Penn Jillette, the long-haired, goateed half of the comic magic duo Penn & Teller, made his debut last Sunday on the new season of NBC's "The Celebrity Apprentice."
It is his latest reality show. He took a turn at "Dancing With the Stars" in 2008 and was eliminated after the first episode.
He'll go on a rant about how we are an unscripted society that history will not look upon kindly and how he gets on those shows to sell tickets to his shows, like the one he and Teller will perform at Centennial Hall on Friday.
But the truth is Jillette does not exactly hate being on reality TV.
"It was pretty great," he said of his "Apprentice" experience during a phone interview in January.
The show had already been filmed by then. Could he tell us who won?
"I can certainly talk about it," he said, then recited verbatim the Constitution's First Amendment. "But I promised people I wouldn't, so I'm not going to."
We were able to get the 56-year-old comic magician to talk about a lot of other things, though, from working with Teller, his stage partner of 37 years, to the friendships he made on "Apprentice."
What are your live shows like, aside from abusing poor Teller?
"First of all, you start out wrong. The bullying fallacy, that aggressive behavior automatically comes to poundage. It's just not true. ... And if you go through our show bit per bit, ... I'm the one who gets the knife in my hand. I'm the one who gets handcuffed against the wall. All that stuff is done to me, and yet after the show people always say, 'Oh, you pick on poor little Teller so much.' And I will add to the fact that 'poor little Teller' isn't even little. He's 5 foot 10."
But you're 6 foot 7. You tower over him.
"You know what that means? That means that if Einstein hadn't beaten us to it, right now in this conversation we would come up with the theory of relativity."
Is it true Teller doesn't talk much?
"We have never done a show in which Teller does not talk. ... It's so funny in our show because people will talk to Teller, have an actual conversation with Teller, then come to me right afterward and say to me, 'I love the fact that Teller never talks.' "
Do you two talk a lot?
"We've had a 37-year conversation ... called by the outside world 'shows.' The first conversation started with Teller claiming that magic was essentially intellectually a form, which is a crazy thing to say. What does Jerry Seinfeld say about magic? All magic is 'Here's a quarter, now it's gone. You're an idiot, now it's back. You're a jerk. Show's over.'
"What magic was when we first got together was a greasy guy that talks to a lot of birds, tortures women ... and that was all magic was. Teller claims it was essentially an intellectual see and say, but his point was that magic has built-in irony at a level you can't imagine in a theater. Because what you are seeing, while you are seeing it, you know it's not true. Most theater is the willing suspension of disbelief. Shakespeare says you're on an island, 'OK, we're on an island.' But magic is based on the unwilling suspension of disbelief. You are supposed to have a chip on your shoulder. ... That's what Teller and I wanted to see if we could do, if we could do a magic show that had tricks that no one could figure out and yet did not insult the audience. That was kind of the experiment. ... And that is the conversation that's been going on for 37 years."
Is this a family-friendly show?
"There is no obscenity whatsoever. There's no sexual content whatsoever. You couldn't even really tell watching our show that there were different genders on planet Earth. Not even a reference."
What were some of the most outrageous "Apprentice" outbursts?
"The women on this particular season - I'm not making a generalization about gender; that would be wrong - but the women ... tended to be more strident, more aggressive than the men's team. But I didn't find the yelling as unpleasant as the incompetent manipulation that you see."
And you made a friend of Paul Teutul from "American Chopper."
"I have been told by people that Paul Teutul was loud and aggressive and angry. It was wonderful to see that none of that was even slightly true. He was smart and measured and kind."
What reality show will you do next?
"I don't know. I found out that 'Wife Swap' didn't really involve (sex), so I lost all interest in that."
If you go
• What: Penn & Teller.
• When: 8 p.m. Friday.
• Where: Centennial Hall, 1020 E. University Blvd., on the University of Arizona campus.
• Tickets: $44 to $84 through www.uapresents.org
