It’s difficult to pigeonhole Penn and Teller. The only truly applicable label one could use would be performer. Their act combines magic and illusions with morose and twisted comedy. It’s great fun, and audiences love the act.

The duo of Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller have been entertaining audiences throughout the United States since the ’80s. They’ve enjoyed a successful run in Las Vegas and have been headlining the aptly named Penn and Teller Theater at the Rio since 2001.

In addition to their live act, the duo also work on an Emmy-nominated show on Showtime, and they have put out three top-selling books.

Penn Jillette recently spoke to Casino Connection about the magic behind the duo.

You’ve got a lot of things going on—touring, television show, writing, performing in your venue at the Rio—how do you keep all those things straight and find the time to do all of that?

I guess we’re motivated by greed. Teller and I are obsessed with time management. So we break down our time really carefully. I break my day down into 10 or 15 minute hunks. I also have to have time to spend with my children.

We’re one of the very few shows that writes new material and puts it in. Cirque is out of Montreal; Blue Man is out of New York; and we’re out of Vegas. They don’t do the show themselves and we do. So when we get an idea for something new, we can just put it in. We put in about five or six new bits a year since we’ve been in Las Vegas; we’ve done five and a half or six hours of new material. And that same amount of 12 years all the other shows have done an hour and a half of material.

That leads to another question I had about whether you ever find it getting repetitive.

Well we don’t change the show—this is a very important distinction to me, but it may not matter to anyone else—we don’t change the show because we’re bored with it. I’m very happy doing stuff I wrote 30 years ago. I believe that part of being a professional and part of being a performer is being able to find a way to love the stuff you’re doing every single night.

I love being able to go out and do a bit I’ve done 5,000 times before and just be thinking if I can get the breath in a better place; see if I can do a line in one breath instead of two. And I’m able to just think about that because everything else I have where I want it.

The next night I think about something else. I love that.

We have a lot of friends who are old-timers in the variety acts and they started doing their act when they were 16, and when they’re 60, they’re still doing the same act. There is a level of quality you see in a bit that has been done 20,000 times that you can’t possibly get with any shortcuts.

So we try to keep old stuff in as well, but the problem is not that we’re bored, but we have new ideas and that we get really excited about wanting to have in the show. We can’t just wait for the bits to go away, so I can say with more pride than I say about anything else, the stuff we take out of the show is stuff that we still love doing.

So ideally, if you could, you would keep adding 30 minutes to the show?

Yeah, if we had an infinite amount of time and an audience with infinite patience, I would love to be doing an eight-hour show every night.

There is also stuff, you put a new bit in that is really talky, then you’ve got to take out another talky bit so we have to put in a solo Teller bit that we haven’t done in 15 years. Every small change in the show to make sure the tones are right and sneaky stuff with the pocket loads and making sure the balance is right, we have to change the whole show. So if you come to the show one week and the next week we’ve only written one new bit, you’ll actually see eight new bits because you’ll see seven things that we pulled out from 10 years ago and we’ve moved some stuff around to get the new bit to swing.

Do you have a favorite thing? The television show? The headlining act in Las Vegas? The touring?

Without any hesitation, our favorite thing is the live show. One of the things that makes the live show so wonderful and such a joy to do is the fact that we have a non-monogamous plate. We do so many other things that it always makes the live show just a joy to come back to. Again, most other entertainers in Las Vegas don’t do anything else.

There is a cliché, a change is better than a rest, and I think there is a lot of truth to that. You really do get a great deal, you can feel like your live show is not the drudgery of going to work but the joy of coming home.

You know, you find that if what you’re doing is repetitious day by day, doing stuff around that that is very different and challenging can make coming back to that repetitious quality a plus instead of a minus; or as they say in the computer business, a feature not a bug.

You are also involved in some charity work in the community. What do you do?

Every year in the summer we do AFAN (Aid for AIDS of Nevada), and we do a walk for that that we match all the funds. Our team made more than $60,000, so Teller and I put in more than $60,000, and the whole walk ended up over $400,000—it’s not research, it’s just people who need help now.

Then in December we do the 12 bloody days of Christmas where we work really hard to get the blood drive going and it changed December from the weakest month of the year—which is why we put our effort there—into the strongest month of the year for Nevada.

Why do you feel it is important to do so, anyway?

I don’t know. “Important” may be too presumptuous of a word. We like doing it. It feels good to help out a tiny bit, the little bit that we can and it really takes, if you break it down in 15-minute hunks, it really takes less time than you might think at first blush.

You are pretty outspoken for a Vegas headliner. Have you ever gotten in trouble with Harrah’s over anything you have said? Are they pretty relaxed and aware of who you really are? Do they ever tell you to take a hint from Teller?

It’s just not very popular to come out and say you’re a cynic. It’s wonderful that we have had the plum gigs in our lives. We played off-Broadway in a show we produced three times. We have played Broadway twice. We’ve toured all over the world and I can say without hesitation that the best bosses we’ve ever worked for is Harrah’s.

When you play Broadway, you know there is millions of dollars riding on you and you have a contract that says Penn and Teller will do whatever the f--- they want and no one has any control over you, but you still feel the investors breathing down your neck and worrying. Harrah’s, their policy on Penn and Teller is that it’s the Penn and Teller Theater and we put a show on in there and if people are showing up and people are enjoying the show, that is the extent of their involvement.

To anyone who has worked in the arts, for any who is serious about creating, that kind of complete unbridled freedom, although a little frightening, is also breathtakingly liberating.

You ask anybody and they’ll tell you owning your own show off-Broadway is the most freedom you can possibly have and I will answer, “No, it isn’t. Try working for Harrah’s.”

Harrah’s has been very clear, and I don’t mean implicit but explicit, that what I do and say off-stage is none of their business, which, of course, is not true. It is their business in a very real sense, but taking the point of view that it’s not is about as high-road and pure freedom you can possibly find.

By Greg Jones

Greg Jones is managing editor of Casino Connection Nevada, as well as associate editor of Global Gaming Business magazine.