Penn & Teller: Bullshit! · Season 1
[First lines]
[Posing over a fake grave of Harry Houdini] Harry, can you believe it? The same bullshit you so thoroughly debunked almost a century ago is continuing, and even enjoying a resurgence. [To camera] See? Anyone can talk to the dead. Getting an answer, that's the hard part.
[Through the plastic gravestone] Bullshit!
[Penn explains why there is so much vulgarity on the show] You'll notice much more obscenity than we usually use. That's not just because it's on Showtime, and we want to get some attention. It's also a legal matter. If one calls people liars and quacks, one can be sued and lose a lot of one's money. But "motherfuckers" and "assholes" is pretty safe. If we said it was all scams, we could also be in trouble. But "bullshit," oddly, is safe. So, forgive all the bullshit language. We're trying to talk about the truth without spending the rest of our lives in court because of litigious motherfuckers!
Before we bust up this party—and God dammit we're gonna bust it up—we have to make it very clear where our hearts are. We have nothing but empathy for the people who are experiencing the loss and grief of the death of a loved one. That guy who lost his mom rips my heart out. I'm a momma's boy whose mom died a couple of years ago, and I'll never get over it, and my dad died at around the same time, and I was very close to both of them. I loved them so much there isn't a moment that goes by that I don't miss them. Houdini didn't really go nuts busting these mediums until he lost his mom. Once you've felt that pure grief, seeing it exploited can take away your sense of humor. Once a loved one has died, all we have is our memories of them. There is nothing more precious to me than my memories of my mom and dad. We don't give a rat's ass about the money these bastards are taking from the grief stricken; what we do care about deeply is the desecration of memories. These "performance artists" are, in a very real sense, motherfuckers. That poor guy's grieving memories of his mother are now all fucked up by somebody else's images. All he will ever have left of his mom are memories, and this pig has pissed on those for a buck and a little unearned fame. I'm sure these lame fucks tell themselves that they're easing the grief, but skits for money can not replace loving memories. How low do you have to be to exploit someone's true grief to sell some bullshit book?
One of the weird things Houdini discovered is that some of these mediums actually slip into believing their own bullshit. They forget their own misses, or as John Edward—"the Biggest Douche in the Universe"—does, rewrite them as hits that we're just not able to recognize. Cold reading can be done accidentally. That doesn't mean the psychic is a better person. Lying to themselves does not make lying to others OK. It can make intellectually lazy scumbags more convincing and dangerous. But even if these fucks know they're just making this shit up and pushing people's buttons, they tell themselves, "At least I'm comforting the bereaved." Who the fuck are they to decide that lying about the universe and a dead loved one is what the bereaved needs!? That's condescending bullshit!
You don't heal a broken heart by pretending it's not broken.
[Opening lines. Teller is said to have a number of symptoms]
Teller's been feeling a little down lately. He's had bouts of low energy, low endorphins, delusions, hallucinations, depression, a touch of carpal tunnel syndrome, Lyme's disease, cataracts, glaucoma, sciatica, a few retinal disorders, cancer, acid indigestion, autism brain damage, macular degeneration, eczema, and most heartbreaking of all: bed-wetting. We're gonna see if we can cure him without the bother of going to a doctor. Let's try some bullshit!
[After hearing that magnet therapy could be addictive if a patient puts magnets on their head at all times]
So magnets are a cheap, legal high. Why is anyone using crack?!
Let me hear you say "Hallelujah!"
Hallelujah!
A lot of real scientists make you say "Hallelujah!"
Ahh, yes! The famous alien probe! So versatile it works into any orifice. No matter how [menacing] it looks, abductees all love the probe!
If we could see beyond the limitations of our five senses, we would see George Bush the Father and George Bush the Son as reptilian entities.
[semi-sarcastically] You know, this is the first thing anyone's said that makes sense.
So, when does Bruce believe the bombs will start dropping?
The date which a lot of people feel right at this moment is about the 8th of December.
Relax! He's talking about 2002 [which had passed]. You can start breathing again!
[Bruce Beech laughs hysterically]
You know, when you hear about people predicting the end of the world, they're always predicting 60 to 90 % of the world's population is going to get killed. It's odd how they're always planning on what they're going to do when everyone else is dead. Teller and I have always played the odds, so, we're betting we're gonna die. You should see our credit card bills. They're higher than our cholesterol! Good thing we don't plan on paying 'em! [microphone appears] I'm sure that we—
Cut! Cut. The mic was in the shot. We have to go again.
Fuck you, it's the end of the world! If you live, you can fix it in post.
John Hogue; rogue scholar!
Get it? Hogue! Rogue! It rhymes! And scholar, well... not a chance.
Do you think that this tape will ever air?
I don't give that a very high rate of probability.
[on the subject of decoding Nostradamus' writings]
Quatrain 97 of century, Volume 6 reads, "At 45 degrees latitude, the sky will burn. Fire approaches the great New City." At latitude 45 degrees the only new city since Nostradamus' time that you could call great and new and vast is the city that rests between 40 degrees and 41 degrees latitude, which is Manhattan and New York. Now... that's a little off.
Then, he's way off up in Canada or some place. […] When [Nostradamus] said "New City," he was referring to Naples [Italy]. He refers to it several times throughout his writings and makes it clear that he's talking about Naples. Not New York City.
These quotes come from Wikiquote's Penn & Teller: Bullshit! pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
