God, No! (26 page)

In America, Noblesse Oblige Isn’t Just for Noblemen

I
was on
Larry King Live
with Seth MacFarlane, the
Family Guy
guy. I like him. I like the pleasant feelings in my iPhone pocket when I’m with him. It’s the gentle vibration of women I know texting to remind me that, if I get a chance, I could give Seth their cell phone numbers.

MacFarlane is funny, smart, attractive, and filthy-dirty-corporation-richer than the god neither of us believes in. Besides being a funny rich guy, Seth is also a liberal, and some women dig that. He’s a real Hollywood liberal. Larry King brought up the Tea Party on the show. Rachael Harris, the woman from
The Hangover,
was on the show with us, and she explained that Tea Party people were racists. When I asked her to elaborate, she couldn’t think of a racist part of their platform (maybe partially because they don’t have a platform). Most of them are white, though, and maybe that’s what racism means now. Most of the Sierra Club is white, and most of Jon Stewart’s audience is white, but those didn’t come up.

Seth didn’t jump on board with the racism thing. Seth’s problem
seemed to be that the Tea Party people were politically in favor of policies that Seth felt were against their own interests. This is a position I’ve heard others take before. Seth wasn’t hating the Tea Party people, he really wanted what he thought was best for them. His heart was in the right place. What bothered him so about the Tea Party was that they didn’t know what was best for their own damn selves. Seth is very talented and works hard, but he also seems to think he was lucky too. That seems reasonable. He had done well, and he didn’t need his taxes any lower. He wanted to pay his share, and he thought his share could be even higher. The Tea Party was pushing for things that would help Seth his own damn self and that were bad for the average Tea Party member. Seth explained that if the Tea Party got their way, Seth would, his own damn self, keep even more damn money. That really bugged him. He couldn’t dig that at all. How could these nuts possibly be pushing for things that weren’t in their own immediate self-interest? The Tea Party people were trying to stop the government from doing things that were financially good for the Tea Party individuals themselves. Seth didn’t want people who were much less well-off than he was pushing for things that were good for rich fucks like Seth. I understood that Seth thought that anyone pushing for something politically not in their own financial self-interest was stupid and/or manipulated by big corporate rich-fuck money. This was my understanding of his position; those aren’t the words that he used. I might be unfairly lumping Seth in with other people I’ve heard talk about this. This is an argument I’ve heard a lot. It’s an argument some liberals I know seem comfortable with.

Larry and Rachael were nodding. It seemed they’d heard this argument before, and it made sense to them.

What the fucking fuck?

Huh?

As I see it, any person making this argument is kind of bragging that his political position is so purely altruistic that it is against his own self-interest. He cares so much about other people, justice, and pure political
ideology that he has the moral strength to argue for something that isn’t in his self-interest. I’ve heard a lot of rich Hollywood people make that argument. They seem to be very proud of it.

On the other hand, if a . . . I guess the word would be “peasant,” cares enough about other people, justice, and pure political ideology to argue for something that isn’t in his or her puny ignorant best interest, he or she is a manipulated idiot.

The problem with this argument is it’s a robot killer! It uses the claim that the speaker arguing against their own self-interest shows how strongly they believe that the other side shouldn’t be arguing against their own self-interest. Let me break it down to this: “I’m arguing against my own self-interest in saying that no one should argue against his own self-interest.” Arghhh!

The only way this makes sense is if you think that rich people can argue against their own self-interest, but less rich people can’t. Seth, I love you, but this is the United States of America—one doesn’t have to be rich to be guided by what one thinks is right. Morality can trump self-interest in good people of all classes. If it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for them. Me, well, I’d like my position to be moral
and
in my self-interest—and I think those aren’t that often mutually exclusive.

I, my own damn self, am not a Tea Party supporter. I disagree with them on social liberties, our overseas wars, Obama’s birthplace, Sarah Palin, and the conspicuous absence of tea at their rallies. But I do believe if Seth dropped his fat wallet at a Tea Party rally, the person who picked it up would be very likely to give it back to him. And if one of the Tea Party people dropped his skinny wallet near Seth, Seth would give it back. It’s not in either of their immediate self-interest, but it’s the right thing to do. Seth and the Tea Party don’t disagree on doing the right thing, they disagree on what the right thing is. I just wish we all could remember that.

