April 10
The Honest Deceivers: When Penn Met Teller
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In 1974, a man named Weir
Chrisemer introduced two people to each other: one was Penn Fraser Jillette—nineteen
years old, six feet six inches tall, freshly graduated from Ringling Brothers
and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, already a skilled juggler and
fire-eater, burning with a furious skeptical intelligence that had not yet
found its proper vehicle; the other was Raymond Joseph Teller—twenty-six years
old, quiet by instinct and by professional design, a graduate of Amherst
College with a degree in Classics, currently teaching Latin and English at a
New Jersey high school, performing magic at fraternity parties in the evenings
and discovering, to his satisfaction, that silence made his audiences pay
closer attention.
Chrisemer had been performing
with Teller under the magnificent name “The Othmar Schoeck Memorial Society for
the Preservation of Unusual and Disgusting Music.” When Penn joined, the three
formed a new act: “The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society.” They performed their
first show together on August 19, 1975, at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival,
subsequently played San Francisco and Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theater, and
broke a house record at the Phoenix Theater in San Francisco—965 performances
over three years.
By 1981, Chrisemer had grown
uncomfortable with his partners' increasingly outrageous sensibilities and left
to pursue a quieter life. Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller—who had by then
legally changed his name to the mononym Teller, full stop, possessing a United
States passport issued in that single word—formed “Penn & Teller,” embarked
on a project called “Mrs. Lonsberry's Seance of Horror,” and began one of the
most extraordinary careers in the history of stage magic performance.
Fifty-two years after that
introduction: a Las Vegas residency since 2001—the longest-running show in
Vegas history … and Broadway and Emmy nominations—and a Hollywood Walk of Fame
star placed near Harry Houdini's.
And a philosophy of magic that
stands as one of the most genuinely interesting intellectual positions in the
history of the art.
I want to acknowledge at the
outset that this blog has a personal dimension. I have loved Penn & Teller
since childhood, with the kind of devotion that many readers of Modern
Occultist will recognize—the fascination that begins with the simple pleasure
of being fooled and deepens, over time, into something considerably more
interesting. I have had the extraordinary fortune of meeting them, and the more
I have come to understand their actual philosophy—not the theatrical persona,
not the loudmouth skeptic caricature, but the genuine intellectual position
they have articulated about the nature of magic and deception—the more I have
come to believe that Penn & Teller represent something genuinely important
for everyone who takes seriously the questions this magazine explores.
The Clown and the Latin Teacher
The biographical contrast
between Penn and Teller is one of the great comedy pairings in performance
history—not merely in height (Penn at six-six, Teller at five-nine) or in
verbal style (Penn famously never stops talking; Teller famously never starts—unless
you’re alone with him…), but in the trajectories that brought them to the same
stage.
Penn grew up in Greenfield, Massachusetts, the son of a corrections office and a secretary. He discovered juggling as a teenager, attended clown college at eighteen, and was already performing as a street entertainer when Chrisemer made the introduction. He had been profoundly shaped by watching the illusionist James Randi perform: not a mystical magician claiming supernatural powers, but a man who openly presented deception as entertainment, who understood that the contract between performer and audience was one of consensual, joyful foolery. Penn has said repeatedly that if not for Randi there would not be Penn & Teller as we are today, and that outside of his own family, no one is more important in his life.
Teller arrived by a stranger
road. Born in Philadelphia on Valentine's Day 1948, he graduated from Amherst
College with a degree in Classics—a background in Greek and Latin rhetoric that
gave him a framework for thinking about performance and persuasion that most
magicians never acquire. He taught high school Latin and English while
developing his performing practice, and discovered his signature silence
through simple practical necessity: at college fraternity parties, he found
that audiences who might heckle a talking performer would instead watch,
transfixed, a silent one. He kept the silence. He has kept it on stage for over
fifty years.
What united them, beyond
Chrisemer's introduction, was a shared conviction that magic was being done
wrong—that the dominant mode of the art, which encouraged audiences to wonder
if the performer truly possessed supernatural powers, which built its appeal on
the exploitation of credulity, was not merely intellectually dishonest but
aesthetically impoverished. They were going to do something radically
different.
Magicians Do Not Lie About the Universe
The philosophical position Penn
& Teller have articulated across five decades is one that places them in a
genuinely unusual position relative to the broader landscape of esoteric and
magical culture—and it is a position that Modern Occultist respects even where
it differs from the traditions we cover.
Penn has stated it as clearly as
it can be stated:
"Magicians do
not lie about the universe. They say they're going to fool you, and they do.
There is a contract. You can never leave a Penn & Teller show believing
something that I know not to be true."
This is a radical position in
the history of magic, and it is worth sitting with. The great tradition of
conjuring—from the Victorian spiritualists to the twentieth-century mentalists—has
generally operated on the opposite principle: the illusion of genuine
supernatural power is the product, and the audience's credulity is the raw
material. The magician who claims to bend spoons with his mind, who presents
his cold reading as evidence of psychic connection, who suggests that the dead
are speaking through him—this magician is not merely creating wonder. He is, in
Penn's formulation, lying about the universe.
