn and Teller polished their act in Minneapolis and in Toronto and Texas. Then there was a sudden opening at the L.A. Stage Company, a theatre in Los Angeles where Marc Garland had sought shelter as a technical director after the “Lonsberry” debacle. “Penn Jillette and/or Teller” was booked, and shortened to “Penn & Teller.” After a moderately successful run at the L.A. Stage Company, Penn and Teller played over a disco, with the beat coming up through the floor. In a theatre in Westwood, they sometimes played before audiences so small that the same volunteer might have to be called to the stage for more than one trick. They supplemented their income by doing séances for rich people’s dinner parties—announcing beforehand that everything was a trick, and then astonishing those present with revelations about their personal lives and connections with their dear departed. Eventually, though, Penn and Teller established themselves in Los Angeles as an evening in the theatre. They became sufficiently well known to do a PBS special, during which Penn said that he thought of the typical public-television show as “a mime piece called ‘The Birth of a Baby Dove in the Ghetto.’ ”

In fact, Richard Frankel told me, there were long and heated negotiations before they would agree to his terms for producing the show in New York—terms that included bringing in a director. Penn later told him that any time he negotiated over the phone with Frankel he stood naked under a Nazi flag. Why? Because he had read somewhere that when you negotiate you should know something that your opponent doesn’t know. Penn knew that he was standing naked under a Nazi flag, and Frankel didn’t. Furthermore, I suppose, it wasn’t the sort of thing Frankel might tumble to with a lucky guess.

“Do you think he was really standing naked under a Nazi flag?” I asked Frankel.

He shrugged. “You know Penn,” he said.

The show that Penn and Teller are touring with now might strike the casual theatregoer as more or less the show they brought from Los Angeles to the Westside Arts. Penn and Teller, of course, think of it as something that has changed considerably. Even now, when Teller can say, “At long last, we have a show that I’m very happy with,” they treat it as a machine that is in constant need of tuning and adjustment. Is there a line in the MOFO number that is not needed? During their dangerous version of what Penn calls a “wimpy card trick,” is he irritating enough to give the audience a split second of guilty satisfaction when he seems to have been stabbed in the hand by the partner he was irritating?

Teller can still analyze the show in terms of the Greek tragic rhythms he learned from David Rosenbaum at Central High School. To him, the first number is the prologue. Penn announces that he will read “Casey at the Bat” while sitting in a chair, and will then leap up to receive his accustomed

applause, at which point Teller either will be out of the straitjacket attached to the pulley that is tied to the chair or will be dropped head first onto a bed of huge and obviously authentic spikes. From that number, Teller told me one morning in Boston, “You learn that one guy’s going to talk and one guy’s not going to talk. You learn that these guys can do things—that there’s talk interlocked with action, and that it’s action that takes place in the present, in the apparent reality of the theatre. You learn in very plain terms that we don’t see any difference between what’s named poetry, albeit illustrated by a piece of doggerel, and daredevil, life-and-death stunts. And you learn that these two people absolutely trust each other, because night after night one person willingly and comfortably places himself in the position of being completely subject to the other person’s reliability. One of the things this show is implicitly and constantly about is the nature of partnership and friendship.”

Teller told me that he considers the remark that Penn makes before pulling out his copy of “Casey at the Bat”—the remark that the magic they’re interested in is “the magic of fine poetry”—to be the “topic sentence” of the show. “What the audience learns from the straitjacket and ‘Casey at the Bat’ is, first, that they’re going to see a show that is about poetry,” he said. “Although we make fun of that idea again and again, I think that when people leave the theatre at the end they leave with the sense of having seen a sort of poetic event.”

“What do you mean by ’poetic’?” I asked.

Teller paused for a long time. Finally, he said, “I would like for people to have the experience I would like to have. Which is for a period of time I would like to have my attention compelled by something that moves me from one place to another, from one feeling to another, from one understanding to another—and hints at mysteries that somehow fit together. When I was a kid in my back yard, almost daily I used to build what I would call a fun house. It was really not very elaborate, but it was almost a compulsion. There were odd pieces of wood in my back yard—things like long planks with four-by-fours nailed to the ends of them so as to form a small table, and assorted things. And I loved to take those things and put them in sequences, so that at each step something surprising as far as I was concerned would happen—so, say, a plank would tip in a different direction. And then I would get kids who lived on my street to come in and walk through it. And I would be right there to catch them if they fell. If they fell down, they didn’t usually get hurt. I got hurt wonderfully once. But in my head what was happening was they were going into a fun house in an amusement park—a haunted house that was pretty scary.” He paused. His eyes had filled with tears. “And then they’d come out at the other end . . .” He paused again. “You start off at the beginning, and you come out and you feel like you’ve been someplace. . . . I don’t know why I get all weepy over that.”

