God, No! (25 page)

He didn’t do many tricks, and no good ones. They were hack tricks that have been around forever, and he’s been doing them forever, and the only astonishing thing was that he hadn’t gotten better with all the repetition. He hadn’t learned a thing. The jokes he told were awful and he insulted the audience for not laughing, pretending he was working over their heads. He said, “You’ll find yourself waking up in the middle of the night laughing.” I hate when performers blame their audiences for not getting jokes. But I could have forgiven all that, I suppose . . . if not for his opening.

He even used Dunninger’s closing line: “To those who believe, no explanation is necessary; to those who do not, no explanation is possible.”

Dunninger was a big swinging dick. You could admire Dunninger’s bravado.

Kreskin is a fucking weasel. Kreskin ended by trying to force a standing ovation, and as the audience walked out, he pretended he got one. Everyone who didn’t have their back to the stage was embarrassed.

I could have forgiven all that. I’ve grown some since I was eleven. I could be bigger than all that. But I couldn’t be bigger than the first thing he said when he walked onstage.

I guess he felt he needed to explain why his show was starting so late. I guess he didn’t want to say it was because he was trying to get Penn & Teller thrown out and they were going to be assholes and go all limp-Gandhi on his ass.

What he came up with will make it very hard for me to ever forgive him.

When he walked out onstage, he took a few deep breaths, pretended to have some trouble pulling himself together, and said the show had been delayed because . . . he had been on the phone awaiting news about the well-being of his sick mother . . . and . . . thank god, she was all right.

Maybe his mother really was sick and he was really waiting on a real phone. Maybe. It’s possible, I guess. And it’s possible that while he was worried sick about his elderly mother’s health, he was putting her on hold and trying to get Penn & Teller thrown out of the Debbie Reynolds casino showroom. I suppose that’s possible. I know what it’s like to have a sick mother and worry about her. I know that all too well. But when I was on the phone worried about my mom, I wasn’t thinking about having people thrown out of anywhere, I was thinking about my mom. It’s also possible that it wasn’t Kreskin himself who decided that we had to go. Maybe while he was seeing about his poor mom, some middle manager decided that having Penn & Teller thrown out would give the boss some solace.

It’s also possible that Kreskin was lying. It’s hard for me to believe that anyone could be scummy enough to lie about his mom’s health, even this guy who ripped off my mom and dad with his shitty little “Advanced Fine Kreskin ESP Set” and made me hate science.

If Kreskin was lying onstage in Vegas about his mother being sick, fuck him in the neck.

I hope he sues me.

“Love Theme from Superman”

—London Symphony Orchestra

“Liar”

—The Sex Pistols

Nixon the Aristocrat

I
’m the right age for Nixon. He was my bogeyman. When I was a rebellious child questioning authority, the president of the United States turned out to be, without question, a lying sack of shit. I argued with my dad about Nixon. As my hair flopped in my face and my eye makeup ran with passion, I insisted that President Nixon had authorized people to break into a psychiatrist’s office and then used illegal means to cover up his illegal act. My moral righteousness was pure. There was no doubt showing in my voice or eyes as I accused Richard Nixon of crimes. My dad’s automatic defense of any president of the United States of America didn’t have a chance against my youth and fire.

How did a Greenfield, Massachusetts, failing public school student know for sure what illegal activities the leader of the free world was guilty of?

I didn’t. Like a toddler, I was just testing boundaries. Could I go off half-cocked about the president of the United States of America and get away with it? Could I listen to Neil Young and Country Joe in my bedroom, watch the Smothers Brothers on TV, and read Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and
The East Village Other,
and spout that paranoid shit back at my dad and be correct? The way that father/son
story is supposed to go, no. I was supposed to be wrong. I was supposed to look back years later with my dad and giggle about how wrong I was. I was supposed to say, “You know, I really believed all that shit I was spouting,” and Dad would say, “Yeah, and you were passionate about it too. You almost had me convinced.”

That’s the way it’s supposed to go. I didn’t know jack shit. It turned out I was right about Nixon, but only by random chance. The showboating angry young man is not supposed to be right about much.

When I say something crazy and hateful, I always want to be proved wrong. My dad couldn’t see doubt in my eyes (that’s my superpower under this yellow sun), but doubt was in my heart and my mind. I knew I was an ignorant young asshole, and I was waiting to be shown that the president was really a-okay. I’m still that way. When I sit on Fox, CNN, or MSNBC and spout my nonsense, I’m always waiting to be proven wrong. And I very often am. That’s the way it should be. When I carry on about our liberties being eroded and the government taking away more and more of our freedoms, I want people to roll their eyes. I want to go into the next decade with egg on my face and more freedom in my pants.

In the eighties, Penn & Teller did the Letterman show a lot. I’m still very proud of a lot of those spots. We were good because Letterman and his staff were so great. One of the people we worked with (after the brilliant Morty) was Frank Gannon. Before coming to work with Letterman, Gannon had worked in the Nixon White House and, along with Diane Sawyer, had helped Nixon write
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon.
He went from Nixon to Letterman. I talked a lot to Frank about Nixon. He even suggested that Nixon would meet me for lunch, but that lunch never happened. Nixon chose to die first. Frank talked about Nixon listening to rap music, which he really did. Nixon loved the way rappers used words. Nixon loved words. I listen to the “You won’t have Nixon to kick around” press conference and now it sounds to me like Bob Dylan’s angry, surreal press conference in
Don’t Look Back.
Frank said Nixon was our smartest president, and I believe him. Frank didn’t change my mind about Nixon, but he opened it. He brought in more
information. Nixon was no longer just a psychotic bogeyman, he was starting to become a complicated genius. I was starting to get that wonderful feeling of being proved wrong. Nixon, the broken genius, listening to rap music as he died, disgraced and proud, started to be a person to me.