Penn & Teller's alternative
is formally simple and practically demanding: be completely transparent about
the nature of what you are doing—we are going to deceive you, and we are going
to do it with skill and wit and genuine artistry—while making that deception so
extraordinary that transparency only deepens the wonder rather than diminishing
it. Their most celebrated routines are precisely the ones in which they show
how the trick is done and it is still astonishing. The cups and balls performed
with transparent cups. The bullet catch preceded by a cheerful, step-by-step
account of exactly how someone could be killed attempting it. Teller's Shadows—a
piece in which he destroys the shadow of a rose with scissors—which continues
to bewilder even after the mechanism is revealed because the mechanism is
itself a miracle of skill.
The result is magic that asks
more of the audience than conventional conjuring ever does. It requires you to
understand that you are being fooled, to watch for the method, to bring your
intelligence rather than your credulity to the encounter—and still to be
astonished. This is, as anyone who has seen it knows, a vastly more satisfying
experience than being left in mystified ignorance. It is also, in a precise
sense, a more honest one.
The Paradox That Interests True Occultists
Penn & Teller are atheists
and scientific skeptics who have spent significant portions of their careers
actively debunking claims of the paranormal, the supernatural, and the occult.
Their television series Bullshit! spent nine seasons taking a blowtorch to
psychics, astrologers, mediums, and alternative medicine—traditions that
significantly overlap with what Modern Occultist covers seriously.
They are, in the most literal
sense, on the other side of the epistemological fence from much of what this
magazine explores. But damn, do we appreciate a good group of trickster gods…
And yet there is something that
Penn & Teller understand about the esoteric tradition that its own
practitioners would do well to take seriously—something the great magicians and
occultists have always understood and that gets lost in the more credulous
corners of the tradition: the difference between wonder and credulity, between
genuine mystery and manufactured mystification, between a practice that expands
consciousness and one that merely exploits the human susceptibility to being
fooled.
The Hermetic tradition at its
best has never asked practitioners to abandon their critical intelligence. The
serious students of Kabbalah, of ceremonial magic, of Thelema, of the Western
esoteric tradition in its most rigorous forms—these are people engaged in
practices that demand extraordinary intellectual and psychological discipline.
That kind of honest uncertainty—holding the experience without making inflated
claims for it, working with the practice without lying about the universe—is
actually much closer to Penn & Teller's position than it might initially
appear.
The occultists who inflate their
traditions with false certainty, who claim powers they do not possess, who
exploit the credulity of their students—these are, in Penn's precise
formulation, magicians who lie about the universe. And Penn & Teller, who
have spent fifty years performing genuine miracles of skill while being
completely honest that they are tricks, are in their own way practitioners of
something that takes the relationship between reality and perception as
seriously as any tradition Modern Occultist covers.
A Legacy of Willing Deception
The act that began at the
Minnesota Renaissance Festival in 1975 is, as of this writing in 2026,
celebrating its fifty-first year. Penn & Teller's Las Vegas residency at
the Rio has run since 2001—twenty-five years in the same room, the
longest-running act in Las Vegas history. Fool Us, their television series in
which fellow magicians attempt to baffle them with tricks they cannot identify,
has been running since 2011. They were finally given membership to the Magic
Circle in 2025 — fifty years after the tradition-minded organization had
refused to admit them because of their tendency to reveal how tricks work.
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That last detail is worth savoring. Fifty years of outsider status in the Magic Circle—the establishment of the art, with its traditions of secrecy—because Penn & Teller insisted on being honest with their audiences about the nature of what they were doing. And then, at their fifty-year anniversary residency at the London Palladium, the Magic Circle finally let them in. History has a way of vindicating the honest ones, even when it takes half a century.
Ray Teller, the Latin teacher
from Philadelphia who discovered that silence was more powerful than speech—legally
changed his name to that single word. He possesses a United States passport
issued in that one syllable. He has kept his stage silence for over fifty
years, broken only when the audience doesn't know it: the voice of “Mofo the
Psychic Gorilla” in their early Broadway show, transmitted through a radio
microphone cupped in his hand. He directed a remarkable documentary, Tim's
Vermeer, investigating whether a seventeenth-century Dutch master used
optical devices to achieve his extraordinary photorealism. He wrote a biography
of his father. He is, in private, voluble, warm, and intellectually omnivorous.
Penn has never stopped talking
since 1974. He paints one fingernail red on his left hand in honor of his
mother, who told him when he started performing to get a manicure because
people would be looking at his hands. He painted all his nails red as a joke;
the one remaining nail is the memorial. He has published eight books, hosts a
podcast, and is genuinely, uncomplicatedly devoted to Teller—his best friend,
he has said, his children's honorary uncle, the partner whose aesthetic
disagreements make every show better because they expand the range of what is
possible.
Oh, and he owns an original
first pressing of The Velvet Underground and Nico that even Lou Reed
couldn’t claim to possess
All hail the tricker gods, indeed.
Modern Occultist
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