For who knows what is good for a man in life, during the few and meaningless days he passes through like a shadow? Who can tell him what will happen under the sun after he is gone?

Kohelet 6:12

Teller - Biography

Teller (born Raymond Joseph Teller on February 14, 1948) is an American magician, illusionist, comedian, writer, and the frequently silent half of the comedy magic duo Penn & Teller, along with Penn Jillette. He legally changed his name from "Raymond Joseph Teller" to just "Teller". He is an atheist, debunker, skeptic, and Fellow of the Cato Institute (a libertarian think-tank organization which also lists his partner Penn Jillette as a Fellow). The Cato Institute Association is featured prominently in the Penn and Teller Showtime TV series Bullshit!.

Contents

Early life

Teller was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to parents who were of Russian Jewish and Cuban descent. Teller only learned of his Jewish ancestry when he was 50 years old. He attended Central High School and Amherst College and taught English and Latin at Lawrence High School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. He was selected to be a member of the Central High School Hall of Fame in 2001.

Career

As a performer

Teller began performing with friend Weir Chrisemer as The Ottmar Scheckt Society for the Preservation of Weird and Disgusting Music. Teller met Penn Jillette in 1974, when they joined a three-person act called Asparagus Valley Cultural Society, which played in San Francisco. In 1981, they began performing exclusively together as "Penn & Teller", an act that continues to this day.

Teller almost never speaks while performing, although there are occasional exceptions, usually when the audience is not aware of it. For example, he provided the voice of "Mofo the psychic gorilla" in their early Broadway show with the help of a radio microphone cupped in his hand. Teller's trademark silence originated during his youth, when he earned a living performing magic at college fraternity parties. He found that if he maintained silence throughout his act, spectators refrained from throwing beer and heckling him and focused more on his performance.

Other exceptions to his silent act include instances in which his face is covered or obscured, as when he spoke while covered with a plastic sheet in the series premiere of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, and when he was interviewed while in shadow for the 2010 History Channel documentary, Houdini: Unlocking the Mystery, while Teller spoke at length in an NPR story on Houdini in 2010. Teller appears to have said "Science" in a high-pitched voice in Penn and Teller's appearance on the television show Bill Nye the Science Guy, namely the episode "Light Optics," but he mouthed the word while Penn used a ventriloquist technique to make it sound as if Teller had spoken while keeping his mouth from moving. Teller also spoke in his 1987 appearance on NBC's Miami Vice (a fourth season episode titled, "Like a Hurricane"), and had speaking parts in the movies Penn & Teller Get Killed (he speaks in the final scene) and The Aristocrats. He gave voice to an animated version of himself in two episodes of The Simpsons ("Hello Gutter, Hello Fadder" and "The Great Simpsina"), and voiced a series of cloned store clerks in Zoey's Zoo, an episode of Oh Yeah! Cartoons, as well as the English version of the 1988 animated feature "Light Years" (Original French: Gandahar) where he was the voice of Octum. Teller speaks at length about magic performance and sleight-of-hand in the documentary "Penn & Teller's Magic and Mystery Tour." Teller has been shown screaming and swearing in the Anger Management episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!.

As a writer

He collaborated with Jillette on three magic books, and he is also the author of "When I'm Dead All This Will Be Yours!": Joe Teller - A Portrait by His Kid (2000), a biography/memoir of his father. The book features his father's paintings and cartoons which were strongly influenced by George Lichty's Grin and Bear It. The book was favorably reviewed by Publishers Weekly:

When Teller, the quiet half of the Penn and Teller showbiz team, made one of his monthly Philadelphia visits to see his parents, Joe and Irene ("Pad" and "Mam"), he was shown 100 unpublished cartoons his father drew in 1939. These "wryly observed scenes of Philadelphia street life," as Teller describes them, are in a loose, sketchy style imitative of the great George Lichty (1905-1983), famed for his long-run syndicated Grin and Bear It. Teller and his father's "memories began to pump and the stories flowed" after they opened boxes of old letters that Teller read out loud (learning for the first time about a period in his parents' lives that he knew nothing about, such as the fact that his father's name is really Israel Max Teller). Joe's Depression-era hobo adventures led to travels throughout the U.S., Canada and Alaska, and by 1933, he returned to Philadelphia for art study. After Joe and Irene met during evening art classes, they married, and Joe worked half-days as a Philadelphia Inquirer copy boy. When the Inquirer rejected his cartoons, he moved into advertising art just as World War II began. Employing excerpts from letters and postcards, Teller successfully re-creates the world of his parents in a relaxed writing style of light humor and easy (yet highly effective) transitions between the past and present.

Teller is a coauthor of the Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper "Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research" from the November 2008 issue.

In 2010, Teller wrote Play Dead, a "throwback to the spook shows of the 1930s and ’40s" that ran September 12–24 in Las Vegas before opening Off Broadway in New York. The show stars sideshow performer and magician Todd Robbins.

See also

  • Mononymous person
  • Long Gone (film)


Bibliography

External links







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