Teller told me that he considers the remark that Penn makes before pulling out his copy of “Casey at the Bat”—the remark that the magic they’re interested in is “the magic of fine poetry”—to be the “topic sentence” of the show. “What the audience learns from the straitjacket and ‘Casey at the Bat’ is, first, that they’re going to see a show that is about poetry,” he said. “Although we make fun of that idea again and again, I think that when people leave the theatre at the end they leave with the sense of having seen a sort of poetic event.”

“What do you mean by ’poetic’?” I asked.

Teller paused for a long time. Finally, he said, “I would like for people to have the experience I would like to have. Which is for a period of time I would like to have my attention compelled by something that moves me from one place to another, from one feeling to another, from one understanding to another—and hints at mysteries that somehow fit together. When I was a kid in my back yard, almost daily I used to build what I would call a fun house. It was really not very elaborate, but it was almost a compulsion. There were odd pieces of wood in my back yard—things like long planks with four-by-fours nailed to the ends of them so as to form a small table, and assorted things. And I loved to take those things and put them in sequences, so that at each step something surprising as far as I was concerned would happen—so, say, a plank would tip in a different direction. And then I would get kids who lived on my street to come in and walk through it. And I would be right there to catch them if they fell. If they fell down, they didn’t usually get hurt. I got hurt wonderfully once. But in my head what was happening was they were going into a fun house in an amusement park—a haunted house that was pretty scary.” He paused. His eyes had filled with tears. “And then they’d come out at the other end . . .” He paused again. “You start off at the beginning, and you come out and you feel like you’ve been someplace. . . . I don’t know why I get all weepy over that.”

I was helping Penn and Teller block out an appearance on a Boston talk show. I played what Penn likes to refer to as “the meat puppet.” It’s a term he picked up from television cameramen, who invented it as a description of some of the beautiful but vacant people who recite the local news. Most of Penn and Teller’s talk-show appearances revolve around making the meat puppet edgy, or even terrified. The plan this time was to engage him in a game of rodent roulette—a game played on a lazy Susan on which Penn and Teller had glued seven or eight huge rat traps. There is a short piece of cord attached to the bar of each of the traps, so you can trip it without worrying about its snapping shut—unless, Penn will explain to the host, you happen to trip the one whose cord has been cut underneath the trap. That one will break your finger.

“Well, welcome to Boston,” I said, in my assigned role as host. “I hear your show is wacky, madcap fun. Are you going to do a trick for us today?”

“Tell me,” Penn says. “How’s your show doing in this market?”

“Well, we’re O.K., I guess.”

“You creaming the competition?”

“Well, we don’t say creaming, actually,” I said, aware that I was now the one answering the questions.

“What’s next for you after this?” Penn asked, glancing around as if looking for something to break.

“Well, actually, Peoria beckons if we’re not careful here,” I said.

Deciding that a host in my position must be on top of the world and looking for new thrills, Penn suggested rodent roulette, explaining that we’d take turns putting our fingers into the traps. As the routine works, Teller, taking his second turn, lets out a horrible shriek as blood spurts from his finger onto Penn—the result of a simple squirt-ring filled with stage blood. We did that part, with plain water, twice, since Penn didn’t seem to be hit squarely enough in the eye the first time. As Penn was wiping his face after the second squirting, he said “What are we doing here?” and Teller joined in for the ritual chorus: “We’re earning a living.”

The rodent-roulette routine worked pretty well the next morning. The host turned out to be an amiable and relaxed young man, named Matt Lauer, who didn’t panic even when Penn, working up to the suggestion that any thrill-seeking instincts the host had be channelled into the nearly harmless pastime of rodent roulette, said, “I get this premonition of you being found dead in a hot tub with a fourteen-year-old girl.” Still, it was, I thought, a long way from the tension and precision and polish of the “Penn & Teller” performance. In general, I think of their television appearances as a mixed bag. So do they—although Penn enjoyed the liberation of the cockroaches on David Letterman’s desk, at least more than Letterman appeared to. Penn says that on television “you can only do the grossest strokes.” Sometimes even the grossest strokes are not quite caught by the camera. Sometimes the audience doesn’t seem to know quite what to make of Penn and Teller; they’re out of context. A lot of the problem, I think, is that on television Penn and Teller can’t lure the audience into a constant but ever-changing role in the swindle.

I think of Penn and Teller as two acts—the stage performance and everything else. By now, because of their appearances on Letterman and “Saturday Night Live,” they are probably better known for everything else. The way show business is organized, of course, their success may be measured by how well they cross over into everything else. They may measure success that way themselves. They worked hard on their video; they’ve written a book. There are people in the trade who think Penn and Teller may be too specialized in tone to translate well into other areas of show business, and those people would cite as confirmation the troubles encountered recently by Penn and Teller’s most ambitious breakout project—a movie they wrote called “Penn & Teller Get Killed.” The movie, directed by Arthur Penn, was scheduled to have been released early this spring, but the word from Hollywood is that studio executives were shocked by its ending and that the audience at its first test showing was distinctly unenchanted. It has now been recut, but it lingers in what a friend of Penn and Teller’s calls Hollywood Hell.

As it happens, Penn and Teller love the way the movie came out. The prospect that it may not be the mainstream triumph their supporters had looked forward to does not seem to horrify them. After all, they also measure success by infinitesimal degrees of improvement in the needles trick. In Chicago on the national tour, Penn is still hauling Teller up on a pulley eight performances a week and sitting down to read “Casey at the Bat.” Teller says he sees the stage show continuing into the foreseeable future, although, of course, it will change. There might be less magic. Penn, Teller predicts, may get to the point at which he’ll be able to admit from the stage that he didn’t actually go into the sideshow tent at the Franklin County Fair, and will tell “that much more chilling story that he never did see the fire-eating, that it was so fascinating and so fearful from such a distance that he had to go do it instead.” Teller says that he and Penn would like to try a stadium show someday, because they’re fascinated by the problem “How do you do a theatrical event before an enormous number of people?” They even have a trick in mind, which Teller told me about one day in Boston. It starts with Penn announcing that they were allowed to bring only one prop to the show. At that point, he leaves, and Teller lies down, draping a towel over his chest. Penn reappears with the one prop—an eighteen-wheeler. He drives right over Teller and out of the stadium. “Then I get up and take a bow,” Teller said.

“And there are tire marks on the towel?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” Teller said. “Absolutely.” ♦