Nixon said, “I’m not a crook,” and when his book came out, people protested with the slogan “Don’t buy books by crooks.” Frank had changed me. It was years after it came out, but I bought and read the massive book by the crook and it blew my mind. I learned so much from that book on Nixon. It changed me. Yup, Nixon did all those bad things, but the angry young asshole in Greenfield, Massachusetts, was wrong. Nixon was a monster, but not just a monster.

In the crook book, Nixon points out a bunch of factual and ethical mistakes that Woodward and Bernstein made in bringing down Nixon’s presidency. Tricky Dick contends that the
Washington Post
boys made the same mistake Nixon himself made. They thought the end justified the means. They thought that getting Nixon out of the presidency was important enough that they had to bend some rules.

The end does not justify the means. Nixon learned that too late.

Since reading the book by the crook, I’ve thought about this point a lot. The ends never justify the means. We’re all living only in the means and we don’t ever get to see the real end. We don’t get any big accounting of projects at the end of our lives. We just get our lives, day by day, minute by minute, and we have to be good. There’s no punch line.

There are no ends, there are only means.

The supposed end that did not justify Woodward and Bernstein’s supposed means was the president of the United States of America resigning on TV. I watched it live, brokenhearted. Other hippies cheered, but I so wanted to be wrong. I so wanted Nixon to be vindicated. Fuck, I want O. J. to be innocent. I wanted my hatred of Nixon to be a phase that I was going through. I didn’t want it to be an awful event the world was going through. I wanted my dad to be right.

Years ago someone showed me a videotape of outtakes from the Nixon TV resignation speech. I saw it that one time years ago and
it stayed it my head; it was another piece of the puzzle in my long-term relationship with Nixon. I just watched those outtakes again on YouTube. And I watched them again. And again. The bootleg starts several minutes before Nixon goes live on the air to resign from office. It’s his last time addressing the American people as their president. The crew is finishing up with the set, the lighting, and the sound. The recording starts as Nixon walks in with his speech in hand. The speech he will use to resign as president of the United States of America. It’s a heavy speech. It’s a heavy room. A tech person gets out of the way so Nixon can sit down for the final tech tweaks before they go out live.

Nixon looks as the tech guy walks away and says with a big smile, “Hey, you’re better looking than I am, why don’t you stay here?” Nixon gives a little laugh and continues: “Blonds, they say, photograph better than brunettes. Is that true or not? You are blond, aren’t you? Redhead?” Nixon is telling the young sound guy that America would rather see an attractive young man resigning than crazy old Nixon.

Nixon then tells the still photographer to stop shooting. “I’m afraid he’ll catch me picking my nose,” he says with a laugh. Everyone in the room knows that’s the least of Nixon’s worries. His worry is that the whole world will not end before he makes this speech.

Nixon is making jokes. I think about jokes a lot. Especially jokes that cross lines. I worked on a movie,
The Aristocrats,
where we explored how far you can go with comedy. There was no violence depicted in that movie, there was no nudity in that movie, but there was shocking, unspeakable obscenity. It was the greatest comedians of our time showing that they could be funny making jokes about rape, AIDS, racism, pederasty, and 9/11. The comedians are amazing. Creative machines with nerves of steel. We made a movie about my heroes. My friend Emery Emery was one of the editors on
The Aristocrats.
I sent Emery the Nixon outtakes link and Emery flipped out. Emery knew Nixon was crazy, but man, how could he be this crazy?

How crazy was Nixon at this point? Nixon, at this point, was bugnutty, crazier than Charlie Manson’s shithouse rat, but I don’t think the jokes are any evidence of that insanity. The jokes and smile are proof
that even with all that crazy and evil living in him, Nixon was still a strong, brave, smart human being, more fit to be president of the United States than I will ever be. The ability to make jokes is self-control. The Massachusetts boy that I was would have seen Nixon’s smile as pure psycho evil; the Las Vegas man that I am sees it as superhuman strength. I see it as the best of us.

Nixon was not fit to be president of the United States of America. He had done bad things, he had violated trusts, and he had gone batshit. But no one is fit to be president of the United States of America if he or she isn’t able to make jokes in that room right before resigning. If you’re going to make decisions that are life and death to hundreds of thousands of people, and life-changing to billions of people, you had better be able to joke with more crushing pressure on you than anyone else has ever felt. I was able to make little jokes at my mom’s deathbed. I was able to do that, but I did it through choking sobs. I couldn’t have made jokes in that Nixon TV resignation room. I would have been vomiting. I might have died rather than give that speech. I don’t mean suicide. I mean my heart might have just exploded in my chest. I might have shit out my liver. I could not have made jokes. That may not be in the top ten thousand reasons I’ll never be president, but it certainly is a sufficient reason for me not to be president.

I was right as a child. Nixon was a crook. He was the president. He was not above the law, he was not an aristocrat, he was an elected official who worked for us.

But, as an adult, I know that Nixon, as a comedian, was an Aristocrat.

“Young Americans”

—David Bowie

The Bible’s Ninth Commandment

Thou shalt not lie.

If you were a man in a monogamous relationship with a woman, and you were fucking a guy on the side and your wife asked you, “Are you seeing another woman?” and you said, “No,” and felt you were telling the truth, you are a liar as sure as if your name were Liar Liar Pantsaflame!

ONE ATHEIST’S NINTH SUGGESTION

Don’t lie. (You know, unless you’re doing magic tricks and it’s part of your job. Does that make it okay for politicians too?)