Penn & Teller: Technology has morphed the magic act

SAN FRANCISCO — Leave it to Penn and Teller. Ask the fabled magicians about the impact of technology on their craft, and you'll get answers as wonderfully disparate as the tall and garrulous Penn Jillette and the short and mute-on-camera Teller.

"There's no doubt the Internet has made magicians better technically," booms Jillette, 59, in town Tuesday with his partner to be honored at Sketchfest, the annual comedy festival.

He explains that in magic's early days, secrets were passed down through mentors. "Now, the entry-level price is an Internet connection and a deck of cards," he says. "You can teach yourself this stuff (through online tutorials), so what we're seeing in terms of close-up and sleight of hand is breathtaking."

Teller, 66, focuses his lens on the topic differently.

"The world of magic has been more or less unchanged by technology," he says. "Magic has always been a live form. It's also in direct competition with better virtual stuff. If you like the special effects of Guardians of the Galaxy, how are you going to be impressed with a card trick? But in a room, that card trick is untarnished."

Few magicians have had quite the pop cultural run as Penn and Teller, who began performing together in the 1970s.

Beyond their long-running stage show at The Rio in Las Vegas, the duo are behind current TV shows Penn & Teller: Fool Us and Wizard Wars. They also directed the well-reviewed 2013 documentary Tim's Vermeer, and Penn and Adam Rifkin are wrapping up a crowdfunded feature film, Director's Cut.

In separate conversations — Teller joined Penn for our video but played his usual Harpo-like silent sidekick — the two artists make clear that technology has played a role in morphing the very definition of what a magic act is today.

Teller, who is steeped in the history of prestidigitation and has written books on the subject, says magic remains a "primitive handmade art form" whose success is inextricably linked to a magician's live performance.

"The sets and lighting of a play may be entertaining, but what you go to see are flesh-and-blood people sharing something in their hearts with you," says Teller, whose magical version of Shakespeare's The Tempest, co-directed with Aaron Posner, is currently playing in Chicago. "If they're using technology (in a show) that's fine, but if it becomes the center of it you get Spider-Man on Broadway, which is terrible."

He insists, however, that he's not a Luddite when it comes to slyly slipping magic into the duo's stage shows. "I'm all for the use of technology, but I think it's easy to overestimate the effect it will have," he says.

Penn agrees with that point, adding that technology "can't be used as a method, but more as a magic wand" to aid in misdirection.

But he's quick to point to a range of ways in which today's tech has improved the world of magic. Exhibit A is his own iPhone, which he pulls out of a jacket pocket. Penn explains that in the old days of magic, a watch would be vanished and then show up somewhere else, but left lingering doubts if a duplicate watch was used.

"We use tech in our show by borrowing a cellphone making it vanish and reappear inside a real fish," he says, flashing his personalized home screen. "So now it's a better trick, because there's no way you can clone a phone that quickly."

While Teller says that "if magic succeeds on TV, it's secondhand … you're watching someone else be amazed," Penn counters that today's TV-based magicians actually have made a new magic-based art form by their use of camerawork not to deceive as much as to heighten the intensity of a performance.

CAMERA'S ON US

"(Magician) David Blaine doing street magic on television was an amazing thing to see because he turned the camera on the audience," he says. "Using multiple takes of a trick, we now have a sense that what we're seeing is what happened. And that's just as valid as a palm or a steal, or any other technique used ages ago."

Penn is quick to note that while seemingly almost any trick can be discovered today through a quick Google search, many of the so-called explanations aren't on the money, "and some are so wrong that it terrifies us, because people will get hurt doing it that way."

But he adds that in the end, "Magic is more complicated than we pretend it is. Many of us make the deal and decide not to find out how a trick is done."

Why?

"It's the sharing of one's heart that matters," says Penn. "I had to make this journey. I started out distrusting and being philosophically opposed to magic. I loved Lenny Bruce, the Velvet Underground, Jack Kerouac. The purpose of art was to tell the truth. The idea that there was the cheesy bar entertainment built on lying was repulsive to me. I became a juggler, which is the purest form of not cheating."

He laughs. "As I've gotten older, the juggling stuff interests me less than the magic part."

On this count, both Penn and Teller hit the same emotional notes.

"The fundamental thing we want out of any art form is a miracle," says Teller. "A good actor is a good liar is a good magician. A good filmmaker makes things that couldn't possibly be look real. That sounds like a magic act to me. Magic is the stupid simple version of all of the fictionalizing that we do."