Penn & Teller: Bullshit

[GKarsEye]

New episodes of Penn & Teller's Bullshit return on Wednesday on Showtime & 10pm.

The people:
Penn & Teller should be familiar to B5 fans at least due to their roles as Rebo & Zooty in Day of the Dead. Magician/comics; Penn is big and has a mouth to match, Teller is diminutive and silent. Their libertarianism, atheism, and skepticism are the impetus for this show.

The show:
Bullshit spends a half-hour targeting various schemes, agendas, and beliefs and exposing... well, the bullshit.

Topics have included: New Age, PeTA, psychics, ESP, and very controversial things like recycling, environmentalism and the Bible.

I saw two episodes this weekend about New Age (which also covered tantric sex and yoga) and PeTA. Very entertaining if not particularly enlightening to me as I've never gone for any of that stuff myself. And they goal of entertainment and time constraint doesn't allow for the most rigurous of research (tantric sex, for example, is something I've been interested in and didn't know how valid it is and what it's really about and they didn't really tell me much because they focused on one American wacko and his sex classes).

The first season is out on DVD and I just netflixed it.

Wednesday's episode deals with funeral scams.

 

[PillowRock]

Wait until you see the one about various (non-surgical) methods of penis and breast enlargement. There was actually some woman who was managing to charge women for hypnotism sessions specifically to make their breasts grow larger. That didn't work. (What a surprise. ) Neither did the herbal pills, the vacuum pumps, stretching exercises, ... (Admittedly P&T don't exactly use what the FDA would call a statistically significant sample space. More like 1 to 3 people for each technique.)

 

[Londos6]

Pretty much all the season 1 episodes are great. One of my favorites was the one about bottled water.

Overall they pretty much debunk just about anything you can think of, and some things you'd never think of- and successfully too.

I didn't really care for Penn & Teller previously, having only known them as Rebo & Zooty, who I really didn't care for, but now I think they're great.

Anybody interested should check their cable listings. In my area it's Thurs. night, not Wed.

 

[hypatia]

I just saw them in the Showtime highlights for August email I signed up for.

Before Penn and Teller were on B5 (and after, too) they were known for showing and then explaining magic tricks. Probably makes them relatively unpopular in the magician world, but...

Very funny, interesting shows that I caught from season 1. I confess, I haven't seen that many. The recycling episode was a real surprise to me, I admit. Like old Mighty, some of the others I saw weren't all too surprising to me personally, but all were at least a little bit informative.

Thanks for the reminder that in 2 days they have another new episode. I tend to forget they are on Thursdays, I sometimes forget I even have Showtime.

 

[G Kar of the Kha Ri]

I love this show. I think the last episode I saw was the one about America's war on drugs. Now... if only I could recall specifics aside from that one guy named Weiner.