Penn & Teller’s Bullshit!: The Complete Third Season
Studio: Paramount
Rated: NOT RATED
WorkNameSort: Penn & Teller’s Bullshit!: The Complete Third Season
Magicians usually spend their time creating illusions, but Penn & Teller, those postmodern prestidigitators, have always been at least as interested in dispelling them. On their Showtime series, they do, on occasion, perform a magic trick to emphasize a point. Mainly, though, they’re into debunking such things as the hair-care industry, circumcision and life coaching. (Debunking is a proud tradition in magic: Late in his career, Houdini himself spent years exposing spiritualists.) On this three-disc, 13-episode DVD collection, the garrulous Penn and the silent Teller are always fairly entertaining, although the best episodes are those in which the skeptical duo takes aim at truly tough targets like Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama. When they aim at easy ones (conspiracy theorists, for example), Penn just tends to rant. Still, he is a world-class ranter.
This article appears in Oct 25-31, 2006.