Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! (4 page)

I’m thinking maybe I’ll go back to the no-swearing thing. It worked well for my parents, but whether I do that or not, I’m going to try to phase out all the hateful terms and ideas. I’m sick of racial and sexual stereotypes or even making fun of those stereotypes. I believe people are people. Differences between men and women may exist in the aggregate, but they mean nothing at the street view. I know gay men who are a bit prissy, and I know gay men who are slobs. Gilbert Gottfried is the cheapest motherfucker on the planet, but that has nothing to do with Jews, that’s Gilbert.

I’m embarrassed that I wanted to make my African-American, gay, Jewish (background, now atheist) friends (I do have more than one friend who is all of those: African-American, gay and Jewish) prove how much they trusted me every time I felt like making a hack joke.

If I really don’t believe in tribalism and I really want all those stereotypes to go away, it’s much faster to just stop using them than to teach everyone to understand when I’m kidding. I’ve made a mistake or two being overheard or typing in a forum online that I thought was private, when someone didn’t know my relationship with the person I was writing to, and accused me of being a kind of person I’m really not. It really upset me. Isn’t it easier to just not do it than to make it easy for people who are trying to misunderstand?

I appeared on the same episode of
Politically Incorrect
as Jerry Lewis once. I had just done
The Aristocrats
and I was on the show selling it. Jerry was saying that he didn’t work blue; that he didn’t swear or make dirty jokes (I believe he meant in public). I decided to turn it on him, for the show, and as Bill Maher took the show out, I was saying things like, “Jerry, I think you’re good enough to make dirty jokes. I really do. You’re good. I bet you could work blue, if you worked on it. You may not be as good as Johnny Carson, Red Foxx, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, or George Carlin, but I bet you could do a pretty good job if you tried. I think you’re good enough to work blue, give it a try.”

I thought it was really funny at the time, but maybe it was true. I’m not as good as that list of people. When I make jokes using those hateful terms, am I adding to our culture like Johnny, Red, Pryor, and Carlin? When Lenny was swearing and doing all that ethnic stuff, it took a lot of bravery, ideas and talent, but times have changed. It’s no longer brave or smart. We’ve gotten to the place where it’s too hard to tell whose side the harelip bartender is on. Even one person’s misunderstanding may not be worth the next guy’s laugh.

Don’t worry about any of that for the rest of this book. I’ll still use “fuck,” but Canadian Thanksgiving is at a different time than Thanksgiving in the States and that’s okay with me.

Listening to: “Don’t Call me Nigger, Whitey”—Sly and the Family Stone

With Ron Jeremy and Paul Provenza, invoking the punch line from
The Aristocrats.

 

HERE COME OUR “CELEBRITIES” —CUE THE FREEZING RAIN

I DID
THE CELEBRITY APPRENTICE
2012
as kind of a work/study thang. TV networks are dying. The death throes of religion give us jihads. The death throes of television give us reality shows. I blame the writers’ strikes. That’s not really fair, but I hate a union that forces me to join it. I’d like to be the anti–Pete Seeger on this and stand up against the unions, but they really have Hollywood writing sewed up. Penn & Teller chose a different battle. We stood up to Equity.

Equity is the only live Broadway theater union. Penn & Teller are not members. The first time we played Broadway, Equity tried to get us to join. They said they could get us a better deal. That seemed impossible, because we were producers on the show. How would they help us negotiate with ourselves? They said we had to join. We found a couple loopholes. Equity guarantees understudies, so we said we would join if they could find five or six guys to audition for my part. They had to be 6'7'' tall and be able to perform the monologues, eat fire, juggle, play bass and do all the magic. Then they’d need to find someone with Teller’s abilities. He’s average height, but aside from that, he can do stuff no one else can do. They failed. Then we claimed we weren’t actors. (And if you saw me deliver the line “Superman, the others!” in
Lois & Clark
, you saw proof I’m not an actor. We might have been lying about Teller.) Penn & Teller are variety artists, so our Broadway union is the American Guild of Variety Artists. It handles circus performers and Vegas acts. The guild’s president was and is Rod McKuen, so don’t fuck with us. Equity is a union that boasts ninety percent unemployment at any given time. I hope the plate spinners and Risley acts on Broadway follow our lead and hang tough with AGVA.

Our sucky TV culture is all PBS’s fault. In 1971, they put a camera crew into the home of Bill and Pat Loud and their children and, in 1973, put everything the crew filmed on TV. The show was called
An American Family,
and viewers watched the Louds’ lives as though it was a TV show. It was a TV show. The Louds went from happy family to D-I-V-O-R-C-E and America watched it happen. Their son Lance became the first totally out gay guy on TV (I guess no one counts the
Hollywood Squares
and
Bewitched
). When Lance died of hep C and complications from HIV years later, there was another TV show.

Before
An American Family,
you would have bet your ass and your colonoscopy video that if you put TV cameras in a room with people, those people would behave better. They’d be kinder, wiser, more measured and more loving than they would be without the cameras. The whole world is watching, so be at your best.

