PLUME: What I find interesting when looking at the mature version of your act – which I guess would have first emerged in, what, the mid-80’s…

JILLETTE: Oh, sure… Yeah…

PLUME: It really hasn’t changed, fundamentally, since then. The dressing may have changed to accommodate larger venues, but the core interaction between you and Teller hasn’t…

JILLETTE: Yeah, that doesn’t change. What’s interesting about the kind of stuff we do is that The Rolling Stones have been able to do – in their career, they’ve done, really, 4 albums… and then every album between there has been kind of that album kind of reshuffled again. So they really, strongly, reinvent themselves and how the stage looks and the lighting and all of that, but the ideas they’re exploring – outside of character and outside of style – really don’t change at all. That’s the wacky thing with music – Teller uses this wonderful analogy where he says, “In magic, and the kinds of things we do, every time you write a song you have to invent and build the instrument.” The skills that we have are the actual magic skills – not the performing skills. We have to separate those. But the actual skills that make the tricks work, we don’t get to use again. Once we learn to play those bar chords, to use the analogy, we don’t use them again. You’re done playing the guitar. Especially once you get it right – you’re done playing the guitar. So it’s like Keith Richards finishing “Exile on Main Street,” and they say, “Okay, but you can’t use any of those chords ever again, and you can’t play the guitar. Now, do you want to invent an oboe and play that for the next record?”

PLUME: I love his French Horn album…

JILLETTE: Exactly! Yes, some of the basic ideas of our show… cooperation without compromise, which I would say is one of the major ones, is so interesting to us. We’ve come from a culture where there were a zillion teams. In 1950, there were ten famous teams. And with the population bigger now, there’s Siegfried and Roy, there’s the Smothers Brothers, and there’s us. And then there’s arguably Jagger and Richards, who are on again, off again. But for enduring teams, there just aren’t many, because cooperation and partnership became seen as codependence. What was really interesting to us was to do a show where you really celebrate codependence – one person can’t say anything, one person can’t do anything. Completely a one-man show done by two people. And also, doing that without any compromise whatsoever -which I think is what I find the most fascinating about it. It’s not like these two people give up themselves to work together – they become more themselves to work together. That idea is just in everything we do. That’s not true… It’s in a lot of the stuff we do. We do some solo stuff in the show where that serves it in the bigger purpose, but is not really true of that exact second. So there’s that idea. There’s the idea that lying is a tangible thing that you have to watch out for. The truth can be distorted. It is something that is constantly there. Those ideas just become a leitmotif of our whole careers – more than our whole careers, of our lives. And then, however, the new bits that go in have entirely different plots and entirely different props, and entirely different moments. If you look at our show, the new bits in our show that we just put in in the last few months… If you look at “Air Sax”, which is this thing where we’re playing jazz and the music takes a solid form and so on – if you compare that to something else in our show, like Teller throwing the rabbit into the chipper/shredder or us shooting the guns, every single thing about those is entirely different. Yes you have the same characters, the same interaction, the same style, but the actual content is different – and much more different than if you compare “Satisfaction” with “Low Expectations.” Much more different than that. So yes, once we’ve got the idea that we were going to be partners without compromising, that incredibly powerful individualism – that kind of thing you get rarely in our culture… You get it with The Three Stooges. I mean, the best demonstration of pure love among creeps that we’ve ever seen is The Three Stooges. These complete outsiders that function as this unit outside, but are entirely different and with a lack of compromise. You see it a little bit in Wayne’s World, and then you see it wonderfully in Jackass. But those are just high points in American culture, and for the most part anytime you see friendship depicted, we’re very careful to make sure the two people playing the friends don’t know each other. It’s even better if they hate each other, like Miami Vice. And they do a lot of time hugging, and going, “All right!” Jackie Chan and stuff – “Oooo, we’re real friends now”… because there’s nothing there, and they have to fake it. Whereas the Stooges did none of that work. They were brothers and a close friend, and they could really hit each other and beat each other around, and that love… that power, that bonding… just flowed off the screen.

PLUME: It’s interesting when you see a dynamic that can’t hold, such as towards the latter part of the Marx Brothers…

JILLETTE: Yeah… Of course, the Marx Brothers always avoided what The Three Stooges embraced. The Marx Brothers were always really ending up fitting in very much. They ended up not being a unit. And on a very superficial level, the Marx Brothers Chico and Harpo often know each other within the plot at the beginning, but Groucho never does. I don’t believe he ever knows them when it first starts.

PLUME: And unlike the Stooges, the Marx Brothers usually come out on top at the end…

JILLETTE: They come out on top, and they also usually end up doing good things for society, whereas The Three Stooges – at their very best – are inert. At their worst, it’s chaos.

