Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, Season 1

[First lines]

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:
[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 "motherf***ers" 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 motherf***ers!

Penn:
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" are, in a very real sense, mother-f***ers. That poor guy's grieving memories of his mother are now all f***ed up by somebody else's images. All he will ever have left of his mom are memories, and this pig has pissed on those for a buck and a little un-earned fame. I'm sure these lame f***s tell themselves that they're easing the grief, but skits for money can not replace loving memories. How low do you have to be to exploit someone's true grief to sell some bullshit book?

Penn:
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 f***s 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 f*** are they to decide that lying about the universe and a dead loved one is what the bereaved needs!? That's condescending bullshit!

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

[Opening lines. Teller is said to have a number of heartbreaking symptoms]

Penn:
We're gonna see if we can cure him without the bother of going to a doctor... let's try some bullshit!

[After hearing that magnet therapy could be addictive if a patient puts magnets on their head at all times]

Penn:
So magnets are a cheap, legal high. Why is anyone using crack?!

Doctor Brickerhoff:
Let me hear you say "Hallelujah!"

Trucker:
Hallelujah!

Penn:
A lot of real scientists make you say "Hallelujah!"

Penn:
Ahh, yes! The famous alien probe! So versatile it works into any orifice. No matter how it looks, abductees all love the probe!

David Icke:
If we could see beyond the limitations of our five senses, we would see George Bush the Father and George Bush the Son as reptilian entities.

Penn:
You know, this is the first thing anyone's said that makes sense.

Penn:
So when does Bruce believe the bombs will start dropping?

Bruce Beech:
The date which a lot of people feel right at this moment is about the 8th of December.

Penn:
Relax! He's talking about 2002 [which had passed]. You can start breathing again!

[Bruce Beech laughs hysterically]

Penn:
You know, when you hear about people predicting the end of the world...they're always predicting 60 to 90 % of the world's population is going to get killed. It's odd how they're always planning on what they're gonna do when everyone else is dead. Teller and I have always played the odds, so, we're betting we're gonna die. You should see our credit card bills. They're higher than our cholesterol! Good thing we don't plan on paying 'em! [microphone appears] I'm sure that we...

Cameraman:
Cut! Cut. The mic was in the shot. We have to go again.

Penn:
F*** you, it's the end of the world! If you live, you can fix it in post.

John Hogue:
John Hogue; rogue scholar!

Penn:
Get it? Hogue! Rogue! It rhymes! And scholar, well...not a chance.

Cameraman:
Do you think that this tape will ever air?

Bruce Beach:
I don't give that a very high rate of probability.

[on the subject of decoding Nostradamus' writings]

John Hogue:
Quatrain 97 of century, Volume 6 reads, "At 45 degrees latitude, the sky will burn. Fire approaches the great New City." At latitude 45 degrees the only new city since Nostradamus' time that you could call great and new and vast is the city that rests between 40 degrees and 41 degrees latitude, which is Manhattan and New York. Now...that's a little off.

James Randi:
Then, he's way off in Canada or some place. When [Nostradamus] said 'New City', he was referring to Naples [Italy]. He refers to it several times throughout his writings and makes it clear that he's talking about Naples. Not New York City.

Penn:
Naked people are their own reward.

[After identical twins get the same exact haircut, one from a barber, the second one from a Feng Shui hairstylist]

Penn:
Conclusion: it's bullshit! Save your money and go see Joe... and we'll tell you you're sexay for free!

[Teller is on a stack of chairs, which fall over]

Penn:
[on the subject of Feng Shui] You know, Teller, I find it silly that some people think that how you arrange your furniture can affect your health. It seems so...so...so...hmmm, stupid. [drinks out of Penn & Teller: Bullshit bottled water]

Penn:
[on the subject of bottled water] Consumers are offered water with names conveying pure and pristine water sources. Ever hear of Alaskan Falls water? That must come from the crystal-clear glacial waters of our 49th state, right? Sorry, folks. Alaskan flows from this liqui-box corporation building in Worthington, Ohio. Does the brand Yosemite conjure up visions of the cool, pristine waters rushing through California's high sierras? Well, then the marketers have done their jobs. The source of Yosemite bottled water is actually 400 miles away in Northwest Los Angeles. How about Everest Water? Could our piddly show possibly afford to send a camera crew to Nepal? NOT NECESSARY. Everest comes from the industrial section of Corpus Cristi, Texas! In fact if you read the fine print on the FUCKING LABEL, they even admit that the water comes from a MUNICIPAL SOURCE! THAT IS TAP WATER, brothers and sisters of the cult of the bottle!

Penn:
In much of the rest of the world, [drinking] tap water equals rapid and severe weight loss, with the introduction of new, probably harmful, friends to your intestines and other organs. Are we so ashamed of our wonderful tap water, that we have to disguise it?

[Teller is acting as a pet psychic by finding out what a turtle is thinking through ESP]

Penn:
I'm a pet psychic... psychic! I can tell you what your pet psychic is thinking and feeling. Your pet psychic is thinking "This is safe. No one can contradict me and realize I'm lying. I don't even have the balls to be a human psychic. I feel like such a pile of bullshit!"

Penn:
When he [Norman Borlaug] won the Nobel Prize in 1970, they said he had saved a billion people. That's BILLION. "BUH!" That's Carl Sagan billion with a "B". And most of them were of different race from him. Norman is the greatest human being. And you've probably never heard of him.

Penn:
Throughout history there's never been an abundance of food. All food is the product of technology; apples, corn, tomatoes, all modified. Every food has been changed through selective breeding or grafting. For ten thousand years each attempt at improvement has changed the DNA of the plant. Now some people are up-in-arms about changes in DNA. You know what? If you're able to get up and have food you should celebrate. We should all dance about how much food we have. Why is anyone fighting food advance? A very small percentage of the world's population is fortunate enough to have the luxury of turning down food. The rest of the world spends most of its time trying to get any food. You know why? Technological problems. They got dirt, they got water, they got sun. They lack the technical ability to till or enrich the soil. They lack the machines to plant enough to feed their families. They lack the hybrid plants that produce more food per acre. We need to spread all the technology all we can, so all people everywhere can deal with the problem of too much food. We can't start getting picky because we've got enough food- that's just self-centered and racist. Unless you and yours are starving, you need to SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Norman Borlaug:
[on the possibility of a world-wide switch to organic farming] We are almost 6.6 billion people, now. We can only feed about two-thirds of them. I don't see 2 billion volunteers to disappear.

[after some raw-foodists try to foist their food on other people, being rejected in the process]

Penn:
We're pretty sure that if you live in a beach-house in the US, you probably shouldn't be trying to tell starving people in the rest of the world that you're fighting the technology that could feed their children.

Norman Borlaug:
You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.

Penn:
There are two things you say for sure about the Ouiji board. One, it'll set you back about twenty bucks. Two, it's bullshit!