Better with Age

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Both Penn and Teller are in their 50s now and have been working at the Rio longer than any other place they’ve ever performed.

But as far as Penn Jillette can tell, no one is goofing on them yet.

When the duo first staked out the Strip in 1993, “anybody under 50 came to Vegas ironically,” the tall, talky half of the comic illusion team recalls. “They’d smoke cigars and drink too much and go see shows they knew weren’t good just to kind of make fun of them.”

The tourist corridor has transformed around Penn & Teller since they became a year-round attraction at the Rio five years ago this week. They’re the same ol’ Libertarian atheists in three-piece suits they’ve always been, merrily throwing bunnies into wood chippers and shooting .357 magnums at one another each night.

Noticing that the show has been light on stage blood lately, the two are working on an illusion that will be “the goriest thing that we’ve ever done,” Teller promises.

But the early novelty — the fish-out-of-water contrast of edgy, New York intellectuals landing in Las Vegas — no longer seems out of sync with the Blue Man Group or “Zumanity.” It’s hard for any act to raise eyebrows, given the growing apathy for all ticketed shows amid the nightclub boom.

“We certainly don’t tap into the young club audience,” Penn, 52, acknowledges. But he hasn’t spotted that telltale cigar smoke from the stage.

Not that it would change anything. “There is a lot in Vegas that is about writing for what you think the audience wants to see, and that has nothing to do with us,” says the single-named Teller, 59, the short one who doesn’t speak onstage. “We write what we would like to see onstage ourselves. And it perpetually astonishes me that anybody else would want to see it.

“These things we do are very quirky.”

It also would be easy to take the Rio shows for granted because of everything else the duo has been up to.

Each of them has written a book. Their TV show, “Penn & Teller: Bullshit!,” is gearing up for its sixth season on Showtime. Jillette co-produced the 2005 movie “The Aristocrats” and recently hosted the prime-time game show “Identity” (which seems to have been canceled, but no one is saying for sure). For a time, he broadcast his own radio show from home.

Teller is co-directing and creating special effects for a January production of “Macbeth” in New Jersey and still finds time to take an online history course.

And somehow, “we’re putting more new stuff in the show now than we have anytime in the past 30 years,” Jillette says. They rotate segments the way a rock band changes the set list. A three-person staff works on illusions in a warehouse near the Strip.

The two also can rehearse onstage at the Rio, because they haven’t had to share their theater with another show since 2004.

“One of the highlights of my life right now is that I’m working on a little trick after the show every night,” Teller says. “It takes about an hour when the whole place is empty, and I go up there and work on this very difficult little technical thing. You don’t have to go to a rehearsal hall to do this. You can actually get out there onstage in that wonderful lonely environment.”

The contract for the Rio — originally two years, now extended to the end of 2010 — received a well-timed boost from Showtime. Their comic documentary show returns in January and has become the cable network’s longest-running series. Penn & Teller use their comic material as connecting segments between interview segments out to debunk everything from the Bible to anger management therapy.

The duo film an entire season’s worth of segments in one intense week, and Jillette adds voice-over narration from his home studio. He isn’t present for the interviews, because he says they aren’t about entrapment.

“We’re not looking for that ‘Borat’ moment where someone falls down or picks their nose, or the Michael Moore moment. We’re looking for someone to say what they believe, so it’s not as hard,” Jillette says. “If you go to someone who believes the U.S. government blew up the twin towers, they’ll tell you. It doesn’t matter who you send, they’re going to say the same thing.”

Penn & Teller’s 32-year stage partnership has few counterparts. Jillette reels off the names of “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Mick Jagger and the Smothers Brothers.

“We don’t really have the master plan you’re supposed to have,” Jillette says. “Madonna and Howard Stern know what they’re trying to do. With us, there are no ends. There are only means.”

“This partnership has survived because the two of us really deliver for each other always,” Teller says. “There aren’t any rules other than we both have to like what goes into the show.”

Though they agree on Libertarian politics, the act is shaped by differences in other areas. Jillette always has declared magic to be a lower entertainment form — “Hans Klok’s sure turned that around, hasn’t he?” he quips — while Teller confesses to being “a magic nerd.”

Jillette never watches the duo’s old tapes, but Teller plans to catch up to their 1989 movie, “Penn & Teller Get Killed.” Teller believes the two are better performers now: “We don’t seem to be working as hard at it. It’s deeper in our bones now.”

Jillette says he’ll never know because he’ll never watch.

Penn & Teller moved to Las Vegas in 1994, when they weren’t yet full time on the Strip but performed about 10 weeks per year at Bally’s. Each built custom houses that have been featured in TV shows and magazine spreads.

Jillette recently added another 5,000 square feet to his house, The Slammer, after the biggest changes in his life: his marriage to TV producer Emily Zolten in 2004, followed by the birth of daughter Moxie in June 2005 and son Zolten in May of last year. Moxie’s middle name, CrimeFighter, was picked up as a nationwide news item.

“Life goes by pretty fast, and when you have kids it goes into warp speed,” he says. “I just hope my kids listen to a kind of music I don’t like. That’s all I’ve been wanting my whole life.”

While Jillette seems to pop up everywhere, Teller says “life is a little bit less of a performance art for me.” He’s happy that Jillette is so high-profile, because “I benefit from it all the time, while still allowing myself to have the level of privacy I prefer.

“What you see of me when I’m onstage is the best part of me,” he adds. “The fact that I make really fine pancakes and really superb waffles is not that interesting.”