Free God, No! by Penn Jillette Page A

puppets.” In the good old US of A, if you have a plural noun and you don’t know what it means, it probably meansbreasts. I can’t think of a plural noun whose meaning I don’t know that wouldn’t be better off meaning “tits”—jelutongs!
    One of the quickest ways for a man to make me uncomfortable is to talk about strip clubs. I’m very judgmental about how men enjoy strip clubs. If I hear a man say anything negative about a stripper’s body, I never seem to get over thinking that guy is a little creepy. I’ve been to strip clubs with fat men who’ll call a woman a third their size “chubby.” It makes me crazy. I just overflow with hatred. I can’t defend my position. It’s not logical, it’s emotional. It’s fine to judge an entertainer even if you can’t do what that entertainer does. You are welcome to come to our show, not being able to do a lick of magic, and say we suck. Even if you couldn’t be funny riding the ass of a smoking monkey, you’re welcome to judge a comedian’s ability to tell a joke. We all judge people who are doing things that we can’t do, but if you do it in a strip club in front of me, I’ll remember that for as long as I know you and I’ll hold it against you. I find it really unpleasant. To me, working in the sex industry isn’t about what you’re showing off, it’s that you’re showing it off at all. That’s what I love about it.
    I used to go to strip clubs a lot. One night I walked in and Valentino was sitting with a bunch of dancers at his table. You don’t know who Valentino is. You shouldn’t know who Valentino is. You don’t even care who Valentino is, but I’m going to tell you. Years ago Valentino was on shitty TV as “the Masked Magician.” He did a few shitty TV specials where he pretended to give away shitty magic secrets while wearing a shitty mask so no one would know who he really was. It wasn’t really a mask, it was more a black and silver bag over his head. He didn’t really give away secrets, because no one would watch that. The way you keep real magic secrets is to make them uninteresting. The way you keep magic secret is by making the secrets really ugly.
    The secret to one of the greatest magic tricks you’ve ever seen is public information; it’s patented. You could search for it right now. I’m not going to say which trick it is, because I don’t want to piss off the magician even more than I already have, but if you think about one ofthe best tricks, really any of the best tricks, the secrets are out there and you can find them. If you go to the U.S. Patent Office website (while you’re there, search for “Penn Jillette”; I have a patent on a female masturbation device called the “JillJet”—really; I care about women cumming) and search for the best trick you ever saw, it’s there. It’s a cool, cool trick, but the method is ugly. You won’t get through two pages before you lose interest. You’ll skim over the diagrams. That’s what keeps professional magic secrets secret: they’re ugly and boring. Genius magic designer Jim Steinmeyer said the real secret of magic is that we magicians are all guarding an empty safe. There are no real secrets in magic. We do things just the way they have to be done. We sneak things around, we use gaffer’s tape, and we lie. Whenever they do a TV detective show with a magic trick as part of the plot, the secret has to be a forty-five-degree-angle mirror. In a detective show, there has to be an “a-ha.” You don’t get “a-ha” in real life. Real-life detectives don’t get it, and real-life magicians don’t use it. When Penn & Teller give away magic tricks, it’s really hard work. We have to design magic that’s made to be exposed. We make the way we do it as beautiful as the trick. That’s a sneaky thing for us to do. It makes the audience think that the tricks we don’t give away are also beautiful, and that fucks up their shit. When you’re looking for something