This one is a lot of fun. For anybody who’s got difficulty reading titles, here’s a performance from Penn and Teller on David Letterman. It’s their second, and it’s got a bit of a story behind it. Unfortunately, the Youtube video that describes the story actually gives it all away before you get to see the performance, so I’m going to link to the video half-way through. Watch the performance first, and then rewind to listen to the backstory, (or just click here).
Seeing how well this went, with the amount of creative freedom Penn and Teller were given, it feels weird that Letterman’s show would later on be kind of cruel and demanding to magicians (scroll down for the first-hand experience). Not really sure what changed over the years. That early Penn and Teller came back during his NBC days, when it was the butt of Bloom County jokes and it felt like the sort of show you’d want to watch drunk with the fratboys. He was in his late-thirties at the time, which isn’t exactly old, but it’s old enough that to be surprising that he’d be willing to deal with the sort of shenanigans you’d get from giving the duo carte blanche. It’s pretty cool. I wonder if Fallon or Kimmel would be game for this sort of thing.