I was helping Penn and Teller block out an appearance on a Boston talk show. I played what Penn likes to refer to as “the meat puppet.” It’s a term he picked up from television cameramen, who invented it as a description of some of the beautiful but vacant people who recite the local news. Most of Penn and Teller’s talk-show appearances revolve around making the meat puppet edgy, or even terrified. The plan this time was to engage him in a game of rodent roulette—a game played on a lazy Susan on which Penn and Teller had glued seven or eight huge rat traps. There is a short piece of cord attached to the bar of each of the traps, so you can trip it without worrying about its snapping shut—unless, Penn will explain to the host, you happen to trip the one whose cord has been cut underneath the trap. That one will break your finger.

“Well, welcome to Boston,” I said, in my assigned role as host. “I hear your show is wacky, madcap fun. Are you going to do a trick for us today?”

“Tell me,” Penn says. “How’s your show doing in this market?”

“Well, we’re O.K., I guess.”

“You creaming the competition?”

“Well, we don’t say creaming, actually,” I said, aware that I was now the one answering the questions.

“What’s next for you after this?” Penn asked, glancing around as if looking for something to break.

“Well, actually, Peoria beckons if we’re not careful here,” I said.

Deciding that a host in my position must be on top of the world and looking for new thrills, Penn suggested rodent roulette, explaining that we’d take turns putting our fingers into the traps. As the routine works, Teller, taking his second turn, lets out a horrible shriek as blood spurts from his finger onto Penn—the result of a simple squirt-ring filled with stage blood. We did that part, with plain water, twice, since Penn didn’t seem to be hit squarely enough in the eye the first time. As Penn was wiping his face after the second squirting, he said “What are we doing here?” and Teller joined in for the ritual chorus: “We’re earning a living.”

The rodent-roulette routine worked pretty well the next morning. The host turned out to be an amiable and relaxed young man, named Matt Lauer, who didn’t panic even when Penn, working up to the suggestion that any thrill-seeking instincts the host had be channelled into the nearly harmless pastime of rodent roulette, said, “I get this premonition of you being found dead in a hot tub with a fourteen-year-old girl.” Still, it was, I thought, a long way from the tension and precision and polish of the “Penn & Teller” performance. In general, I think of their television appearances as a mixed bag. So do they—although Penn enjoyed the liberation of the cockroaches on David Letterman’s desk, at least more than Letterman appeared to. Penn says that on television “you can only do the grossest strokes.” Sometimes even the grossest strokes are not quite caught by the camera. Sometimes the audience doesn’t seem to know quite what to make of Penn and Teller; they’re out of context. A lot of the problem, I think, is that on television Penn and Teller can’t lure the audience into a constant but ever-changing role in the swindle.

I think of Penn and Teller as two acts—the stage performance and everything else. By now, because of their appearances on Letterman and “Saturday Night Live,” they are probably better known for everything else. The way show business is organized, of course, their success may be measured by how well they cross over into everything else. They may measure success that way themselves. They worked hard on their video; they’ve written a book. There are people in the trade who think Penn and Teller may be too specialized in tone to translate well into other areas of show business, and those people would cite as confirmation the troubles encountered recently by Penn and Teller’s most ambitious breakout project—a movie they wrote called “Penn & Teller Get Killed.” The movie, directed by Arthur Penn, was scheduled to have been released early this spring, but the word from Hollywood is that studio executives were shocked by its ending and that the audience at its first test showing was distinctly unenchanted. It has now been recut, but it lingers in what a friend of Penn and Teller’s calls Hollywood Hell.

As it happens, Penn and Teller love the way the movie came out. The prospect that it may not be the mainstream triumph their supporters had looked forward to does not seem to horrify them. After all, they also measure success by infinitesimal degrees of improvement in the needles trick. In Chicago on the national tour, Penn is still hauling Teller up on a pulley eight performances a week and sitting down to read “Casey at the Bat.” Teller says he sees the stage show continuing into the foreseeable future, although, of course, it will change. There might be less magic. Penn, Teller predicts, may get to the point at which he’ll be able to admit from the stage that he didn’t actually go into the sideshow tent at the Franklin County Fair, and will tell “that much more chilling story that he never did see the fire-eating, that it was so fascinating and so fearful from such a distance that he had to go do it instead.” Teller says that he and Penn would like to try a stadium show someday, because they’re fascinated by the problem “How do you do a theatrical event before an enormous number of people?” They even have a trick in mind, which Teller told me about one day in Boston. It starts with Penn announcing that they were allowed to bring only one prop to the show. At that point, he leaves, and Teller lies down, draping a towel over his chest. Penn reappears with the one prop—an eighteen-wheeler. He drives right over Teller and out of the stadium. “Then I get up and take a bow,” Teller said.

“And there are tire marks on the towel?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” Teller said. “Absolutely.” ♦