Love and Memory and Humanity

Magician and novelist Penn Jillette on censorship, sock monkeys, and Bullshit!

Nick Gillespie from the December 2004 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

My mom and dad had died fairly recently, just a couple of years ago--it's still traumatic for me--and I had all this stuff in my head. People who know about Penn & Teller know that I'm an atheist. Because of that, I find myself getting into these discussions at two o'clock in the morning in a diner, people asking the usual questions about atheists: "How can you be moral? Don't you wish there were a god?" Then, at some point, they'll ask, "How do you feel with the death of a loved one?" As I wrote Sock, it turned out that I was writing an answer to that question. How does an atheist deal with really deep grief?

Reason: The narrator writes: "Faith felt good, faith always feels good, it probably feels better than heroin and that's why faith has done much more damage...What's the difference between God and a sock monkey? There is a sock monkey."

So how do you live in a world without faith, and how are you moral in a world without faith? You've suggested that writing the book helps you find solace in an indifferent universe. How does it do that?

Jillette: When you boil it down, I think it becomes a cliche. But the book is about how love and memory and humanity are really what we have to hold on to. More important, that's kind of enough.

People have to realize that having an imaginary friend may be dangerous. When 9/11 hit, the second thing I said to myself was, "This really is what religious people do." Those people flying the plane were very good, very pious, truly faithful believers. There's no other way to paint them. Of course, they are extremists by definition, but they certainly aren't going against Islam in any real way.

The first thing I said to myself on 9/11 was, "There go our civil rights." I found out by comparing notes later that George Carlin and I both said that at the exact same time. That's the first thing that popped into our head.

Reason: How have you been hampered post-9/11?

Jillette: Touring, for one thing.

Reason: Explain that. It's not like you can only play Gitmo, right?

Jillette: No. But one of the reasons we started doing a regular show in Vegas was because of how difficult it's become to travel. It's not the only reason, but it was definitely a factor. When we tour, we have an entire crew of freedom fighters. Every checkpoint that we went through--six or seven a week--somebody would be having an altercation with security.

You know, we have the solution on how to do all the security: Have a man and woman at each gate leading to the airplane strip. They're stripped from the waist down, and every passenger has to lean over and lightly kiss the genitals of the person of the same sex and then have a piece of bacon. And all hijacking just goes away.

You don't have to actually have any sexual contact. Just enough so that anybody that has the sexual phobias of the Abrahamic religions [Judaism, Christianity, and Islam] has to violate that deeply. You probably don't have to pay the two people; they would probably think it was a cool, fun thing to do. You just barely touch your lips with the genitals--just like that--and you have a little piece of bacon and you get on the plane. There's no searching your luggage. No nothing. We're all set.

Reason: Bullshit! is a show about calling bullshit on people's beliefs about everything from the Bible to bottled water to yoga. What's been the most satisfying episode of Bullshit! so far?

Jillette: Being this intense mama's boy who's lost his mom, the most important to me was the one debunking the ability to talk to the dead. That was cathartic and a kind of payback across the decades to Houdini [who inspired Penn & Teller and unmasked mediums as frauds].

The most satisfying ones have been the episodes about People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Alcoholics Anonymous. Those were also the ones that were hardest to do. People on the staff went, "Whoa, don't be doing that!" But these are also ones that people came up to us afterwards and said, "We're so glad that someone finally said this shit about PETA, thank you, thank you, thank you."

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