Interview with Penn & Teller: Guess Which One We Talked To?

I think it’s also because they’re trying to get you to say something that you might not have ordinarily said; that they could get you to say something that mildly agrees with their point of view.

Oh, sure. The nice thing about the small government libertarian position is you really are as far left as a person can get socially and you really are as far right as a person can get financially. No matter where someone is in the continuum, they can choose to either agree with you or disagree with you.

Well it doesn’t matter either way, right or left is big government now.

They’re exactly the same now. What astonishes me politically is how many of the people when Bush was in office were against the war are now for the war. I’m not talking generally or on TV or anything, I’m talking about friends of mine who were out of their fucking minds that Bush sending troops over there. Now they’re all, ‘Well we have to do it, we can’t just leave them hanging.’

Right, we have to finish it off.

And you go, ‘How could we leave them hanging?’ You were fine leaving them hanging when Bush was in. What kills me is that Cindy Sheehan parks her ass outside the Bush’s residence and they do a news story on her every six weeks and ‘Here’s Cindy Sheehan, she’s against the war.’ Then Obama comes in and nothing changes, and she parks her ass outside of Obama’s place and the press doesn’t even talk to her.

Exactly. Nobody wants to talk to her and she’s still there.

It’s amazing because she just doesn’t understand that Obama was trying to do right and Bush was trying to do evil. The absolute truth is that deep in their hearts, as deep as you could go and find truth, both of these men want to do what’s good. It’s one of those odd things to me—it’s probably true about conservatives too but I hear it more from liberals—how about this sense on health care—I’m speaking very specifically about some of my friends—where they seem to believe that the people who disagree with them actually agree with them fundamentally and are choosing to do evil as opposed to agree with them on how people should be treated and really have a strong disagreement. Let’s even say they are wrong on how they deliver that, but it’s not that they believe that the liberal way is right to deliver it, and they just want to fuck it up.

There are so many people. If you want to find the number of evil people on the plant, it is tiny, tiny, tiny. You have everybody’s wrong and nobody’s evil. That’s really it, and it’s phenomenal to me how few people seem to see it that way. I just see it as people disagreeing with me. I don’t even see them as wrong, I see them as ‘Oops, one of us is wrong.’ If you take the biggest nut in the world, take Michael Moore, what he ultimately wants for other people is the same that I want. He wants freedom, and security, and fairness, and trust, and brotherhood. His way of giving to those things doesn’t overlap my way at all, but that doesn’t mean that his heart is wrong.

Liberty, Fraternity…

Yeah, whatever. Pick a list of everything you want for the world, and we all agree with you. (laughs)

With all the television, your nightly gigs, the little mini tour you have coming up, the daily videos, hosted a game show, written books, The Aristocrats movie, you had a radio show for a year. I remember when you were the voice of Comedy Central.

Yeah, that was for eight years. It was a long time.

I feel like I’m talking to the Comedy Central guy telling me that used to tell me that South Park is on at 10 p.m.

‘Tonight, Kenny dies… here on Comedy Central.’

It’s a good fuckin’ show.

It’s so good how does it stay good? Because Trey and Matt are wonderful.

They’re very clever guys. I don’t intimately know the show that well, but I know they have many other writers now too.

Yeah, but when you’re actually there and you see them working on it, Trey and Matt do a lot of it.

I’m sure they do.

They do have writers, and I’m the last one who would ever say—you don’t want to ever pretend Letterman, Jay Leno, even we are just saying that stuff. We even have writers on Bullshit. With Trey and Matt, if you wanted to see where the brilliance of the show comes from, you could talk to Trey and a whole lot of it is right there.

Cannibal The Musical, it’s hilarious

It’s not only in the work that he does. When you’re sitting in a room with Trey, you could tell he’s got that much brilliance and beauty just flowing off him.