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Penn and Teller are a two-man magic and comedy team, specializing in gory tricks and clever pranks, who have become associated with Las Vegas and skepticism.
The duo
Teller does not speak on-stage, though there have been occasional exceptions. He was born Raymond Joseph Teller on February 14, 1948 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He attended Amherst College and taught Latin at Lawrence High School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. He is an expert on the history of magic. He had his name changed legally to Teller. He began his trademark of not speaking as a way of dealing with audience hecklers.
Penn Fraser Jillette, the talking magician, is the larger of the two (6'6"/1.98 m to Teller's 5'9"/1.75 m), and was born March 5, 1955 in Greenfield, Massachusetts. He attended Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Greatest Show on Earth Clown College - but he's apologized for this. He became disillusioned with the type of magic acts that present magic as "real" by watching The Amazing Kreskin on the Johnny Carson show. He attended a performance by The Amazing Randi with Teller at the age of eighteen which suggested the idea of presenting magic as an openly acknowledged trick rather than as a mysterious power.
Teller began performing with a friend, Weir Chirsamer, as the Ottmar Scheckt Society for the Preservation of Weird and Disgusting Music: they joined up with Penn Jillette and renamed themselves the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society.
Their tricks include Teller hanging upside-down over a bed of spikes in a straitjacket, Teller drowning in a huge container of water, Teller being run over by an 18-wheel tractor-trailer, Teller swinging over bear-traps on a trapeze, and knives going through Penn's hands.
In one of their more thoughtful and politically charged tricks, they make a U.S. flag seem to disappear by wrapping it in a copy of the United States Bill of Rights, and apparently setting the flag on fire, so that "the flag is gone but the Bill of Rights remains." They normally end the routine by restoring the unscathed flag to its starting place on the flagpole; however, on a TV guest appearance on The West Wing, this final part was omitted for dramatic reasons.
They have also made television guest appearances as a comedy team on Babylon 5 and The Simpsons, and Teller has played Mr. Boots on Dharma & Greg. Penn appeared as "Drell" on the TV series Sabrina the Teenage Witch and was a voice announcer for the U.S. based cable network Comedy Central. They also appeared as scam artists in the music video for "It's Tricky" by Run-DMC.
Their cable television show Bullshit! takes a skeptical look at psychic, religious, scientific and paranormal frauds, and has featured segments on astrology, Feng shui, and weight loss.
Penn married television producer Emily Zolten during an impromptu ceremony at a Las Vegas wedding chapel on November 23, 2004.
Quotes
- "Is this your card?"
- "Doing stuff like Van Praagh and Kreskin is like taking a shotgun and going into a mall, and discharging it in people's faces and stealing twenty bucks from each one of them." - Penn
- "When (Norman Borlaug) won the Nobel Prize in 1970, they said he had saved a billion people. Billion. That's Carl Sagan's billion with a B. And most of them were of different race from him. Norman is the greatest human being. And you've probably never heard of him." --from "Bullshit"
- "Naked people are their own reward." --from Bullshit! #6 "Sex, Sex, Sex"
Television series
Movies
Books
- By Penn and Teller
- By Penn Jillette
- By Teller
External links
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