Penn & Teller let their shtick hit the fan

By Glenn Garvin
Knight Ridder News Service

On tv "Penn & Teller: Bulls---t!" Showtime 7p.m. Thursday

"I would love to do a show just called 'Your Vote Doesn't Count,' " confides investigative comedian-magician Penn Jillette. "And just go up against Rock the Vote. But I'm sure they'll squash me on that."

If so, it will be the first time the cable network Showtime has said no to Jillette and his silent sidekick Teller, starting with the name they gave their raucous, myth-busting laughterhouse for sacred cattle: "Penn & Teller: Bulls---t!"

Perhaps no other program on television goes looking for trouble with more resolve than "P&TB," a sort of "60 Minutes" run by lunatics. Not only do Penn and Teller use pranks and hidden cameras to expose fools and charlatans, they also rank on them with expressions that are often memorable but almost never remotely printable in a family newspaper.

The targets aren't exactly low-profile, either; TV spiritual medium John Edward, New Age guru Deepak Chopra and the environmental group Greenpeace were among those roughed up on "P&TB" last season.

Among the early victims this year are Sherrie Schneider, co-author of the snare-a-man-by-playing-hard-to-get bestseller "The Rules," shown giving romantic advice ("Just pretend he's dead") on her 900 telephone line; and John Gray, who has created a financial empire from his touchy-feely book "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus," kindly offering some surefire pickup lines for men ("Your breasts are perfect").

Amazingly, nobody has sued "P&TB" yet. And Showtime executives insist they weren't even worried about it when they decided to put Penn and Teller on the air.

"Compared to a lot of things we've done, no, we didn't have much trepidation," says Showtime CEO Matthew Blank. "It's entertainment programming." Though he adds: "I now have a close personal relationship with three or four hundred chiropractors who have written to us."

Jillette says the obscenities heaped on the show's targets are actually a barrier to lawsuits. Libel law is pretty clear about what happens when you call someone a "liar" or "fraud," but much more vague when it comes to referring to them by a synonym for intestinal portal.

Penn and Teller originally viewed "P&TB" as a simple vehicle to debunk what they call "junk science."

"We've been trying every year since anybody would listen to us, pitching some kind of a skeptical TV show," says Jillette. "But we never got anywhere. Show business, as a rule, is anti-science. The attitude is, 'If it feels good, believe it.' Real science can do all these marvelous things, but they prefer to believe in UFOs."

In September 2001, Penn and Teller's regular annual pitch sessions with network executives seemed more pointless than ever. Just two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Jillette recalls, "seemed like the worst possible time to be pitching something like that. It seemed disrespectful."

Penn and Teller considered canceling the meetings. Instead, they went ahead — and with nothing to lose, were more blunt than ever. "John Edward (host of the syndicated TV show "Crossing Over") will say, within two weeks, that he's speaking to the 9/11 dead," Jillette told the network brass.

"And when you hear that, you should all feel guilty, because you're involved in it and you bear responsibility. But I won't feel bad, because I was in here warning you."

The executives' immediate response was underwhelming, Jillette recalls. "But a couple of weeks later, when Edward went on TV and said he was having conversations with 9/11 dead, three of them called back."

Even when Showtime agreed to pick up "P&TB," Jillette didn't expect a warm public response.

"My perspective was, people will hate this show, but they'll watch it," he says. "I was very cynical. But it's been the opposite. People love it. I thought our fan mail would come from a few nerds and geeks. But it's actually from families in the Midwest with no apparent eccentricities."

Much of the show's appeal is based on the pranks Penn and Teller use to make their points. For an episode on alternative medicine, they convinced credulous shoppers to try an "ancient African mucus mask" — actually, just snails crawling around on their faces. In another, hidden cameras showed customers at an upscale restaurant prattling on in precious wine-critic lingo about the "bouquet" of expensive bottled waters — while another camera showed the bottles being filled from a garden hose in the back alley.

"P&TB" also relies on what Jillette calls the George Harrison Factor, recalling a scene in "A Hard Day's Night" where Harrison, part of a focus group being quizzed by advertising executives, explains that one of their spokeswomen is so popular because TV viewers like to turn down the sound and provide their own rude dialogue whenever she appears.

"That may explain a lot more of John Edward's TV audience than he likes to believe," says Jillette. "To some extent that's what we're doing — we're kind of like a 'Mystery Science Theater,' making catcalls at these people and inviting our audience to join in."

But, though it may get lost among the purple language and the pranks, the bedrock of "P&TB" is old-fashioned journalism.

That's never been more apparent than in Thursday's season premiere, a hard look at the biggest animal-rights organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Penn and Teller charge that it has funneled money to a confessed arsonist linked by federal investigators to at least seven firebombings of laboratories and farms. They also accuse PETA of killing animals it "rescued" in raids on labs and animal shelters.

PETA officials reacted with scorn last week to advance word of the program.