Voodoo and Violence

Magician Penn Jillette sees through the censors' tricks.

Steve Kurtz from the April 1994 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

The First Amendment says nothing about your getting paid for saying anything. It just says you can say it. I don't believe that if a corporation pulls all the money out of you or a network pulls their money away or you get fired, you're being censored.

Unfortunately, that gets very, very confusing with stuff like the motion-picture rating system. What you have there is, at least on the face of it, a "voluntary" rating system put in because of government threats. I do blame the entertainment industry for a lot, because they could have hung tough and seen where the chips fell. But they didn't, because it's better for business, which is what they're supposed to be about. It's complicated, but what we have now is a situation where if you open a movie theater in a mall, you sign a piece of paper that says you can't show unrated, NC-17, or X-rated films. And that is government coming in all of a sudden, your evil local governments. For someone like me, who says "censorship" is OK--if I want to pull money away from a Christian artist because I don't like Christians, that's my right--the voluntary stuff is fine. The free market will take care of it, and that's all well and good. But these zoning laws are a government thing.

Reason: What do you think the result will be if television does give in to governmental demands to change its product? Is it really better for business in the long run?

Penn: Of course it's not better for business in the long run. That's what the motion picture thing has shown us. This is really a short-term fix. It's really a pretty wonderful short-term fix, that's the part that's so irritating. You know Steven Bochco can come out and agree with the people who are pressuring him that violence is bad, and just claim that his violence is a little different. And he can put on NYPD Blue, which does phenomenal ratings because of its nudity and because of the warning in front of it. And he' s a good citizen, and he' s a bad guy, and he' s all these things except a moral person taking a stand. In the short term, I think that probably serves him the best. But in the long run, it certainly won't, because you get smaller and smaller areas that you're able to express yourself in.

The people who do the best in the face of censorship are people like [radio "shock jock"] Howard Stern. He will do fine with it because his humor is based on being contained and not being able to really go wild It's part of his being monogamous with his wife and yet having strippers on the show taking their tops off. People like the fact that he's wild within a very, very confined cage. So he'll do fine, Steven Bochco will do fine. but the country doesn't do fine. That is, Stern will do fine if he's not shut down altogether.

Reason: That seems to be at least a remote possibility, considering that the FCC has fined Stern's employer, Infinity Broadcasting, in excess of a million dollars and has delayed the company's purchase of more stations.

Penn: That's horrible and terrible. It's something we will have to fight because if they stop granting licenses, if they get him off the air, then that's that.

What makes the problem really awful is that you're dealing with the entertainment industry, a group of people who are traditionally spineless. That's where the problem comes from. You see what happens if you try to do this to the medical profession. They're pretty organized against it; less than half of the doctors are rolling over and going for the new health-care programs to get a head start. Most of them are not going gently into that dark health care. In show business, everyone is, except for us and maybe three or four other people.

Reason: So you do feel the pressure, then?

Penn: Well, you see, the odd thing is we're personally in a very odd place. We work in a rarefied enough atmosphere that we are never and probably will never be attacked. You know, we're S20, $25, $30 a ticket, we're playing Broadwav, we're playing colleges, we're playing Vegas. We're playing the places where no one cares about that sort of thing, and our show is considered by TheNew York Times to be so artsy and smart and everything. It's just like nudity in certain contexts. You can always get away with ballets showing [nudity]. But as soon as you put it in the Baby Doll Lounge downtown, where truck drivers can see it, all of a sudden, legislation comes in.

So, we are benefiting from being seen as artsy. Maybe we get one or two letters a week that deal with the fantasy mistreatment of animals. In our act, we throw a rabbit into a shredder. People write letters about that. Since we're obviously not killing a real rabbit, what are they complaining about? They complain that it's bad for people to see, that it might give them ideas. It's symbolic desrespect to the animals. Animals just shouldn't be used in shows at all.

Reason: Do people worry for you when you appear on television, do they say you should tone it down?

Penn: We're not in a visible enough place, really. The Letterman show, for instance, which is the type of thing we appear on, is on late at night, and no one has talked about that. The only place we were really told to tone it down--where other people would use the word censorship, but I wouldn't--was when we did MTV right after the Beavis and Butt-head thing. We were told we couldn't do the first two bits we wanted to do. It was for Halloween, and we wanted to do a needle through the arm or a razor blade in the eye. They were really worried that, with the Beavis and Butthead thing, people would say that this was irresponsible.

Reason: How do you feel about the Beavis and Butt-head controversy?

Penn: Complete and utter insanity. There's no issue you can find that I could be further on one side of. The fact that Beavis and Butthead--cartoon characters!--are being blamed for things in the real world seems so close to insanity that I can't imagine believing it. There are two ways that I can see to argue this issue of the link between real violence and TV violence. One is to show that there's no [causal link] between the amount of violence someone watches and how they act in the real world. There just isn't. That's one way to go: [Researchers] didn't find anything, so shut up.