10/24: Penn & Teller bring magic to Mesa Arts Center

• Magician-comedians Penn %26 Teller have been performing together since 1975.
• In addition to a standing gig in Las Vegas%2C they have had numerous TV shows of their own.
• Penn Jillette says the heart of their shows is acknowledging that a trick is a trick%2C not "magic."

Penn & Teller aren't just the world's most famous duo of magician-comedians. They are a pop-culture juggernaut.

In addition to a standing gig in Las Vegas, they host "Wizard Wars,"a reality competition show on SyFy. It's just the latest of their television ventures, which include "Penn & Teller: Fool Us," which had them guessing the secrets of other magicians, and "Penn & Teller: Bulls--t!" -- a myth-debunking show that ran for eight seasons on Showtime.

On Friday, Oct. 24, they bring their show to the Mesa Arts Center. Penn Jillette — the garrulous, long-haired giant who does all the talking onstage — talked by phone about their four-decade career.

Question: How does it feel knowing you and Teller have made comedy cool again?

Answer: Oh, I don't think anybody could do that. (Laughs) That seems impossible. What we've tried to do is find some way that magic can at least be seen a little more like music or comedy, (an art form) that isn't stuck in all this weirdness. Many magicians think that what they're doing is somehow above tricks, that they're supposed to pretend that they have real powers or something. That's offensive and insulting, and looking at the tricks of magic does no more harm to the magic form than talking to Seinfeld about how he writes jokes. People should understand a little bit of that.

Q: But magicians do jealously guard their secrets. I watched "Fool Us" hoping that if you guys did not get fooled, you'd tell us how the trick was done, but you don't.

A: Well I do, by analogy. If you were doing a show on music composition and you had a judge judging a fugue, for instance, he would not pull out a blackboard and explain to you what fugue writing is. He would use the terms of art to discuss it enough that you could understand it in layperson's terms, but the terms that he used would also give you enough to do a Web search. Every single answer I give allows a 12-year-old boy to do typing for about 15 minutes and find out everything about that trick.

Q: Watching "Wizard Wars" shows how much of magic is about creative showmanship, since most of the tricks are really just variations on the tried and true. How much has magic changed in recent years?

A: You come down to a very difficult question there. Is "Good Golly Miss Molly" really a different song from "hail, hail rock and roll" (Chuck Berry's "School Days")? Same chord structure, same basic lyric content, but the specifics really do matter. So when you say "really just a variation," that covers a lot of ground. Is "Moby-Dick" really just a variation of a whaling story?

That having been said, if you're talking about the technology, there's very little new technology that's used in magic, and the reason is that our culture has grown to report very accurately on technology. In the 18th and 19th century, new technology was not dispersed, so magicians were the first to use electromagnets and mirrors and, of course, famously invented movies. But nowadays, that doesn't happen as much. Once in a while, there's a little chemical turn or a little mechanical turn that people haven't thought of before, especially in card technology, but not that much.

Magic is in an entertaining way exploring how people ascertain truth. That's essentially what you're doing, and how we ascertain truth, the cultural and neurological aspects of that, are not going to change with technology. How we mislead ourselves and others are things that are so deeply human that a couple 300 years doesn't make a difference.

Q: On "Bulls--t!" you continue a long tradition of magicians debunking spiritualists, etcetera. Does a knowledge of magic lead to skepticism?

A: First, my skepticism led to magic, not the other way around. ...

There are many, many magicians who are credulous, who are believers in all sorts of things. As a matter of fact, there's a very strong and big subculture in magic called gospel magic, which is nothing but Christians proselytizing through magic and in this very odd way using tricks to show that God is real. (Laughs) Very funny. And there's also, of course, the immoral magicians who use tricks to further pseudoscience and do spoon-bending and mind-reading and so on.

Now the fact that the most famous magician, Houdini, did tie those together is a very big deal. And the fact that the first magic book written, in the 16th century, "The Discoverie of Witchcraft," is a debunking book makes it very important. But I would so much like to be able to say to you yes, magic leads to skepticism, but it simply isn't true.

Q: You've done guest spots on TV shows ranging from "The West Wing" to "Babylon 5," as alien comedians. What was your favorite gig that wasn't your own show?

A: I think the thing that culturally is most important and that continues to kind of blow my mind is the fact that we did two appearances on the "The Simpsons" — although using the word appearance there is wrong, because we were drawings. And the fact that just the other day my children opened packages of "Simpsons" toys that had me in it was kind of mind-blowing. I have an action figure is what I'm saying.

Q: You and Teller first teamed up as buskers at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival in 1975. What brought you together?

A: We met in this classical music/comedy group called the Othmar Schoeck Memorial Society for the Preservation of Unusual and Disgusting Music, where I was still in high school and juggling, and Teller was there to do some Latin poetry. We began talking, and I hated magic more than anything. Really, really loathed it. Thought it was lying. I wasn't interested in the misrepresentation of truth. But Teller had the discussion with me that magic could be essentially intellectual, which was a crazy thing to say. And he discussed how magicians throw away the idea that it's a trick, which is actually the beautiful part of it, and try to pretend it's a special effect, which is the uninteresting part of it.

Teller and I never were friends. We never socialized any more than we had to. But intellectually we had this conversation. The conversation started in about '73, and the conversation still goes on.

Reach the reporter at kerry.lengel@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4896.

Penn & Teller

When: 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 24.

Where: Mesa Arts Center, 1 E. Main St.

Admission: $45-$75.

Details: 480-644-6500, mesaartscenter.com.