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.