Penn Jillette never expected to be a star. He also had no interest in doing magic. In the late ‘70s, he and Teller were two-thirds of an act called the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society. As part of that group — and then later as Penn & Teller — they played carnivals and renaissance festivals.
In a recent interview, Jillette says Teller brought the idea of doing magic to the duo and they started incorporating it into their show. But they were still essentially a carnival act trying to figure out what they were — what sort of art they were making and who their audience might be. They had been making a living — barely — for most of a decade and were still trying to figure out what they were.
They got the idea to take their show to theaters, so they committed to a full year of theater shows to see whether they could make it in that world. But as they started performing to small crowds, Jillette panicked. He said they were selling 10 or 15 tickets in a theater that seated 90 people — so he started trying to line up carnival gigs again.
Then something happened — and I can’t stop thinking about how this lesson might apply to me.
Maturity sees world’s ugliness with more melancholy than anger
Making the ‘right’ enemies shouldn’t make a politician electable
Why not join the LP? You can’t fight the state by becoming the state
What if a state government shut down and no one noticed?
That huge fed debt increase? They’ve already used 60 percent of it
Social media creates shallow ties at expense of deeper connections
We’re neither friends nor enemies, just strangers who share the past
‘This path leads to somewhere I think I can finally say, I’m home’
Society needs storytellers to help make sense of a changing world