It's not particularly unusual to see or hear the unusual during the Television Critics Association press tour. But things don't get much odder than what happened here recently.
Teller spoke.You know, Teller. As in the silent half of the outrageous magic duo of Penn & Teller.
As it turns out, he has a lovely speaking voice. And he's entirely eloquent.
But it was odd. As one critic said to Teller, "It's very weird sitting here listening to you talk."
"I feel the same," Teller responded. "I've never heard you speak either."
Despite the fact that he's so well spoken when he wants to be heard, Teller insists he's never frustrated by being the silent half of the act.
"It's loads of fun," he said. "And we also play games with it all the time."
And they'll continue to do so in their cable series "Penn & Teller's Sin City Spectacular," a variety show they're taping in Las Vegas for the FX cable network, which debuts tonight at 10.
Just don't expect to hear Teller talk on TV, not after all these years of being silent.
"It all started off because I was real interested in magic and I got really sick of all these people's magic patter," Teller said. "They're 15 years old and they go, `Last year, when I was touring China.' And you go, `Oh, come on!' Or they say things like, `On this very spot, 15 years ago, Houdini was resurrected.' And I thought that was all really lousy. I didn't think it was very entertaining.
"And I became fascinated with the prospect of lying without speaking."
He began developing his silent act when he was in college performing at fraternity parties.
"I found out that if I went in and tried to shout everybody down got no attention at all. But if I went in and just put a couple of long spotlights on me and didn't say anything and did things that were very much to my taste, as a great lover of Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock - suddenly, momentarily, the frat boys would set down their cups of beer . . . and pay attention."
IT'S A PUPPET: Penn & Teller's variety show will feature a wide range of novelty acts - including what appears to be a talking dog. Not that it really IS a talking dog, however.
"I don't want to tear anybody's heart apart here, but the talking dog - it's a puppet," said Penn Jillette.
The puppet dog looks real, however. Very real.
"When we were shooting a promo we wanted to do a thing with the talking dog," Penn said. "And the director was screaming into the headset, `Please get the trainer offstage! We don't want him in the shot! Get the trainer completely offstage so we can do a broad shot!'
"So if our director didn't realize the talking dog was a gag, we might be in trouble."
NO MASKED MARVEL: One thing that neither Penn nor Teller finds in the least bit troubling is that so-called Masked Magician who revealed all sorts of magic "secrets" in a pair of highly rated specials on Fox.
Penn, at least, got himself pretty worked up when asked about the Masked Magician. But not for the reasons you might expect.
"There's very little given away in those magic shows," Penn said. "Nothing that actual professionals are using. It's a very sad thing that the Masked Magician got all this hype about giving away secrets, whereas there is no place in the United States of America that you cannot go . . . to a local library . . . and find absolutely everything the Masked Magician has given away so far, plus blueprints for how to build those very same things.
"I was so outraged that they were pretending that information does not exist until it's on television."
And, if you're hooked up to the Internet, you don't even have to go to the library to learn all those magic secrets.
"Anybody that can use Yahoo! can find every single magic trick that was in Houdini's repertoire within, probably, 15 to 20 minutes," Penn said. "The patent for David Copperfield's flying (illusion) - all 17 pages, with diagrams - is on the Web. You click on it, it's up there.
"Everything we know about magic we learned from books that are readily available."
Penn actually went so far as to compare the Masked Magician to something you might expect to find on the WWF.
"The Masked Magician came on and acted as though magicians were going to kill him if they saw him without a mask. Yeah," he said derisively. "Professional wrestlers sometimes act like they're going to kill a whole family of people. They're KIDDING. They're JOKING. It's just show business."
As to the specials themselves, Penn said he "thought they looked a tad on the cheesy side for my particular taste." And Teller said he didn't see what the big deal was at all.
"When you watch illusion shows, what do you do? You sit there and you say, `Oh, she went into that platform that's underneath the box,' " Teller said. "So watching this show, I had this feeling - my gestalt was completed. I had the feeling of saying, `Oh, yeah, she really DID go into the base of the platform.' There was a certain completeness to that."
Not that those Fox specials haven't had some effect on Penn & Teller's upcoming show.
"We were so inspired by the Masked Magician that we actually have a Masked Magician doing a guest spot on our show, giving away a piece of apparatus that we have used for years and years and years," Teller said.
Given the way Penn & Teller's act works, it's fairly good bet that that Masked Magician won't fare particularly well when he's through.