PLUME: It’s also interesting how the interaction between you and Teller on stage seems to be a fusion of both of those aspects – both Stooge and Marx…

JILLETTE: Well yeah, there’s a bit of that, although there’s a huge difference. I talked to Tommy Smothers a long time about this, and that’s where it really became clear, because we kind of stumbled into it. If you look at comedy teams and you picture how they stand on stage, they stand at kind of 3/4 looking at each other, and a lot of the interaction – whether you’re talking about the Smothers Brothers or Rowan & Martin, or even Firesign Theater, some of the later stuff, or SCTV and Saturday Night Live – you are watching an interaction between the people who are onstage. Now, the Smothers Brothers characters are very aware that they are performing, but still a lot of the time they are talking to each other. It’s all a 3/4 thing that you’re looking in on. What we do – and is very rare… as a matter of fact, I haven’t been able to think of another example… is we’re dead front. After I was talking about this, I noticed – and during the show, there are three times I look at Teller. What it is, it’s a one-man show done by two people, and the times that I address Teller in the show are just twice. That I say anything to him. All the rest is addressed directly to the audience. It’s exactly as if you were doing a one-person show.

PLUME: So is it the difference between presentation and voyeurism?

JILLETTE: Exactly. Or it’s really the difference between – at a certain level, whether you’re watching a skit, a little playlet, or whether it’s happening to you. The interaction in our show is Penn & Teller on one side and the audience on the other – and not as adversaries – but that is what the interaction is. The interaction with the Smothers Brothers is very often between Tommy and Dickie.

PLUME: With the audience observing the interaction…

JILLETTE: Yeah, with the audience observing. Although some of it’s there, but it’s just not that kind of pure level. And there have been a few bits we’ve done where we interact with one another, but we have – and this is accidental, early on, but now it’s very thought about – we try to make it so when the denouement arrives, you really see that Teller and I have been doing that together fraudulently in order to do something else to you. Which of course is always true for everybody, but in our case it’s more explicit. I think that that’s a really, really important difference in that way of doing the teams. The Stooges are interacting with each other and the Marx Brothers are interacting with each other – we’re not really a mix of those, it’s a slightly different thing. It’s as if Chico and Harpo walked up and, instead of addressing Groucho, actually turned to the audience and addressed them.

PLUME: And as you mentioned, the Stooges were always working towards a singular goal at the same time, while the Marx Brothers were off on different tangents.

JILLETTE: Right. Exactly. And that’s a very important difference. It’s also interesting that when we want to talk about other teams, we instantly go back to the 40’s. If we were having this discussion in the 40’s, you’d bring in The Ritz Brothers, Abbott & Costello – you’d bring in another 20 acts if we had this discussion. And now we’re having this discussion, and I’m trying desperately to at least mention the Smothers Brothers, because they’re now working. But we want to, in this kind of interview… what you want to talk about is “what’s the difference between you and this 23 year-old team?” They don’t exist! That’s what’s so interesting. If we were talking about Dylan, you’d be able to say, “What do you think about Eminem?” But if you’re talking about teams to us, in 2003, you don’t have anyone under the age of 50 you can talk about.

PLUME: So what was the asteroid that hit and wiped out the teams?

JILLETTE: I think it had to do with this weird kind of culture thing that happened, with a deep misunderstanding of individuality. This phony kind of individuality… that individuality and loneliness are the same. Actually, you can be yourself much more with help. That’s a completely laughable statement, and yet it is completely true. I mean, if you want to completely develop who you are, you can read, you can take in art, and you can also have people around you that love you, respect you, and can help. It’s interesting to me how often that’s forgotten.

PLUME: Do you think, to some extent, it was the rise of the “stand-up comedy” superstar culture of the 70’s?

JILLETTE: I have no idea how it happened, but I remember Teller and I really feeling that we were bucking it. I remember a guy that called me up – it was this great conversation. It was in the late 80’s, and I was in our office, and I was to do an interview – much like this one – over the phone. And a guy called up, and in his lead, he said, “We’ve talked before. I used to be with US but now I’m for Self.” And I was like, “I guess we know everything now, don’t we?”

PLUME: That pretty much sums up a generation right there…

JILLETTE: Exactly! “I used to be with US but now I’m for Self.” Okay…

PLUME: Now where can you possibly go in an interview after that…

JILLETTE: Exactly! I kind of laughed and I went, “I guess a lot of people are like that.” And he paused and went, “Uhhh… what?” And I said, “Oh, nothing.”

PLUME: You know, when will that guy just be for People…

JILLETTE: Exactly! “I used to be for People but now I’m for Self.” That’s the way you want to do the joke, but it happens that it’s a true story, so US is in there.

Continued below…

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