9781451610376

The New York Times bestselling reinterpretation of the Ten Commandments from the larger, louder half of the world-famous magic duo Penn & Teller. Not only can the man rant, he can write. One of the most outspoken and visible atheists in the media today, Penn is brilliantly witty and observant, self-deprecating, and hysterically obscene. This collection of absurdly funny essays are The Penn Commandments, and they reveal one outrageous and opinionated atheist's experience in the world. In this rollicking yet honest account of a godless existence, Penn takes readers on a roller coaster of exploration and flips conventional religious wisdom on its ear to reveal that doubt, skepticism, and wonderall signs of a general feeling of disbeliefare to be celebrated and cherished, rather than suppressed. And he tells some pretty damn funny stories along the way. From performing blockbuster shows on the Vegas Strip to the adventures of fatherhood, from an on-going dialogue with proselytizers of the Christian Right to the joys of sex while scuba diving, Jillette's self-created Decalogue invites his reader on a journey of discovery that is equal parts wise and wisecracking.

Penn Jillette has published numerous articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Playboy, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel Sock and the comedic How to Cheat Your Friends at Poker (coauthored by Teller). He lives in Las Vegas, Nevada.

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• INTRODUCTION •
The Humility of Loudmouth Know-it-all Asshole Atheists

You don’t have to be brave or a saint, a martyr, or even very smart to be an atheist. All you have to be able to say is “I don’t know.” I remember sitting in a room full of skeptics when I first heard Christopher Hitchens say, “Atheists don’t have saints and we don’t have martyrs.” I’m a little afraid to put that in quotes, because no matter how brilliantly I remember any Hitchens phrase, when I go back and check, what he said was better than I remember. He is better at speaking off the top of his head after a couple of drinks than I am at remembering his brilliance later while referencing notes.

I know nothing about drinking, but I know that Hitchens did drink, and when he made that comment he was sitting next to me on the dais with a drink in front of him. But the drink was irrelevant—I could never see that it made any difference to his abilities. My doctor’s brother (how’s that for a source?) said there is such a thing as state-dependent learning. This explains the brilliance of all the jazz cats on heroin and how Keith Richards could play even a specially tuned guitar while as fucked-up as . . . well, Keith Richards. They’re performing in the same state in which they practiced. Hank Williams was so fucked-up we don’t even know which of the United States he died in. Hank’s driver drove him across many state lines all night in his long white Cadillac and when they got to Oak Hill, West Virginia, Hank was dead. Hank’s genius might have been state-dependent, but his dying wasn’t even that.

For years it seemed Christopher Hitchens was always drunk, so he was calling up information in the same state (drunk) that he learned it (drunk). I did the Howard Stern radio show a lot in the late eighties. Many times I was on with Sam Kinison. I’ve never had a sip of alcohol or tried any recreational drug in my life, and I’d come in to the Stern show as rested as carny trash could be that early in the morning—focused and ready to work. Sam would come in fucked-up. Really fucked-up. Stern would kick off the show and Sam was always so good. I would be sweating into the mic, trying to get a clever word in here and there while in awe of how fast, insightful, profound, and motherfucking funny Sam was every second. Howard would keep us on for a long time, and at the end of the show I’d be exhausted, and Sam would just stagger out like he came in.

I used to wonder: if that was how he was in a fucked-up state, if he ever were sober, couldn’t he sweep the Nobel Prizes and throw in a Fields Medal?

You don’t have to be very smart, fast, or funny to be an atheist. You don’t have to be well educated. Being an atheist is simply saying “I don’t know.”

When I was a professional dishwasher, I worked with a man named Harold. Harold sent in lyrics and the little bit of money he saved up to “song-poem” companies that advertised in the back of the National Enquirer and Midnight. He’d pay a full week’s wages to have “song sharks” set his poems to music, record the songs, and try to sell them to make Harold rich. Part of the scam was to send the victim a copy of his song on a record. I now collect copies of those song-poem records. Nothing is labeled very well, and most of them are about Jesus or Nixon. I’ll never know if I’m listening to a song Harold cowrote with a rip-off artist, but when I listen, I feel like I’m in touch with him. Most of the song-poems are unlistenable, but the ones that are good are heartbreaking. They are all you want in art—the cynical blasÉ skill of out-of-work studio musicians sight-reading hastily scribbled sheet music while a competent but bitter vocalist sings unedited, pure, white light/white heat lyrics from the heart of someone who doesn’t know what the word “cynical” means. Beat that, Bruce Springsteen.

Harold was fat and ugly and sweaty. He didn’t have any brainpower or hair at all, and I looked up to him. I knew other people who were a zillion times smarter than Harold, but Harold managed to show up for work, get the pots and pans clean, and deal with all the smart-assed punks, hippies, drunks, and drug users who washed dishes briefly and badly at Famous Bill’s Restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Famous Bill’s contained the word “famous” because they’d gotten a good review of their lobster pie in a travel magazine in the fifties. I was a hippie punk who worked with Harold for one summer and then went on with my life with Penn & Teller. Harold knew a couple little jokes, and he knew how to be polite and get to the restaurant on time and back to his apartment after work to write songs. I never talked theology with Harold—I don’t know if he believed in god—but I heard him say “I don’t know” about a lot of things. His smile when he admitted he didn’t know was unapologetic, unless you were asking a question related to his job. If you were asking him if he liked Kerouac or Thailand, he would just say “I don’t know” as a simple statement of fact. He knew very well that he didn’t know.

I try to claim that I was friends with the genius Richard Feynman. He came to our show a few times and was very complimentary, and I had dinner with him a couple times, and we chatted on the phone several times. I’d call him to get quick tutoring on physics so I could pretend to read his books. No matter how much I want to brag, it’s overstating it to call him a friend. I would never have called him to help me move a couch. I did, however, call him once to ask how we could score some liquid nitrogen for a Letterman spot we wanted to do. He was the only physicist I knew at the time. He explained patiently that he didn’t know. He was a theoretical physicist and I needed a hands-on guy, but he’d try to find one for me. About a half hour later a physics teacher from a community college in Brooklyn called me and said, “I don’t know what kind of practical joke this is, but a Nobel Prize–winning scientist just called me here at the community college, gave me this number, and told me to call Penn of Penn & Teller to help with a Letterman appearance.”

I guess that’s close to a friend.

My friend Richard Feynman said “I don’t know.” I heard him say it several times. He said it just like Harold, a simple statement of fact. When Richard didn’t know, he often worked harder than anyone else to find out, but while he didn’t know, he said “I don’t know.”

I like to think I fit in somewhere between my friends Harold and Richard. I don’t know. I try to remember to say “I don’t know” just the way they both did, as a simple statement of fact. It doesn’t always work. It seems that with “climate change” we’re all supposed to know, but I’ll get to that later in the book.