Review: Penn & Teller tell a lie

Note; My personal blog is on indefinite hiatus, but I am cross-posting entries in my newspaper blog at The Marshall Independent, or in this case in the print edition of the TV guide.

Last week I caught the premier episode of “Penn & Teller Tell a Lie” on the Discovery Channel.

I’ll be catching a whole lot more of them I think.

The show features the comic illusionist team of Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller, who by the way first partnered up at the 1975 Minnesota Renaissance Festival.

Penn and Teller present a number of claims of the odd-but-true kind. Except that one isn’t. They invite you to vote on which one you think is the fraud.
The first episode featured claims that:

1) You can steer a light plane with a disabled rudder by opening and closing the plane’s doors.
2) Research shows swearing helps relieve pain.
3) A wall made of Aerogel, a substance that is mostly air, can insulate against a flame thrower.
4) A rope made from a head of hair can lift a Mustang convertable.
5) Alligators get sexually excited when they hear the note B flat.
6) You can drive off an attacking tiger by punching down its throat.
7) A petite woman can prevent a body builder from picking her up just by changing her stance.

For me number one just makes sense, a door can act as a control surface by deflecting the air stream. Two I believe because it works for me. Three I thought was probable because I’ve seen demonstrations of similar insulating materials. Four I was pretty sure of because I’m a history geek and know that human hair has been used for rope when extreme strength was required for things like torsion catapults.

However five sounded fishy to me. But I wasn’t sure about six either.

Seven I knew was true because I know that trick, and several others of the same kind. There’s no mumbo-jumbo secret power involved at all, it’s all about leverage.
So which was it, five or six?

Well right off I noticed the video of a tiger attacking a zookeeper was allegedly captured by security cameras – except it had TV quality color and image, and close-ups that caught the alleged incident just right. And that tiger sure seemed to have an easy time just batting the lock to the door of his cage off, which again was captured by a perfect video close-up. how likely it that?

“Ah ha!” thought I, and was justly proud when proved correct.

(Oh, except that I hadn’t noticed that Penn & Teller had included views of a stone lion in front of a library building in a quarter of the “security camera” video.)
And isn’t that weird about alligators? Turns out it’s true, and has been known for almost a hundred years, but nobody is really sure why.

This show is enjoyable on a number of levels. Penn’s patter, allied with Teller’s mime, is pretty entertaining to begin with. The fun facts are well, fun. Amuse and entertain your friends at parties will all the weird things you know!

And most importantly, it helps people learn to think skeptically, especially about things which can be faked by camera trickery and sincere-sounding acting.

And in this day and age, that’s not a trivial contribution to society.

This entry was posted in Movies, On Thinking. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *