Penn & Teller: Bullshit!

Penn & Teller: Bullshit!
File:P&T.JPG Penn and Teller host Bullshit!
Starring	Penn Jillette Teller
Country of origin	United States
No. of episodes	44 (as of May 4, 2006)
Production
Executive producers	Randall Moldave Star Price (2003-2006) Eric Small Mark Wolper
Running time	30 minutes
Original release
Network	Showtime
Release	January 24 2003 – present

Bullshit!, a.k.a. Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, (2003—) is a Showtime Channel television series shown in the United States. The series is hosted by professional magicians/comedians Penn and Teller. Three seasons have completely aired, and the fourth season is currently being shown. The program has been renewed for one additional season.

The aim of the show is to expose ideas they believe to be unscientific or pseudoscientific through critical thinking and scientific skepticism, and to expose promoters of such things—especially those with ulterior motives (primarily financial exploitation). They also base some shows around a political issue, such as the War on Drugs and gun control, promoting and justifying their stance with historical and statistical evidence. The show is influenced by performers such as James Randi and Harry Houdini, who are similarly known for debunking claims of supernatural powers.[1] It is stylistically similar to Penn and Teller's established magic act, which involves revealing the mechanisms behind their own illusions while simultaneously debunking professional magicians who claim to possess supernatural abilities.

The show openly reflects the atheist libertarian stance of the presenters, and inherits their characteristically blunt, often aggressive style. Since their act is not normally associated with a frequent use of profanity, Jillette explains this necessity in the opening episode: if they referred to people as frauds or liars, they could be sued for slander, even in the face of overwhelming evidence of chicanery, but as "vulgar abuse" is not legally considered slanderous, referring to them as assholes or fuckers ostensibly expresses an opinion rather than a statement of fact and is legally safer for them. The show's name, Bullshit! reflects this approach.

Show format

Each episode, Penn & Teller choose a number of subjects under a common theme and proceed to systematically undermine them, using a variety of methods:

• Proponents of the topic at hand try to make their case in edited interviews conducted by the show's producers. However, they often end up looking stupid or providing evidence to defeat their own arguments. For example, in "Safety Hysteria", a manufacturer of "radiation guards" for mobile phones admits that there is no proven link between mobile phone radiation and brain cancer, but assures viewers that "you can't be too safe". (Mobile phones use conventional radio waves for broadcasting, which are non-ionizing radiation.) He also says his background is in advertising, not medical science or engineering. The unspoken (and thus legally safe) implication is that he knows his product is useless, but uses marketing techniques to rip off an uninformed public. Penn Jillette has insisted in at least one episode that they do not take people's comments out of context in the interviews. He has also stated that the people being interviewed know that the interviewer and camera crew are from the show Bullshit!; one episode shows a video crew from the show going into a building to perform an interview, and Jillette points out that a member of the crew is wearing a Penn & Teller: Bullshit! baseball cap.

• Opponents are interviewed and offer rebuttals to the proponents' arguments. These are sometimes professional experts in the subject under discussion but may also be outspoken celebrities or opinionated amateurs. Penn & Teller sometimes make use of speakers from the Center for Inquiry Transnational, James Randi Educational Foundation, and the Cato Institute.

• Penn & Teller conduct informal experiments, freely admitting that they are often unscientific and geared toward comedy and satire. For example, in "Bottled Water" diners in an upscale restaurant are presented with varieties of what appear to be fancy bottled water. After the diners have praised the water and picked their favorites, it is revealed that every single brand of bottled water is fictitious, and all were filled from the same garden hose behind the restaurant. In one of their more serious experiments during the "Conspiracy Theories" episode, Teller shoots a rifle at a melon to demonstrate that when a human head is shot, it is very likely to be forced in the opposite direction that the bullet was travelling (this to discredit a John F. Kennedy conspiracy theory which points out that the fatal gunshot rocked JFK's head toward (not away from) Lee Harvey Oswald's location). They occasionally throw in some nudity for fun as in the episode "Hair" when three people who answered an ad from Craigslist were having their genitals waxed.

