Rahoul Ghose/Discovery

What can you tell me about Penn & Teller: Tell a Lie?

PENN JILLETTE: It takes the basic format of Discovery, which is, you know, fascinating, unbelievable science stories. [Each show will have] six or seven of these science pieces, with us doing a lot of the demos ourselves, and one of them is a lie. It continues our obsession with critical thinking and skepticism. The formation of Penn & Teller was about the idea: Can you use magic to tell the truth? Can you use the idea of lying to really get to what it means to have a fact? Everybody's lying to people on TV, so it's interesting to say when you are.

Where did you come up with the idea?

We wanted to work with Discovery, and then banged around a lot of different ideas. The fact of the matter is that in Penn and Teller: Bullshit and Penn & Teller: Tell a Lie, the first three words are the same. But whether you're talking about our live show or about our TV shows, it's always been about how we, as humanity, tell the difference between fact and fiction. How do we assess the truth, whether you're talking about the edges of science or about communication between people? That issue is very fascinating to us.

How are you going to test? When I think of testing, I think of the MythBusters blowing stuff up.

PENN: There's a certain amount of that. Their style has always been very hands-on experiments, and our style has always been a little bit broader. Their style has always been to do stuff that you could do in a room or a field. We're trying to do stuff that they wouldn't test. We were able to do this story with blind people who use echolocation. The MythBusters wouldn't do that because you can't learn that in a workshop. We're able to do more field pieces and be out there. But they are certainly kindred spirits.

TELLER: A large part of the joy of the show is making up the lies that we tell, and trying to tell this little bit of truth. You recognize, [a few elements that are true], and then one more thing that is a perfectly logical but false conclusion you draw from that. And some of the true stories really sound like we've made them up. So you're there going, "They just said the temperature that water boils at, is that right? Because they might have slipped that in as their clue."

Where are you getting the ideas for the stories? Are they common ideas?

PENN: We aren't trying to do many common things. There should be some fun to it. It shouldn't just be, "The speed of light is 40 miles an hour"that's not the kind of lie we are going to tell. All of the stories are interesting, and counterintuitive, and also, we are trying very hard to find stuff that isn't widely circulated. And so that means everyone working on the show is looking for that all the time. You know, it's a big, fascinating world.

Has anything you've tested had a result that you think will really shock people?

PENN: We had a few things that we made up, and then when we demoed them, they came so close to being true. We were [nearly] inventing something that we thought was impossible. I'm not going to give the example, because it's a good surprise in the showhow close we came to making something up and then all of a sudden we test it and see, Hey, we can kind of do this! There's a lot of stuff like building a blowtorch out of bacon. The blind guys hearing with echolocation is fabulous, and that's one of the real onesseeing a guy that does not have eyesight being able to ride a mountain bike.

TELLER: Unless, of course, that's a lie. But that's exactly [the question] it raises for you. You go, "That's just unbelievable!" But the world's full of a lot of unbelievable things.

Is this show about teaching people to look at the world skeptically?

PENN: It's not really. It's just that that's fun. Knowledge is one of the reasons we're alive. There's not really any mission to get people thinking more critically, because when you're dealing with the Discovery audience, you're dealing with an audience that likes skepticism and critical thinking anyway. It's really just celebrating that and enjoying it.

TELLER: And it's dealing with it in the way you deal with it in a magic show. In a magic show the ultimate thing you become aware of is where reality leaves off and make-believe begins. But you sit there and while you're searching for that borderlineThat's gotta be fake, that's gotta be fake, wait! That must be realthat's all fun. That kind of detective work is great fun.

Right now you're slated for six episodes. Would you be open to doing more?

PENN: Yes, there are six, and we've got most of them shot. And you know, we're always hopeful. When we did Bullsh!t, we initially did 10 episodes, and we ended up doing eight years and we could have gone longer. We're [hoping] to do more. But you can never tellit's show business!

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