Teller (magician)

Teller
Teller – after the Penn & Teller show at the Rio in Paradise, Nevada, August 5, 2007.
Born	Raymond Joseph Teller (1948-02-14) February 14, 1948 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation(s)	Magician, illusionist, writer, actor, painter, film director
Years active	1974–present
Known for	Half of the comedy magic duo Penn & Teller
Height	5 ft 9 in (175 cm)
Political party	Libertarian Party
Parents	Irene B. Derrickson Joseph Teller (1913–2004)
Website	Penn and Teller.com

Teller (born Raymond Joseph Teller; February 14, 1948) is an American magician, illusionist, actor, comedian, writer, director and usually silent half of the comedy magic duo Penn & Teller, along with Penn Jillette. Teller is an atheist, debunker, skeptic, and a fellow of the Cato Institute (a free market libertarian think tank which also lists his performing partner Penn Jillette as a fellow), an organization featured prominently in the duo's Showtime television series Bullshit!. He has legally changed his name to just "Teller".

Early life

Teller was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Irene B. (née Derrickson) and Joseph Teller (1913–2004). His father, who was of Russian Jewish descent, was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Philadelphia. His mother was from a farming family in Delaware; the two met as painters attending art school at Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial. Teller attended Central High School and Amherst College. He taught English and Latin at Lawrence High School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. He was selected to be a member of the Central High School Hall of Fame in 2001.

Career

Performing

Teller began performing with friend Weir Chrisemer as The Ottmar Scheckt Society for the Preservation of Weird and Disgusting Music. Teller met Penn Jillette in 1974, and they became a three-person act with Chrisemer called Asparagus Valley Cultural Society, which played in San Francisco. In 1981, they began performing exclusively together as "Penn & Teller", an act that continues to this day. On April 5, 2013 Penn and Teller were honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the live performance category. Their star, the 2,494th awarded, is near the star dedicated to Harry Houdini. The following day they were recognized by the Magic Castle with the "Magicians of the Year" award.

Teller almost never speaks while performing, although there are occasional exceptions, usually when the audience is not aware of it. For example, he provided the voice of "Mofo the psychic gorilla" in their early Broadway show with the help of a radio microphone cupped in his hand. Teller's trademark silence originated during his youth, when he earned a living performing magic at college fraternity parties. He found that if he maintained silence throughout his act, spectators refrained from throwing beer and heckling him and focused more on his performance.

Other exceptions to his silent act include instances in which his face is covered or obscured, as when he spoke while covered with a plastic sheet in the series premiere of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, and when he was interviewed while in shadow for the 2010 History Channel documentary, Houdini: Unlocking the Mystery, while Teller spoke at length in an NPR story on Houdini in 2010. He was also interviewed, with his mouth obscured in shadow, in the Nova ScienceNow episode "How Does the Brain Work?". Teller appears to have said "Science" in a high-pitched voice in Penn and Teller's appearance on the television show Bill Nye the Science Guy, episode "Light Optics", but in fact he only mouthed the word while Penn used a ventriloquist technique to make it sound as if Teller had spoken while keeping his own mouth from moving. Penn and Teller appear as comedians Rebo and Zooty in the 5th season episode of Babylon 5, "The Day of the Dead", written by Neil Gaiman. Teller also spoke in his 1987 appearance on NBC's Miami Vice (a fourth-season episode titled "Like a Hurricane"), and had speaking parts in the movies Penn & Teller Get Killed (he speaks in the final scene), Long Gone and The Aristocrats. He gave voice to an animated version of himself in two episodes of The Simpsons ("Hello Gutter, Hello Fadder" and "The Great Simpsina"), and voiced a series of cloned store clerks in "Zoey's Zoo", an episode of Oh Yeah! Cartoons, as well as the English version of the 1988 animated feature Light Years (original French title: Gandahar), where he was the voice of Octum. Teller speaks at length about magic performance and sleight-of-hand in the documentary "Penn & Teller's Magic and Mystery Tour". Teller has been shown screaming and swearing in the "Anger Management" episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!. More recently, Teller had a brief speaking part in Atlas Shrugged: Part II, where he advises Dagny Taggart (played by Samantha Mathis) to go out the side door of the Taggart Transcontinental offices.