The Hawthorne effect—coined in 1950 in response to factory workers’ productivity increases when they were being observed—manifests in every clinical shrink study of people’s motivations. When anyone watches anyone do anything, the watched people do whatever they’re being watched doing a little better for the short time while they’re being watched. The key is that the behavioral improvements are temporary. If the Hawthorne effect worked for more than a few days with TV cameras, we wouldn’t have
The Celebrity Apprentice.

I noticed the Hawthorne effect for the first few days of my season of
The Celebrity Apprentice
, but it sure didn’t last long. We celebrities are desperate pigs. I knew several of my co-stars prior to working on
TCA
together. I had hung out with them and worked with them in high-pressure situations. None were close friends, but I liked them all and thought I knew them a bit. But sixteen hours a day with TV cameras all around, doing pointless fake corporate tasks outside one’s skill set with Clay Aiken (the guy who came in second on
American Idol
years ago), and no one worries about the whole world watching (with the exception of anyone who has a job, someone to talk to, a nice view out the window or a solitaire program). You’re happy if you don’t swallow your own tongue.

The secret truth of
The Celebrity Apprentice
is that it isn’t very hard. The tasks are nothing. Makeup starts just after five a.m. and the show goes to about ten p.m., but you spend most of that time doing nothing. Anyone who isn’t in show business could accomplish everything the show called for and have time left over to do their laundry, cook their supper and post pictures of their animal companion on Facebook.
The Celebrity Apprentice
is easy like junior high is easy. All the arithmetic, the creative writing and the history are super simple, but like junior high, you do that easy work surrounded by people who are full-tilt hormone-raging bugnutty. Everyone is panicked, desperate, yelling, swearing, attacking, backstabbing, failing to get laid and acting crazy. With all this drama, any sane person just wants to do more algebra.
The Celebrity Apprentice
is junior high with a better brand of acne cover-up.

Like all desperate celebrities, I’ve been on more than one reality show. I also did
Dancing with the Stars
. I was amazed to find out that
The Celebrity Apprentice
was more honest and straightforward than
DWTS
. The idea of
DWTS
is pretty beautiful: half-assed show folk who aren’t dancers are teamed up with great dancers, and cameras video them while they learn to dance. How well can people learn to do something outside their ken? It’s a beautiful idea. Dance is a joyous celebration of humanity, so it should be an uplifting, inspiring show to watch and even more beautiful to be on.

Well, I loved being around Kym Johnson, my
DWTS
dancing partner. Kym was a delight. She oozed professional skill and joy. I loved working on the dancing. I love practicing things I’m not good at, and it was an easy schedule. But I hated the time that was spent with the production trying to get young ambitious Mormon women to cry. Guys behind the cameras would say mean things at attractive young men and women and washed-up celebrities about how it would ruin their lives if they didn’t win. The producers were hoping to capture some “good TV.” A young wannabe art filmmaker would take me into my “confessional” and ask me to talk about how upset I was going to be if I was the first one voted off—the biggest failure possible in
reality
. I was the most incompetent and I was off the show as quickly as anyone could be. I found out how I’d feel. The answer was fine. Others danced better than me, but no one danced with more joy. And being on that show for one round made me a lot of money in ticket sales to the Penn & Teller show. If I’d stayed on longer, I would have made much more money—but I’m paid more than I ever expected anyway so that failure is pretty easy to take. It didn’t take food out of my children’s mouths. A twenty-four-year-old film student with a notebook would ask me (me, a guy who worked in the carny) things like, “Is
Dancing with the Stars
the hardest you’ve ever worked? Is it the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” I’d explain that anyone who has a job, any job, or spent any time looking for a job outside show business had worked harder that day than anyone on any celebrity reality show (I specify “celebrity” because it seems those frozen ass crab fishermen work pretty hard). If you fix cars, sell cars, drive cars, practice medicine, take medicine, sell medicine, give pedicures, give blow jobs or work at a KFC, you worked harder today than any celebrity on any reality show ever has. Every time I was asked the “how hard are you working” question on
Dancing with the Stars
, I gave them that answer. They didn’t ever use that answer on the show. They have to pretend it’s hard work. It isn’t.

The Celebrity Apprentice
is more honest, in that creepy kind of way that the guy who admits he’s a racist is more honest. It doesn’t pretend to be about something beautiful like dance. I think business is beautiful, but
The Celebrity Apprentice
has nothing to do with business. No actual business skills are tested. It’s not even a real game about fake business. I can tell you the rules of chess (I know the rules well enough to lose to anyone). I can’t tell you the rules to
The Celebrity Apprentice.
No one can tell you the rules of
The Celebrity Apprentice.
No one. Donald Trump just does what he wants, which is mostly pontificating to people who are sucking up to him, while the network people try to manipulate him into making the highest-rated show they can. Trump can’t be manipulated, so the show isn’t even fair in that way. Annie Duke, the poker genius, and
TCA
veteran, said to me, “It’s a pretend game, about pretend business, where you get pretend fired.” Donald Trump couldn’t fire me. I work for Penn & Teller and he’s never owned any part of us. Trump tried to book Penn & Teller once in Vegas at one of his casinos, but we were priced out of his budget. He can’t fire us from the Rio, because he doesn’t own any of Caesars.

