Penn JillettePenn Jillette is a magician, comedian, actor, producer and, generally, a curator of interesting and intelligent things. But he is best known as the self-described “larger, louder” half of Penn & Teller, a stage show that Penn and his magician partner Teller have put on since 1975. It currently plays at the Rio in Vegas. I saw it there not long ago, and it was phenomenal.
The pair also has a weekly Showtime series called Penn & Teller: Bulls–t, which aims “to aggressively shoot down whack-jobs and fuzzy thinkers, no matter where they originate.” It has gleaned 11 Emmy nominations. Here’s a clip from the show about nuclear energy; you will find that Jillette’s take on the topic almost fully intersects with ours. (Caution: the language in the clip isn’t remotely safe for work.)
Jillette also created and produced the documentary The Aristocrats (website also N.S.F.W.), in which more than 100 comics tell their variations of the same dirty joke.
Jillette is a graduate of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College. He and Teller have jointly won an Obie and an Emmy award, and both serve as visiting scholars at M.I.T.
You can read Jillette’s daily rants on his Penn Says video blog, where he explains, among other things, why he named his kids Moxie CrimeFighter and Zolten Penn.
Jillette has agreed to answer your questions (yes, you can ask about his red fingernail), so fire away in the comments section below. As with past Q&A’s we’ll post his answers here in a few days.
Addendum: Jillette answers your questions here.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
As a skeptic, what techniques have you found most effective in influencing people? Sometimes, cold hard logic doesn’t seem to always do the trick…
Did your interest in magic, whose illusions seem fantastic, but are grounded in reality, have an effect on your worldview or vice versa, or neither?
I watched the clip you linked to. The pro-nuclear side’s facts were presented by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. This organization seems to receive large portions of their funding from various corporations including energy corporations. This seems to taint the expert’s testimony.
Not being an expert in the field, I cannot come down on either side. Are there any truly neutral observers who can comment on the issues associated with nuclear power?
Is rationality going to make it?
Or will Western Hemisphere Christian fundamentalism and Eastern Hemisphere Muslim fundamentalism manage to bring it all crashing down?
Although i have loved your magic acts for many years (my dad was a magician), and the aristocrats made me laugh hysterically, i was as well very impressed by your novel, “sock”. are you writing these days?
Was it fair, in your Bulls–t segment bashing the hybrid car, to send the car on a highway trip, when the greatest fuel savings hybrids offer can be had with “city” driving?
(incidentally, I happen to agree that current hybrids are way over-hyped but happen to disagree with the strategy you chose to illustrate this.)
Why were you so rude on the Colbert Report?
Penn –
I grew up in Deerfield, Mass., and as a kid in the 50s and 60s I was a coin collector. You know where this is going. (For everyone else, Penn’s dad was a coin dealer in Greenfield, Mass.)
Do you collect coins, or anything else? What were your interests as a kid, and do you still have friends or family in Greenfield? I have many good memories of times spent in your dad’s shop on Federal Street.