The outspoken magician/comedian/writer talks to Cracked about leaving behind Libertarianism, why he’s worried about the future and how Trump is even worse than you think
www.cracked.com
Penn Jillette Wants to Talk It All Out
By:
Grierson
January 23, 2024
Penn Jillette has a large, framed French-language poster of
Renaldo and Clara behind him. Most people wouldn’t know what that is, but as a
Bob Dylan fan, I do — it’s his largely forgotten, widely panned 1978 film that he wrote, directed and starred in. Only real Dylan obsessives talk about it, and Jillette is one of them. I’m speaking to him over Zoom — I’m in Los Angeles, he’s in Las Vegas — and when I mention the poster, it makes him smile.
“It’s funny: I was at the
Dylan Center in Tulsa and they asked to interview me about Dylan, and they got the cameras all set up and stuff,” he recalls. “And I said, ‘I’m a little taken aback because I’ve never done an interview that
didn’t mention Dylan — but this is the first time I’ve been
asked to talk about Dylan.’” The singer-songwriter is one of his heroes, and Jillette is tickled that I’ve brought Dylan up rather than him having to for once. “I bring in Dylan to explain everything,” he says.
Click right here to get the best of Cracked sent to your inbox.
Turning 69 in March, Jillette not only worships Dylan but in some ways has tried to emulate his career. Both of them grew up in middle-class families, both of them became showmen, both of them have done a little bit of everything. The world knows Jillette best from his long-running magic/comedy duo
Penn & Teller, but he’s also written books, acted and spoken out about political issues. He’s been on Broadway, and his latest television program,
Penn & Teller: Fool Us, is now in its 10th season.
Teller famously never talks during their routines, leaving Jillette to be their spokesperson, and in real life, Jillette talks a lot, too. I knew going in that he has opinions on everything from
Taylor Swift to
religion, but during our hour-long interview he never came across as a know-it-all. Rather, his views were often offered modestly, complete with disclaimers or self-deprecating jokes. He thinks a lot about a lot of things, but he’s not sure he’s right about any of them. That’s where talking comes in for Jillette — it allows him to try a rough draft of a stance that maybe he’ll later refine. In other words, he’s someone who can change his mind — like when he recently renounced Libertarianism after long being one of its most public champions.
As we head into this election year, I was curious how he was feeling about the country,
Joe Biden, his former
Celebrity Apprentice sparring partner
Donald Trump and the general direction of things. But we also discussed magic and comedy — which, he argues, can help explain politics. Penn Jillette knows he doesn’t have all the answers, but that won’t stop him from asking the questions.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve said that, as a boy, you weren’t into magic — you were into music. But what comedy albums were you listening to?
The first record I remember buying with my own money was
the Smothers Brothers. They were everything to me — everything. And from the Smothers Brothers, we’d go to
the Monkees — from the Monkees, we’d go instantly to Zappa, Velvet Underground. It was only a lack of talent that stopped me from being a musician — the passion was certainly there.
I had an odd relationship with comedy — I was too pretentious and highfalutin for comedy. My family was very funny. I always made people laugh — it was always very easy for me, but they were always laughing at me and not with me. When I was in high school, I wanted to be the great existential writer — and I’d write stuff and it would constantly have funny stuff in it. I was drawn to
Lenny Bruce and
National Lampoon. I was obsessed with the fact that comedy could have a deep, deep meaning.
Obviously, if you’re starting out listening to the Smothers Brothers, that interest in a deeper meaning in humor must have been there from the jump.
That was really important to me. It was actually a difficult learning thing for me to realize that being funny was okay. Even
the Stooges, I think that’s essentially about friendship among outsiders — it’s about love and the different manifestations of love. But I was going to move to France with my girlfriend and be a beatnik existential writer — she broke up with me, I was very upset, I said, “fukk you,” and went to Clown College.
(Laughs) And that’s all you need to know.
There’s so much talk about A.I. replacing artists. Are you worried?
Every single time something comes along, people (trash) it. When writing first came along, people said it would ruin our memories — and, of course, it did, but we got other stuff out of it. Recording, they said the same thing — John Philip Sousa was against recording because it would stop live music. Then he went on to make a lot of money doing it. Movies were going to ruin live performance — television was going to ruin the movies. And all of those things are true — every single one of (those fears) was completely true. But so what?
I hope that A.I. isn’t a different thing. It may be — friends of mine who are very smart scientists have some trepidation about it.
What are their concerns?
Not worried about artistic stuff at all, but worried that if you have A.I. doing all of air traffic control, one mistake…
My buddy
Piff the Magic Dragon, he (uses A.I.) for magic tricks — “What would Piff the Magic Dragon say if he were performing this trick?” — and gets himself a first rough draft. If you have incredible fear of the blank page, and if you’re the kind of person that likes to fix things rather than generate from zero, you can have that. “First draft” is perhaps too strong — pre-pre-first draft. (Teller and I) have tried it for a couple of things — we needed to generate some full Biblical stuff, and we tried it, and it turned out we were better than it was. But that’s just one data point — that doesn’t mean anything. But it is plagiarism — it just simply is.
So, if it’s not A.I., what do you worry about?
Without being overly dramatic — but, I think, being accurate — there’s a small chance, but still real non-zero chance, that we’ve destroyed our country with monetizing hate and monetizing aggression and monetizing outrage. What makes you the most money is outrage and hate.
I’m beginning to think that the whole MAGA movement, it’s possible we can blame that on fiction — it’s so exciting to have that turnabout in a movie where you find out that there’s a deep state. I certainly feel the pull for that — so much of trying to live our lives to do it right is tedious. And truth is very tedious. Trying to figure out how a certain insect interacts with an environment in the tundra is a lifetime of work — whereas saying that
Hillary Clinton has a pizza place where she’s blowing young boys in the basement is no work at all.
Einstein comes up with this idea E = mc² — a profound, powerful, mind-blowing idea — and he has to work forever to make people understand that and to share that reality. Woodward and Bernstein are pretty sure the president of the United States committed crimes, and they work their asses off to try to prove that. But if you’re deep in the MAGA movement, you can just type that Biden went to China and set up a secret nuclear arsenal, and you get this incredible amount of praise with seven-minutes work. Trying to get the news cycle to look as much like
24 seems to be the goal.
Part of your public life involves debunking and demystifying — you’re interested in presenting the truth. Do you get depressed about living in a world where there are so many charlatans? So many people who just lie and lie?
We can argue forever about gun control — whether that’s a good idea or a bad idea, including what the framers thought — but if we can’t agree that the shootings happened, then we can’t talk. I don’t think we’ve ever experienced a time in human history where there wasn’t a shared reality, even if that reality was false. I’d rather everyone believed in Christianity than what it’s turned into.
We should always be striving to agree on what reality is. A bunch of people have decided that it’s easier and more fun to not worry about that part of it. Einstein didn’t just want to run around saying, “E = mc²” — he wanted as many people as possible to share that reality. Woodward and Bernstein wanted people to share that reality.
What we do in live magic, it’s constantly dealing with that subject. Recreational epistemology is what stage magic is — we play around with that. And if you want to get heavy about it, you can say that every magic show is an exploration of how we determine what’s true.