So I'm down a country back road on one of my evening runs when an SUV happens to pass me then slowly comes to a stop several yards up and backs up until the passenger and driver, two guys, can see me. They ask me if there's access down to a local river and I tell them probably not anymore as there's a residence built on the hill above it but that it won't hurt to double check. They thank me and then the driver asks, hey, haven't I seen you on tv somewhere?
Maybe,
I respond slowly, looking around for potential escape routes.
Yeah, you were on that bullshit show about Walmart.
And they made us look like total douche-bags, yes.
I'll have to jump a fence or two but a B-line across the fields into the woods looks like my best bet. I can get home without setting foot on another road if I need to.
Well, Penn [Jillette] couldn't even get the location right. There's no Walmart in Cinebar.
the driver replies.
And that's the least of the errors.
I add, breathing easy. Okay, it doesn't look like I'll have to run for my life after all. All the rabid tv-zombie sheep who write into HEL-MART.com regularly tend to put me on edge a bit, especially the threats of violence. And here I am in the middle of nowhere when lo and behold someone just happens along who recognizes me as the asshole on tv. Now, that's funny ... well, now that it's not frightening in a Deliverance kinda way anyhow.
So I explained to these guys how my friend and I were invited to do an interview and be featured on the show, that we agreed with controversy sells in mind (and boy does it ever) and how the releases we signed specifically stated that we were signing away the rights for our audio and images to be literally exploited
in anyway Showtime saw fit to and those results speak for themselves: we come off as snobby assholes.
The guys seemed more disappointed that I never actually met Penn or Teller. No one featured on their show does which means no one gets an opportunity to respond to Penn's rehearsed indignation. Bullshit!, true to it's namesake, is a hack job from end to end but it's an entertaining and brilliant hack job which is why I'm a fan, though I must admit that I'm less entertained by it having discovered for myself just how much of it is a complete work of fiction. It's one of those programs that requires a kernel of truth to make it funny.
Penn & Teller by themselves aren't funny to me. Penn comes off as loud and obnoxious but not funny. I tried listening to his radio show but it bored me away. I briefly caught the ever-so-brief game show, Identity, that he hosted and I, like most viewers apparently, was not compelled to change the channel back. I found him being booed on the Colbert Report for saying that god, like the tooth fairy, doesn't exist. And then there's Penn's political punditry for doomed-to-fail presidential, libertarian-esque candidate Ron Paul on CNN's Glenn Beck and of course his infamous Hillary Clinton White Bitch Month
joke regurgitated on MSNBC. Maybe these talking head programs mistook the fact that Penn admittedly lies to make a very good living for being a political expert of some degree. He hosts a show called Bullshit! and tricks people? He's perfect for political discourse! Book him ASAP! No no, not the short, clearly more intelligent mute that he abuses.
Teller is a little more funny in that creepy mime kind of way. Caught both of them on the History of the Joke documentary hosted by the very funny Lewis Black and they didn't even make me smile whereas George Carlin had the production crew laughing till they cried out for mercy just out of camera range. It's A LOT funnier when Carlin says there is no god than when Penn does.
As far as being informative, Penn & Teller simply aren't. Bullshit! is facts light and speculation heavy. They've been soundly denounced for their big-oil biased global warming/environmental hysteria expose, turns out second-hand smoke IS bad for you, cell phones can, indeed, cause brain tumors and you go ahead and handle spent uranium rods from nuclear reactors with your bare hands. Accept the statements of two Vegas magicians who take GREAT liberties with science at your own risk. These aren't the skeptics they proclaim to be and it follows that neither are the sheep who blindly believe them; they're illusionists, they're clowns, they are shills.
Want some entertaining facts? May I recommend the very entertaining program, Myth Busters. It's on Discovery so you don't have to pay out the ass for bad porn on Showtime to get it. Just the facts? History Channel documentaries are awesome. Documentaries on PBS run a bit drier but are informative none the less (the bran muffins of the sugar-coated entertainment world) and Nova and Nova Science Now with Neil Tyson are also fun.
But someone getting their facts
from Penn & Teller amounts to a monkey flinging shit in any serious exchange. The purpose of Bullshit! is not to educate, it's to make fun of dancing idiots like me featured on it and persuade intellectually lazy morons to adopt weak arguments on the authority of two celebrities who were able to land a televised soapbox in which to promote their opinions. They are the atheist equivalents of televangelists Peter Popoff and Benny Hinn, the libertarian equivalents of Bill O'Reilly and Michael Moore, and probably employ the same skilled editors.
And HEL*MART continues to receive hate mail (an increase indicating when the episode is in syndication) from a seemingly endless parade of shit-flinging monkeys nearly a year and a half since our unflattering appearance debuted on Bullshit!. They call us anti-capitalist in spite of the fact that we operate HEL*MART to turn a profit and free nationally syndicated advertising to a paying audience is a gift that keeps on giving. So-called libertarians (like Penn & Teller) who endorse a company that is, in large part, essentially subsidized with their tax dollars actually have the gall to chide us. And they think we're stupid in spite of the fact that we had a pretty good idea of what we were getting ourselves into (the producers insisted upon it) and they evidently do not. But the ones that really make a critical thinker cringe are those who seem to believe that we deliberately modeled our mock white trash family of breeders
after them and theirs. You don't deserve to be called anything short of dumb as shit with that mistaken perception. And the worse ones are the military wives who're disgusted that their husbands are putting their lives on the line presumably for our right to unfairly criticize the discount retailer selling out the county that, again, their husbands are presumably fighting to preserve because they don't want people like us to somehow take away their right to buy cheap imported shit like ... oh, I dunno ... leaded baby bibs for their precious children. If there's a point where one weeps for the generation to come, that would be it.
You too can tap this quality, and seemingly boundless, demographic as Penn & Teller evidently have. There are consequences of course, like meeting people in the middle of nowhere who recognize you from television. Thankfully, most of those have have been as amused as we, our friends and families have been.
