Penn Jillette - Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!

I thought it was really funny at the time, but maybe it was true. I’m not as good as that list of people. When I make jokes using those hateful terms, am I adding to our culture like Johnny, Red, Pryor, and Carlin? When Lenny was swearing and doing all that ethnic stuff, it took a lot of bravery, ideas and talent, but times have changed. It’s no longer brave or smart. We’ve gotten to the place where it’s too hard to tell whose side the harelip bartender is on. Even one person’s misunderstanding may not be worth the next guy’s laugh.

Don’t worry about any of that for the rest of this book. I’ll still use “fuck,” but Canadian Thanksgiving is at a different time than Thanksgiving in the States and that’s okay with me.

I DID THE CELEBRITY APPRENTICE 2012as kind of a work/study thang. TV networks are dying. The death throes of religion give us jihads. The death throes of television give us reality shows. I blame the writers’ strikes. That’s not really fair, but I hate a union that forces me to join it. I’d like to be the anti–Pete Seeger on this and stand up against the unions, but they really have Hollywood writing sewed up. Penn & Teller chose a different battle. We stood up to Equity.

Equity is the only live Broadway theater union. Penn & Teller are not members. The first time we played Broadway, Equity tried to get us to join. They said they could get us a better deal. That seemed impossible, because we were producers on the show. How would they help us negotiate with ourselves? They said we had to join. We found a couple loopholes. Equity guarantees understudies, so we said we would join if they could find five or six guys to audition for my part. They had to be 6'7'' tall and be able to perform the monologues, eat fire, juggle, play bass and do all the magic. Then they’d need to find someone with Teller’s abilities. He’s average height, but aside from that, he can do stuff no one else can do. They failed. Then we claimed we weren’t actors. (And if you saw me deliver the line “Superman, the others!” in Lois & Clark , you saw proof I’m not an actor. We might have been lying about Teller.) Penn & Teller are variety artists, so our Broadway union is the American Guild of Variety Artists. It handles circus performers and Vegas acts. The guild’s president was and is Rod McKuen, so don’t fuck with us. Equity is a union that boasts ninety percent unemployment at any given time. I hope the plate spinners and Risley acts on Broadway follow our lead and hang tough with AGVA.

Our sucky TV culture is all PBS’s fault. In 1971, they put a camera crew into the home of Bill and Pat Loud and their children and, in 1973, put everything the crew filmed on TV. The show was called An American Family, and viewers watched the Louds’ lives as though it was a TV show. It was a TV show. The Louds went from happy family to D-I-V-O-R-C-E and America watched it happen. Their son Lance became the first totally out gay guy on TV (I guess no one counts the Hollywood Squares and Bewitched ). When Lance died of hep C and complications from HIV years later, there was another TV show.

Before An American Family, you would have bet your ass and your colonoscopy video that if you put TV cameras in a room with people, those people would behave better. They’d be kinder, wiser, more measured and more loving than they would be without the cameras. The whole world is watching, so be at your best.

The Hawthorne effect—coined in 1950 in response to factory workers’ productivity increases when they were being observed—manifests in every clinical shrink study of people’s motivations. When anyone watches anyone do anything, the watched people do whatever they’re being watched doing a little better for the short time while they’re being watched. The key is that the behavioral improvements are temporary. If the Hawthorne effect worked for more than a few days with TV cameras, we wouldn’t have The Celebrity Apprentice.

I noticed the Hawthorne effect for the first few days of my season of The Celebrity Apprentice , but it sure didn’t last long. We celebrities are desperate pigs. I knew several of my co-stars prior to working on TCA together. I had hung out with them and worked with them in high-pressure situations. None were close friends, but I liked them all and thought I knew them a bit. But sixteen hours a day with TV cameras all around, doing pointless fake corporate tasks outside one’s skill set with Clay Aiken (the guy who came in second on American Idol years ago), and no one worries about the whole world watching (with the exception of anyone who has a job, someone to talk to, a nice view out the window or a solitaire program). You’re happy if you don’t swallow your own tongue.

The secret truth of The Celebrity Apprentice is that it isn’t very hard. The tasks are nothing. Makeup starts just after five a.m. and the show goes to about ten p.m., but you spend most of that time doing nothing. Anyone who isn’t in show business could accomplish everything the show called for and have time left over to do their laundry, cook their supper and post pictures of their animal companion on Facebook. The Celebrity Apprentice is easy like junior high is easy. All the arithmetic, the creative writing and the history are super simple, but like junior high, you do that easy work surrounded by people who are full-tilt hormone-raging bugnutty. Everyone is panicked, desperate, yelling, swearing, attacking, backstabbing, failing to get laid and acting crazy. With all this drama, any sane person just wants to do more algebra. The Celebrity Apprentice is junior high with a better brand of acne cover-up.

Like all desperate celebrities, I’ve been on more than one reality show. I also did Dancing with the Stars . I was amazed to find out that The Celebrity Apprentice was more honest and straightforward than DWTS . The idea of DWTS is pretty beautiful: half-assed show folk who aren’t dancers are teamed up with great dancers, and cameras video them while they learn to dance. How well can people learn to do something outside their ken? It’s a beautiful idea. Dance is a joyous celebration of humanity, so it should be an uplifting, inspiring show to watch and even more beautiful to be on.

Well, I loved being around Kym Johnson, my DWTS dancing partner. Kym was a delight. She oozed professional skill and joy. I loved working on the dancing. I love practicing things I’m not good at, and it was an easy schedule. But I hated the time that was spent with the production trying to get young ambitious Mormon women to cry. Guys behind the cameras would say mean things at attractive young men and women and washed-up celebrities about how it would ruin their lives if they didn’t win. The producers were hoping to capture some “good TV.” A young wannabe art filmmaker would take me into my “confessional” and ask me to talk about how upset I was going to be if I was the first one voted off—the biggest failure possible in reality . I was the most incompetent and I was off the show as quickly as anyone could be. I found out how I’d feel. The answer was fine. Others danced better than me, but no one danced with more joy. And being on that show for one round made me a lot of money in ticket sales to the Penn & Teller show. If I’d stayed on longer, I would have made much more money—but I’m paid more than I ever expected anyway so that failure is pretty easy to take. It didn’t take food out of my children’s mouths. A twenty-four-year-old film student with a notebook would ask me (me, a guy who worked in the carny) things like, “Is Dancing with the Stars the hardest you’ve ever worked? Is it the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” I’d explain that anyone who has a job, any job, or spent any time looking for a job outside show business had worked harder that day than anyone on any celebrity reality show (I specify “celebrity” because it seems those frozen ass crab fishermen work pretty hard). If you fix cars, sell cars, drive cars, practice medicine, take medicine, sell medicine, give pedicures, give blow jobs or work at a KFC, you worked harder today than any celebrity on any reality show ever has. Every time I was asked the “how hard are you working” question on Dancing with the Stars , I gave them that answer. They didn’t ever use that answer on the show. They have to pretend it’s hard work. It isn’t.