PENN & TELLER
It’s so hard to stay hip. New concepts come and go like witches in Oz. And if you don’t catch them the first time, you’re lost. You’re stuck making learned faces while happy, knowledgeable people discuss them at parties.
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The secret’s pretty simple, really. Postmodernism, as I understand it, is the elevation of irony to the status of style, You take some traditional form–some art or craft or aesthetic from the past–and recapitulate it in a new context, so that its meaning is transformed. So that it becomes a comment, maybe even a joke, on itself. A postmodern architect might stick motifs from a classical temple on his multinational corporate headquarters, thereby letting us know where the gods currently reside. A postmodern artist might repaint an image out of Picasso’s oeuvre, thereby declaring an end to the era of originality.
Teller, for instance, repeats Houdini’s stunt, allowing himself to be submerged in an “underwater coffin of certain doom.” Now this seems pretty death-defying at first, but after he’s been in there for about six minutes we begin to realize that our expectations have been played with. The illusion’s been doubled over on itself, so that we experience the pleasant terror of the stunt even as we’re being shown its structure. Penn & Teller let us stand inside and outside the joke at the same time.
Written by Mark Leib while he was still at the Yale Drama School, this one-act about a little boy who drives everybody wild with his silence is obviously collegiate work: very funny, very smart, very snotty, and very derivative. You can check off the influences as you go along. Here’s some diction out of Ionesco, a strategy out of Charles Ludlam, an imaginative leap out of fellow Yalie Harry Kondoleon.
