Presto!: How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales

by Penn Jillette

Most every night onstage, my partner, Teller, has a bullet signed and loaded into a gun by a stranger. He turns on the laser sight, aims the gun at my face, and pulls the trigger. Bang! The Bullet Catch is just a trick, but it’s the most dangerous trick in show business. At least twelve magicians have died onstage pretending to catch a signed bullet. If you count carnies as magicians (and magicians don’t), the number of people (if you count carnies as people, and many rubes don’t) killed doing this trick jumps to over fourteen.

Our mentor, Johnny Thompson, had already lost two friends to the Bullet Catch when we started working on it, and he asked us to please not do it, but we felt we could do it safely, and Johnny knew we had a better chance of being safe with his help than without it, so he worked with us on it. Since we started doing the trick in 1996, I have had a gun fired at my face onstage 4,460 times. On any given night, chances are I’m staring down the barrel of a gun.

In 2012 I went on The Celebrity Apprentice with Donald Trump, who has hair that looks like cotton candy made of piss. Before the show was over I published my previous book, Every Day Is an Atheist Holiday!, which stated that Donny’s hair looked like cotton candy made of piss. I created the most perfect description of Donald Trump’s hair ever given by anyone. “Hair like cotton candy made of piss” is also the phrase that Trumpy said was his reason for my coming in second a year later on All-Star Celebrity Apprentice. I love that about Trump. He comes out and admits crazy shit like that. He doesn’t pretend he’s

I was one-third the size of a cow dressed as an elephant.

It’s showbiz to light a cigarette off my tongue and smoke it. It’s a good way to show the fire is real. The fire in fire eating is real. Fire eating is real. Fire eating is not a magic trick. Fire eating is a skill. There is no cheat. As we say in the carny, there’s no “G” on the joint, no affis-gaffis. Fire eating is done by combining a working sense of physics and human physiology with a natural lack of common sense.

We love to work. I’ve turned my cushy twelve-and-a-half-hour-a-week job into a really cushy seventy-hour-a-week job that makes me the luckiest person in the world—except for the hypertension, being obese, and my doctor promising to make my stomach into a sleeve.

may be known as a Las Vegas magician, but I’m really a puritanical Massachusetts juggler.

Also, as the brilliant magician Mac King once said about me, “You exaggerate way more than anyone else in the world.”

potatoes. He drove the paleo people crazier than they already were. But if the paleo diet is really that good for you, how come the Flintstones need multivitamins?

The big secret in showbiz is that the “suits” are okay. I tend to like them. It’s middle management in any corporation that has all the stress and ends up sometimes seeming like assholes, but the big bosses are usually okay.

I’ve seen Goudeau cry, but I’ve never seen him far away from a giggle. I asked him once why he giggled all the time, and he explained that when he was a child, he didn’t giggle. When Goudeau was a child, he snickered all the time like a cartoon dog. His mom told him that snickering like a cartoon dog all the time would hold him back in life, so she worked with him to turn his snicker into a giggle, and this constant giggle is where he landed. Why was he snickering all the time to begin with? A better question is, why the fuck aren’t we all snickering and giggling all the time? We all know what life is; you can snicker like a cartoon dog or you can weep like Leonard Cohen. I do both. Goudeau giggles.

According to CrayRay, eating nothing is the option that’s most often overlooked. You get into a groove with your diet, and then you go out to eat with friends and there’s nothing that’s right for you on the menu, so you get something “close.” “Well, they don’t have plain salad with vinegar, so I guess I’ll have a double cheeseburger and make sure I get it with lettuce and tomato so I’m kind of having a salad.”

I have a good Vegas doctor. That’s a rare being. Vegas is good at pole dancers. We import them and we grow them domestically. We have second- and third-generation pole dancers here.

I finally found a good doctor. He works with one of those “concierge” doctor scams. We pay him extra, and he actually gives us appointments. He’s a smart guy, and funny and honest and perfectly discreet. You’ll never find out from him that I have herpes. He’s a pro.

Now that I read this, I guess that cayenne and cocoa aren’t whole plants . . . um . . . but spices seem okay. It’s delicious. I put on enough cayenne that no one but me can eat it. I consider it child repellent.

to open that Jefferson-was-a-slave-owner can of worms. That led me to doing schtick for Xaviera about how Elvis Presley during the chatter section of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” says, “You know, someone said that all the world’s a stage. And each must play a part . . .” It wasn’t “someone” who said that, it was Shakespeare, you hillbilly piece of shit!

I’m fine going to a place that serves meat, cheese, oil, salt, liquor, and methamphetamines and plays ABBA, but I’m still going to just have a plain nothing-but-plants salad with no dressing except vinegar on the side—or I can eat nothing. Eating nothing is the option I never had before. It doesn’t work for a year or really even for a month, but it sure works for a supper meeting.