Penn & Teller: Bullshit!

Penn: [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. Teller: [Through the plastic gravestone] Bullshit!

Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, CC BY-SA 4.0

[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!

Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, CC BY-SA 4.0

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"

Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, CC BY-SA 4.0

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!

Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, CC BY-SA 4.0

You don't heal a broken heart by pretending it's not broken.

Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, CC BY-SA 4.0

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!

Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, CC BY-SA 4.0