And just for the record, the government doesn’t stop you from paying more than you owe in taxes. If you really believe you should be
paying more . . . just skip the deductions. I’m sure you can find a way to give 100 percent of your earnings to the government and not be arrested for anything . . . except vagrancy.

“Have a Cuppa Tea”

—The Kinks

Would This Seem Crazy If You Read It in a Book?

I
was on the road for many years of my life. For years, I traveled most days of the week and did shows most nights. I was happy living in hotel rooms. I didn’t have children, and I called my mom and dad every day. I loved having friends all over the country and seeing them every couple of years. It’s really hard to have arguments with people you see only once every two years.

On the road, you get along with everyone. The same is true for “romantic relationships.” The first couple of days are the easiest in a relationship, and the road keeps everyone at the first couple days. Nothing can follow you on the road.

There was a woman who worked at a theater that we played. She was so sexy. She had an amazing body. Great writers have written about sexual qualities, and I won’t try to compete, but . . . this woman was sexy. Cartoon sexy. She looked as though a very talented sixteen-year-old boy with a hard-on (redundant) had sketched her body and it had become flesh.

As soon as I arrived, one of the local crew guys warned me she was “too crazy to fuck.” Robbie Libbon, one of my best friends, who also
works on our crew and helped me with this book, took one look at her and said, “Holy fuck, she’s got to be weapons-grade crazy.” I thought for a few seconds that I should take the advice of someone who knows and just stay away from her. That didn’t last. Even in baggy clothes she was amazing, and she was smart and fun to talk to. She wrote sci-fi movies, and since way back then she’s had one of her movies hit the big screen. She wasn’t just perfect tits and a perfect ass. She was great in every way—smart, funny, cool. Yeah, you could kind of feel the crazy coming off her like stink, but how bad could it be?

We talked, and then we flirted, and then we hung out, and then we fucked. It didn’t seem there was any head room above her sexiness in a sweater and jeans, but she was even sexier when the rubber hit the road. We had a blast. What a night.

Then she brought the crazy. It bloomed fast. I hadn’t even gotten back to my room when there was a four-page fax (it was way back then) at the desk of the hotel. Handwritten, small, psycho R. Crumb’s–brother writing, telling me about our future together and what I had to do now. She was making demands. She was halfway to “I will not be ignored” bunny boiling, and I had hardly even stopped fucking her. Oh, my word.

I decided to be honest. I’d never tried that with crazy before. After reading the fax, I called her up and asked her out to lunch. We went to a soul food restaurant, and over hot links, ribs, and pulled pork, I decided to just tell her the truth as I saw it:

“People think you’re crazier than a shithouse rat. You are the sexiest woman I’ve ever seen. You told me last night that last Halloween you had a
Kill Bill
outfit that you filled out better than Uma and still no date. Do you realize how much fucking crazy that is? When I arrived in town, I was told where the closest Denny’s was, and that you were too crazy to fuck. Those were the two pieces of information the local crew thought I needed. Do you understand that?”

She gave no reaction, but I kept trying. “How can I get you to understand this? Here we go. You read a lot. You see a lot of movies.
You watch TV. You write movie scripts and you’ve written short stories. I’ve brought this fax with me that you sent to my hotel. Imagine we’re in a movie or a book. Imagine this is a story. Imagine you aren’t you. You don’t even know you. ‘You’ isn’t even real. ‘You’ is a character in this story, okay? And this hack magician comes to town and fucks this incredibly sexy, hot, smart, cool woman. And when he gets back to his hotel, he finds this fax waiting for him.”

I handed her the fax she had sent me that morning.

