Penn Jillette: Camera Tricks Are Not Magic | Big Think

Become a Big Think member to unlock expert classes, premium print issues, exclusive events and moreCamera Tricks Are Not Magic

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PENN JILLETTE:

Penn Jillette is a cultural phenomenon as a solo personality and as half of the world-famous Emmy Award­-winning magic duo Penn & Teller. His solo exposure is enormous: from Howard Stern to Glenn Beck to the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. He has appeared on Dancing with the Stars, MTV Cribs, and Chelsea Lately and hosted the NBC game show Identity. As part of Penn & Teller, he has appeared more than twenty times on David Letterman, as well as on several other TV shows, from The Simpsons and Friends to Top Chef and The View. He co-hosts the controversial series Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, which has been nominated for sixteen Emmy Awards. He is currently co host of the Discovery Channel's Penn & Teller Tell a Lie and the author of God, No! and Presto!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Does magic have to be performed live?

Penn Jillette: There are performers who have built their whole career doing magic on TV and can't really perform live at all—don't really have jobs and skills. And people watch those shows and seem to enjoy them. I don't think it's magic. I don't think it's valid and not because they're doing camera tricks which they are, and not because they're using plants, which they are. And not because they're using editing tricks, which they are. The problem is simply that what you've seen on that screen, what you're competing with... I mean, once you've shown "Avatar" on video what does sleight of hand mean? It means nothing.

And you can't keep telling people, "We're not cheating. No honest, we really mean this." What does that matter when your job is to lie? The most amazing trick I could ever do for you is to be from one place to another place instantly and that's done about three times a minute on every TV show, even the news. So I don't think you can do that. Whereas in the theater Teller and I don't have to spend a moment saying: "We're not using camera tricks." Because what we're doing there in that room is following the rules of physics and the rules of time that you've dealt with since birth.

And that makes it bypass a certain kind of intellect that makes it fascinating to me. That's what I think, but there are many people that watch Chris Angel and, go: "Ooh, that's a magic trick." It's not to me but they are, "Ooh it is." So they're not wrong they just, you know, have a different perception of what video does and I do. I mean, there are people that will watch things on Chris's show that to me are crystal clear how they're being done, and they seem to fool people. I mean, if you want a very simple example: if you go out on the street with your camera and you take a deck of cards and you let the person open the cards, shuffle them, clean deck, nothing, reach in, pick out a card, peek at it, put it down, and you say, "Is that the seven of diamonds?"

If you go out on the street in New York and do that for two hours eventually you'll be right. You know, you don't have to do any other cheats other than editing, just pick the time it works. You know, show us the time it works and you've done magic and you don't have to design any of that. So to me that's really clear. Whenever I'm watching TV I have a very real sense that I'm watching different tries of the same thing stuck together. And with that sense in my heart, with my sense in my heart that when you're watching DeNiro do a take that he might have done that 15 times. It's different for me than watching an actor in the theater that i know is going directly into what he's doing now from what he did 10 minutes ago because we were both in the room in realtime. I think it's an entirely different thing but most people don't.