A grand variety of acts may have performed at UC Irvine's Bren Events Center in the last few years, but one thing that has yet to grace its stage is a gas-powered, deafening, branch-devouring chipper-shredder. Penn and Teller hope to remedy that cultural lack this evening.
"A few years ago I bought a chipper-shredder to turn my useless yard rubbish into useful mulch," the mono-monikered Teller explained. "And we were impressed by the extreme power and terror of the chipper-shredder. Over the last year we've devised a vanishing bunny rabbit trick, utilizing the chipper-shredder. You can sort of put it together yourself from there."
Teller (who legally dropped his first name after no one used it for years) is the smaller, eerily silent member of the duo onstage. He says the silence comes in handy when he's drowning or swinging upside-down over a bear trap.
The physically and verbally imposing 6-foot-6 Penn Jillette, meanwhile, embellishes their bold comedic magic with monologues of Spectorian density.
Penn describes himself and Teller as "sub-stars": "If you spent 20 minutes recounting to the average person everything we've done, chances are he'll eventually go, 'Oh, them.' " In their 18 years together, Penn and Teller have created a wealth of unique reference points. They've irked some magicians by breaking the rule of not revealing how their tricks are done, but the tricks remain twistedly wondrous nonetheless: Teller is run over by trucks or seemingly impaled by power drills. They do card tricks in which the key card turns up in the mouth of a rat balanced on the nose of Teller, who has his head in the rat's cage. They'll pull a rabbit from a hat on David Letterman's show, followed by 500 cockroaches.
Oh, them.
They play Vegas, Broadway and long touring runs with their shows, the most recent being "Penn & Teller Rot in Hell." They do PBS, NBC and MTV with equal ease. They have two books on the shelves, including last year's "How to Play With Your Food," which gives tips on eating ants and how to get the image of Satan to appear on a burrito. On their own, Teller pens articles for the New Yorker, while Penn tells computer buffs what's on his mind in a column in PC/Computing magazine.
The performances in Irvine tonight, and at UCLA Friday, are among a handful of shows they are doing to break in new material. The chipper-shredder bit is one of four new routines which will be accounting for a quarter of the two-hour show. They intend to return to the Southland in late '94 or early '95 with an entirely new show celebrating their 20th year of performing together.
In separate phone interviews recently, the two spoke enthusiastically about another new bit they're working on, which they intend to debut on Thanksgiving on "The Late Show with David Letterman."
Penn said, "Teller and I have both gotten to a point where we think that big machinery is really funny. On Letterman we'll be doing a card trick with two forklifts and four-foot playing cards made of metal, where the entire deck weighs in at about 1,000 pounds. Our thinking was that we're playing bigger places all the time, and that we should do bigger things. The idea of using giant cards like a clown would use really turned my stomach. But the idea of them being four-by-three and metal and dangerous I really enjoyed.
"And, man, have we been working, every day, learning to operate these forklifts. Fortunately Teller and I, when it comes to practicing, are both like terriers with slippers. We're getting pretty good, so now we have learned to cut the cards and shuffle them with forklifts. It is absolutely, literally, sleight-of-forklift that we're doing.
Teller said, "From time to time we will hear complaints from people that they have a little trouble in the back seeing the faces of playing cards when we do card tricks in the show. I think this will fix them."
Penn thinks it will give audiences a unique perspective: "We're using Hyster electric forklifts. They're completely silent, and the cards are pretty loud. I imagine if you were tiny and standing right near a normal deck of cards, they're probably pretty loud, while the hands are silent. I think it really has the feeling of just blowing up a card trick."
That combination of whimsy and large machinery is representative of Penn and Teller's singular approach to their art. Though they've worked hard to gain their status as the Bad Boys of Magic, a lot of thought goes into the splatter and clang of their act.
When they met in 1974, Teller was a Latin professor who dabbled in magic, and Penn an unemployed clown school graduate. Neither harbored dreams of stardom. Instead they were drawn to their present pursuits through an annoyance that no one was practicing magic with the attitude and intelligence they felt it deserved.