“So, you’re reading the book, and then there’s this fax from a woman that our hero has fucked once. He fucked her once! And you read this fax from her in the book, okay? Now, just reading the book, just trying to understand the book, would you think that the author wanted you to believe that the woman who sent the fax to the hack magician was crazy? You understand stories, right? You understand that there are people in stories whom the reader is supposed to think are crazy, right? You need to know certain characters are crazy to understand the book, right? And you know how authors let you know that you’re supposed to think that a character is crazy? They make you think that with crazy shit the character writes, says, and does. So, you write this fax to me, and you’re about to send it, and then you think, ‘If I read this fax in a movie, would I think that the person who wrote this fax was supposed to be crazy?’ And if the answer is yes, you just throw the fax away, you never send it, and no one knows you’re fucking nuts. Okay?”

It seemed I was really onto something. I went on. “We all think crazy shit all the time. All our heads are full of crazy fucking whack-job shit, so before we say something, we just have to think to ourselves, ‘If a character in a movie said what I’m about to say, would I think that character was supposed to be crazy?’ And if the answer is yes, you just say something else. It’s that easy. And then you won’t be too crazy to fuck.”

It didn’t work. Even though I knew she was crazy, I fucked her a few more times, and she got crazier and crazier, and it didn’t go well. It ended up very badly, but . . . I got to leave town.

A few days later I was sitting on the plane next to Robbie. I was pretty proud of the “If this would seem crazy if you read it in a book, don’t say it” theory of living one’s life.

Robbie listened to the whole story and said, “Penn, if you were reading a book, and one of the characters said exactly what you said to that poor incredibly hot woman, would you think the guy saying that was supposed to be crazy?”

“Brick House”

—Commodores

It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Stupidity

I
repeat: “I fuck Jesus hard through the hand holes and cream on his crown of thorns.” You say that in certain rooms and you’ll piss some people off. I said it to a socially conservative Christian woman during a commercial break on
Politically Incorrect
. When we came back on the air, she was in pro-wrestling mode. She was in full flipped-out Andy Kaufman mode, attacking me like a nut. I had made sure that no one but her, not even Bill Maher, heard me say it, so she seemed really to have lost it for no reason. I had said my crazy thing quietly, off air, and her reaction was loud, on air. She looked like a fucked-up crackhead and I looked measured, tolerant, and sane. It was just a cheesy TV trick that you can pull on amateurs. Hey, what can I say, I’m a professional.

Talking about raping the pain of the son of god can get you a strong reaction, but nowhere near as strong as you can get from environmentalists without even trying. James Randi is a skeptic and is Penn & Teller’s inspiration. Randi is our hero, our mentor, and our friend. The Amazing Randi taught us to use our fake magic powers for good. Psychics use tricks to lie to people; Randi uses tricks to tell the truth. About every year in Vegas, the James Randi Educational Foundation holds “The Amazing Meeting” and gathers as many like-thinking
people as you can get from a group of people who want to question every time people think alike. They invite speakers as smart, famous, and groovy as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Trey Parker, and Matt Stone. We all fill up a big Vegas ballroom. There’s lots of real science stuff with real scientists questioning things that a lot of people on TV take for granted, like ESP, UFOs, faith healing, and creationism. It’s a party.

Every year Penn & Teller are honored to be invited. We don’t wear our matching gray suits and Teller doesn’t stay in his silent character. Teller chats up a storm. It’s not a gig, it’s hanging out with a thousand friends. A couple years ago, during our loose Q & A, someone asked us about global warming. Teller and I were both silent onstage for a bit too long, and then I said I didn’t know. I elaborated on “I don’t know” quite a bit. I said that Al Gore was an asshole (that’s scientifically provable, right?), that I really wanted to doubt anything he was hyping, but when all was said and done, all I wanted to say was that I didn’t know. I also emphasized that really smart friends, who knew a lot more than me, were convinced of “climate change” (marketers have changed the brand name from “global warming” to “climate change,” having learned from Goldman Sachs that if you bet against yourself and have the government to bail you out with other people’s money, you’re golden). I ended my long-winded rambling (I most often have a silent partner) very clearly with “I don’t know.” I did that because . . . I don’t know. Teller chimed in with something about Al Gore’s selling of “indulgences” being bullshit and then said he didn’t know either. P & T don’t know jack shit about global warming; next question.