Penn Jillette - Presto!: How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales

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143.7

59.8

99.2

CONTENTS

DISCLAIMER

You know the deal, right? There are legal requirements for anyone who writes anything about health to make sure he, she, or it is safe from lawsuits. Anyone can sue anyone, so you can never really be safe from a lawsuit, but you can make yourself less likely to suffer damage if a nut decides to file suit. When it comes to health, theres always a lot of jive about see your doctor before making any changes in your lifestyle and shit like that. And you skim over it like you do appliance warnings and Facebook privacy contracts, thinking, Well, they have to say that, but it doesnt apply to me, and then you stick your knife in the toaster to get the bagel out and post a picture of the event to your social media without noticing your embarrassing reflection in the toaster. You figure that because you arent a Darwin Award winner yet, you dont have to read disclaimers. You figure you already know the coffee at McDonalds is too hot to pour on your genitalsyou dont have to read the cup.

This aint like that. This disclaimer is not jive. This is a real, heartfelt, honest disclaimer. This was not written by lawyersthis was written by the guy who wrote this book. The guy who lost a hundred pounds. This is a disclaimer for the lawyers, but it also comes from my common sense, my concern, my knowledge, and my heart. This is a book about extreme personal lifestyle changes, written by a fucking juggler whose only higher education was Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College. This book was written by someone who finished high school on a plea bargain. Someone who dropped his cock into a hot blow-dryer and scarred it like one of the Wendys beef patties he no longer eats. This is a book written by an idiot. Take everything in this book with a grain of salt (but only a grainsalt is poison, as even this idiot now knows). I have no expertise. This book is about what I did, not about what you should do. Got it? This book is first-person, and you should not take it as second-person. Even I know a lot of what I did was wrong and stupid, but I dont even know which things were wrong and stupid. Even I, who dropped my fucking cock in a blow-dryer, knew enough to check with my doctor before making each change. If youre going to make any changes in your diet, exercise routine, or health, talk to your doctorand take what even she says with a grain of nutritional yeast. Get a second opinion, and remember that my opinion does not count as the first opinion. Im telling stories and making jokes. If you make lifestyle changes that youve checked out with your doctor, I hope this book can give you a few laughs, a little bit of moral support, and (I hope) some inspiration, but this is not a how to book. Im okay with your thinking, If that stupid fat fuck can do it, so can I. But Im not okay with your doing what you think you understand that I think I understand I might have done that could have kind of gotten some results that might be good. Really, I dont know jack-fucking-shit! Okay? Be careful. Take care of yourself, and do not fucking trust me! Really. Thats not legal jive, thats from my heart. It means a lot to me that youre reading this book, but please remember who wrote it: me.

If you take any lifestyle or medical advice from a juggleryoure an asshole!

INTRODUCTION:

HOW ARE YOU GOING TO DIE?

How do you think Im going to die?

Most every night onstage, my partner, Teller, has a bullet signed and loaded into a gun by a stranger. He turns on the laser sight, aims the gun at my face, and pulls the trigger. Bang! The Bullet Catch is just a trick, but its the most dangerous trick in show business. At least twelve magicians have died onstage pretending to catch a signed bullet. If you count carnies as magicians (and magicians dont), the number of people (if you count carnies as people, and many rubes dont) killed doing this trick jumps to over fourteen. These are men and women who were shot dead onstage in front of a live audience. When a magician fucks up a card trick, the crowd is simply more entertained than if the trick had gone as planned. When a magician fucks up with a gun and live ammo, the audience has nightmares for the rest of their lives.

Penn & Teller have done the Bullet Catch more than any other magicians in history, and its a long history. The plot of this tricksign the bullet, load the gun, shoot megoes back to Native American magicians. I didnt even know there were Native American magicians before I worked on this trick. It doesnt seem like the wisest trick to use to entertain violent, invading foreigners. Our mentor, Johnny Thompson, had already lost two friends to the Bullet Catch when we started working on it, and he asked us to please not do it, but we felt we could do it safely, and Johnny knew we had a better chance of being safe with his help than without it, so he worked with us on it. Since we started doing the trick in 1996, I have had a gun fired at my face onstage 4,460 times. On any given night, chances are Im staring down the barrel of a gun.

But the Bullet Catch will not kill me. Most likely, my death will not cause our audience members to be interviewed on CNN. I will die, like many Americans will, as a result of spending most of my life being a fat fuck. By the time I turned fifty-nine, I had been more than one hundred pounds overweight for over a decade. And before that Id been fifty pounds overweight for over a decade, and before that Id been thirty pounds overweight for over a decade, and before that... I was a homeless skinny teenager hitchhiking around the country who, for a brief, sexy statistical blip, might have been a little more likely to die from a gun than a doughnut.

No one has ever been seriously hurt working with Penn & Teller, and that includes Penn & Teller. We are tight-ass and careful. Safety in magicsafety in artfor me is more than self-preservation. Doing tricks in the safest way possible is more than just concern for my coworkers. Making dangerous-looking events safe is my job. That is the art. Letting dangerous things be really dangerous is not magic. Thats not art. When we do tricks onstage that appear to be dangerous, we are asking the audience to enjoy themselves on our roller coaster. We want their visceral and their intellectual to collide at faster miles an hour. Were expecting them to feel their lizard heart race at the apparent danger while their human brain says, Its just a showtheyve never been hurt. In order for our art to be valid, in order for our tricks to celebrate life and health while thrilling the audience, those tricks must be safe. There are magicians who try to convince their audiences that the tricks really are dangerous. They try to convince the audience that their tricks arent tricks. Thats worse than lying. There are magicians who have been hurt, and there are more who perform cheesily staged accidents that are reported by a credulous, jaded media as real incompetence. The cynical business model is that the public will come to see their shitty acts in the hope that the show might contain real suffering and maybe death. This makes the audience complicit in unnecessary human risk. I dont know how many in the audience truly believe they are going to the theater to witness a clumsy, stupid, unskilled, careless asshole suffer and die, but if anyone really is, Penn & Teller dont want them in our audiences. We dont want them as fans. Fuck them in the neck. Shakespeare and Call of Duty are able to thrill people and celebrate life without anyone getting hurt. We want to be like them; we do not want to be like NASCAR.