Free Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! by Penn Jillette Page A

we had the same goals in showbiz. But while I was reading Silverman’s book, I was disabused of that kinship. Being a magician and skeptic didn’t matter to Houdini; he was first and foremost a superstar. After that time, when interviewers would ask me about Houdini, I stopped giving an opinion of my own. I would answer, “If you want to know about Houdini, don’t talk to us or Copperfield, talk to Bob Dylan. Dylan knows what it’s like to sum up a generation’s dreams and goals. I don’t.”
    By the end of the eighties, Teller and I were far more successful than we had ever expected to be. The Penn & Teller pop-and-pop business plan was to eke out a couple of livings doing shows that we loved. We accomplished that within a few months of working together, and we were pretty satisfied. We kept working, just because we loved working, but every larger accomplishment just amazed us. We figured when we started that a couple hundred creeps a night might want to see our weird-ass shit, and we were off by an order of magnitude. A couple thousand creeps a night wanted to see our weird-ass shit. Creeps wanted to see us on TV. It still shocks us how many fucking creeps there are.
    After I read the Silverman book, I realized Houdini was nothing like me. In the nineties, Stern was “The King of All Media.” As brilliant as Stern was, as far beyond anyone’s expectations that he’d risen, Stern was never satisfied. King of all media wasn’t enough. He was disgusted that people listened to anyone on the radio besides him. Similarly, when I talked to Madonna in the eighties, it was clear that she didn’t even consider the possibility that she had peaked or ever would—people needed to forget there was ever a Marilyn Monroe or Debbie Harry or Elvis, and she still wouldn’t be satisfied.
    I finished the Silverman book in the bathtub at about two a.m. and the alarm went off at five a.m. to get in the limo and head uptown to do the Stern show. As I sat in the limo, thinking about Houdini, I realized that if I wanted to know what Houdini was really like, I should not look into my own heart, but I should look into Stern’s eyes. Stern and Madonna were driven beyond anything I’d ever imagined. I enjoy working in showbiz, but they need to be famous and that’s all the difference. Houdini could have talked to Stern and Madonna, and they could have argued about who was more famous. Houdini would have had nothing to say to me, not a word. Houdini would have said that he heard that the little guy and I did a cute little show for a few creeps. Hating psychics was not the point; fame was. It was during that limo ride, that I decided that it wasn’t only lack of talent and looks that put the cap on my career. It was also my own satisfaction with my success. I didn’t know it—it didn’t happen until decades later—but it was that morning that I decided to try to become a good father. I still worked really hard and wrote and did TV and radio and shows, but I knew I wouldn’t ever speak for anyone but Teller, let alone a whole generation. I would never define anyone but myself. That shouldn’t have been a revelation. Everyone else knew what league I was in, but I needed to read that book to realize I wasn’t in the league with Harry, Howard, and Maddy. They weren’t having fun doing shows; they were walking on the moon.
    About a decade later, another Houdini book came out and again I was reading it at two a.m. in the bathtub, and again had an epiphany. This was Ratso’s biography,
The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero
. I wasn’t at the end of the book. This time I was on page eight. I wasn’t into the juicy parts where Ratso speculates that Houdini could have been a spy, might have been poisoned, and could have been banging one of the spiritualists. I was just in the early nuts and bolts. Ratso and his co-author, Bill Kalush, were writing about Houdini’s father. Mayer Samuel Weisz, a lawyer in