Teller did break his silence in his portrayal of Mortimer in the 1995 film version of The Fantasticks, though almost all of his dialogue was edited out of the film's final version (his "Dying isn't easy" scene is included among deleted scenes on the DVD release). He also appeared as a "cat" in the Dharma & Greg season 1 episode "The Cat's out of the Bag". He also appeared in an episode of Tosh.O giving "advice" to a fellow magician. He stood staring at the gentleman for several seconds before uttering "Practice once in a fuckin' while" while walking away. He also spoke at length during an interview on the Charlie Rose television program on 27 January 2014.

Teller co-directed a version of Macbeth which incorporated stage magic techniques in the scenes with the Three Witches.

More recently, Teller's voice can be heard on Season 13 of Celebrity Apprentice, "Episode 10: The Mayor of Stress Town", when speaking with contestant Penn Jillette over Penn's mobile device.

Writing

He collaborated with Jillette on three magic books, and he is also the author of "When I'm Dead All This Will Be Yours!": Joe Teller – A Portrait by His Kid (2000), a biography/memoir of his father. The book features his father's paintings and cartoons which were strongly influenced by George Lichty's Grin and Bear It. The book was favorably reviewed by Publishers Weekly:

When Teller, the quiet half of the Penn and Teller showbiz team, made one of his monthly Philadelphia visits to see his parents, Joe and Irene ("Pad" and "Mam"), he was shown 100 unpublished cartoons his father drew in 1939. These "wryly observed scenes of Philadelphia street life," as Teller describes them, are in a loose, sketchy style imitative of the great George Lichty (1905–1983), famed for his long-run syndicated Grin and Bear It. Teller and his father's "memories began to pump and the stories flowed" after they opened boxes of old letters that Teller read out loud (learning for the first time about a period in his parents' lives that he knew nothing about, such as the fact that his father's name is really Israel Max Teller). Joe's Depression-era hobo adventures led to travels throughout the U.S., Canada and Alaska, and by 1933, he returned to Philadelphia for art study. After Joe and Irene met during evening art classes, they married, and Joe worked half-days as a Philadelphia Inquirer copy boy. When the Inquirer rejected his cartoons, he moved into advertising art just as World War II began. Employing excerpts from letters and postcards, Teller successfully re-creates the world of his parents in a relaxed writing style of light humor and easy (yet highly effective) transitions between the past and present.

Teller is a coauthor of the Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper "Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research" from the November 2008 issue.

In 2010, Teller wrote Play Dead, a "throwback to the spook shows of the 1930s and ’40s" that ran September 12–24 in Las Vegas before opening Off Broadway in New York. The show stars sideshow performer and magician Todd Robbins.

Directing

Teller directed a feature film documentary, Tim's Vermeer, which is set for release in 2014. He and Penn served as executive producers, with distribution by Sony Pictures Classics.

Works

• Jillette, Penn; Teller (1989). Penn and Teller's Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends. New York: Villard. ISBN 0-394-75351-8.
• Jillette, Penn; Teller (1992). Penn and Teller's How to Play with Your Food. New York: Villard. ISBN 0-679-74311-1.
• Jillette, Penn; Teller (1997). Penn and Teller's How to Play in Traffic. New York: Berkley Trade. ISBN 1-57297-293-9.
• Teller; Teller, Joe (2000). "When I'm Dead All This Will Be Yours!": Joe Teller – A Portrait by His Kid. New York: Blast Books. ISBN 0-922233-22-5. {{cite book}}: External link in |publisher= (help)
• Teller; Karr, Todd; Abbott, David P. (2005). House of Mystery: The Magic Science of David P. Abbott. Marina del Rey, California: Miracle Factory. Retrieved April 4, 2013.

See also

• Mononymous person
• Harpo Marx

External links

• Penn & Teller's official website
• A Tour Of Teller's Home
• Video of Teller talking
• Teller at the Internet Broadway Database
• Teller at IMDb
• A man, a ball, a hoop, a bench (and an alleged thread)... TELLER! – Las Vegas Weekly