TCA
pretends to be about raising money for charity. That’s true, but only so far. If I had not taken time off from the Penn & Teller show to do
The Celebrity Apprentice—
if Teller and I had just done our show, gotten usual pay—I could have donated four times the amount of money that Trump had pledged to give my charity if I won the whole damn shooting match. Opportunity Village, “my” charity that helps intellectually disabled adults to enter society, got a lot of attention because I was on
The Celebrity Apprentice
, and that does count for something. And when I was “fired,” my real bosses at Caesars, who own the Rio and the Penn & Teller Theater, said, “Oh, you wanted a quarter million for Opportunity Village? We don’t have to do some jive TV show; we’ll just write a check.” They wrote the full winning amount to Opportunity Village and everyone was happy. But
The Celebrity Apprentice
people are honest. They don’t pretend it’s about something beautiful, and they don’t pretend it’s fair. It’s venal people clawing at stupid, soulless shit in front of the modern-day Scrooge McDuck in order to stay famous.

The producers of
TCA
are a couple of really groovy women whom I grew to know a little and like a lot. They wanted the show to be honest, and they kept it honest. I didn’t watch the show, but I didn’t hear about any edits that were really disingenuous. They had to tell a story, and stories are never real, but they showed a view of the show that was certainly as accurate as the one you’re reading now. I never saw them lie, or push someone to get the reaction they wanted. They just let it happen with integrity and honesty. For one “task,” Donald Trump asked us to create a Macy’s store display and print ads for his new fragrance. Is there anyone who wants to smell like Donald Trump? Mr. Trump thinks so, so we were asked to create advertising. Instead of the usual twenty grand that the show would give to the winning “team leader’s” charity, Donald floated the promise that if he “loved” our promotional material, he would give
one hundred thousand dollars
to his “loved” one’s charity. Five times the amount that was arbitrarily assigned to this “task.” In other words, if Trump got an ad that he could actually use for his stink-pretty juice, he would pay about twenty percent of what he would have to pay in the free market to hire a professional to do the job properly. Trump was willing to donate one-fifth of what the campaign would be worth to charity. I got fired for coming up with the slogan “You Earned It.” They thought that slogan was “pompous.” My slogan for a perfume with Donald’s picture on it called “Success” was deemed pompous. Wow. The problem was my audience, I think. “You Earned It” isn’t good for the Trumps. It should have been “You Inherited It.” I would have won. I also helped with some of the parts of the campaign they liked, but the team chose my slogan, so not having a slogan would have been better than having one they don’t like. The game theory is to do as little as possible. Not the way I live my life, but it’s not my game, it’s Trump’s.

TCA
gets the coin on both sides: they get NBC to pay for the show and they get the corporations to pay for the “challenges.”

Trump stays rich in real estate and stays kinda sorta famous for his “brand.” Trump is obsessed with his brand and that’s all you really need to know. Trump is on a game on TV where my showbiz peers, if they want to play the game, have to suck up to him, and I sucked up to him. I’d sit and smile and listen, because I promised the producers I would do my best. The boardrooms went long and I was there to spend about twenty-two hours, over six weeks listening to Trump do his monologues. He’d talk about Occupy Wall Street and global warming while he was deciding whom to pretend to fire from his pretend business. Bill Gates is fighting polio, and polio and I don’t suck up to him, but I was on TV with Donald Trump, so I did my job. I wasn’t even going to say anything about Trump’s hair. I live in a glass house. I’ve always had ugly, out-of-style hair. Trump’s hair is a lot better than mine—but as I sat there for hours half listening to Donald carry on, it struck me exactly what his hair looked like. It looks like cotton candy made of piss. That revelation came to me, and I had to type it here. But my hair is worse.

One day while shooting, Clay Aiken, Arsenio Hall, Lou Ferrigno and I were sneaking out of Trump International Hotel behind a laundry truck, to hide from the imaginary paparazzi. We’re all sub-stars, and we’d all been in showbiz for a while, so we were used to being walked in through the kitchen so the paying customers wouldn’t see the show folk. There were a few others with us, but I was trying to shock you with that opening foursome. Dee Snider, from Twisted Sister, was with us too. It was November in New York City, but in TV phony-baloney world it was March. I had been up since five a.m. for makeup, and a few days before I’d had a heart-to-heart talk with Clay. I would have preferred waterboarding. I don’t like heart-to-heart talks with anyone, but Clay Aiken? Strap me to the board, and put the wet towels over my face. Drowning sounds nice. Clay had put his arm on my shoulder, looked in my eyes and said softly something like, “You know, Penn, I really like you, I do. I think you’re really smart, but I have to talk to you about some things that are bothering me.” Clay told me, gently and kindly, that I was being condescending by talking over people’s heads. He was accusing me of being condescending and he was being . . . condescending. When someone is busting you for being condescending, it takes a bigger asshole than me to say, “Are you sure you know what ‘condescending’ means? It means to talk down to, not talk over someone’s head. So, you see, honey, I’m not condescending, I’m pompous, let me explain . . .”