• The subject matter is generally ridiculed by Penn and Teller through skits and stunts performed on-set or through stock footage. The approach here seems to complement reasoned argument with straightforward ridicule for entertainment value. The "Sex, Sex, Sex" episode satirizes society's obsession with sex appeal by having the hosts constantly surrounded by naked actors and actresses.

• Penn & Teller often close with an impassioned ethical plea against the subject matter near the end of the show as to why this particular belief is harmful and should be resisted. The presenters distinguish between believers (often saying that they would like to believe also) and direct their anger at those they see as charlatans while showing compassion towards the victims of what Penn and Teller see as manipulation and deception.

Criticism of the show

While Penn and Teller are self-professed as skeptics, some critics have noted that their show tends to approach it's targets with indignant and comedic editorializing rather than traditional, fact-based debunking. An otherwise favorable review by The Onion noted:

"Bullshit! isn't journalism, exactly. The show is one-sided by design: P&T's field interviewers rarely confront their subjects with the evidence against them, preferring to let the crackpots ramble on so that Jillette's voiceover rejoinders can score points without inciting a real argument."

In a more critical review, MSN's Slate magazine similarly noted:

"One of the unwritten rules for winning an argument against an inflammatory, irrational opponent is to calmly adhere to a loftier set of rhetorical standards. Penn and Teller showily throw this notion out the window."

Such reviews take issue with Penn Jillette's tendency to use profanity-laden sentences, as well as backing up his arguments with guests that posess dubious qualifications (such as controversial rock star Ted Nugent or the largely corporate-funded lobbying group Center for Consumer Freedom)[2].

Jillette has also raised eyebrows by refering to his targets as "Fucks", "Motherfuckers" and "Assholes" numerous times throughout each broadcast. Jillette stated in the first episode of the series that he would be referring to people as "assholes" rather than "liars" is to avoid lawsuits from the interviewees, as expletives are not generally considered to be slander.

Trivia

• The show was originally going to be called Humbug! in honour of Harry Houdini. However, it was decided that the word humbug was not relevant to a contemporary audience, and therefore it was replaced by "bullshit". Humbug makes an appearance in one episode, though: during the episode on profanity, the script does not include a single profane word (interview subjects excepted) until the very end of the show, in which George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words are spoken to an anti-profanity interview subject. This includes the title, which was replaced by "Humbug!" for this episode only.

• During the "Conspiracy Theories" episode, the crew interviewed a number of people at Dante's [3] bar in Portland, Oregon, during a weekly show called Ground Zero Lounge. One of the fellows in the bar that night was a man in a black beret, dubbed "Beret Dude" by Penn and Teller. He was given an opportunity to speak at the microphone and made a number of outlandish statements, among them that the Kennedy assassination was an industrialist conspiracy to enforce the compliance of future Presidents with the will of Big Business. The rant he gave was, verbatim, a rant given by the late Bill Hicks in a comedy routine from the album "Rant in E minor".

• There were plans to make an episode focusing on Scientology, but Showtime executives rejected this idea as to avoid any legal action against the network from the Church of Scientology. After hearing this from friend Penn Jillette, South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone were inspired to make the episode "Trapped in the Closet" which criticizes Scientology.[4] That episode, after broadcast, has resulted in several disputes, including the resignation of Isaac Hayes (the voice of Chef), the episode's non-broadcast in the UK and the episode being pulled from circulation on Comedy Central.

Episode list

Main article: List of Bullshit! episodes

External links

• Official Showtime website
• Penn & Teller: Bullshit! at IMDb
• Masters of Disillusionment: Penn & Teller's show explains why everything you know is wrong by Dennis Cass, Slate.com; posted April 1, 2004
• Episode guide
• The Futon Critic