Penn Jillette, in Rollicking, Ribald ‘Felony Juggler,’ Follows Paths Not Taken on Road to Stardom as Comic Magician

‘Felony Juggler’By Penn JilletteAkashic Books, Hardcover, 248 pgs. A raw-boned, overly-tall hippie juggler decides to hitch-hike and ride the rails through the Midwest, chasing the ghosts of Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce. He becomes a highly paid juggler working the street, only to get pressured into a bank heist that goes horribly awry. He changes his identity, falls in love with a mild-mannered librarian, and reinvents his juggling act. His improvident past comes back to haunt him, however, threatening everything he loves. To protect his new life, he must confront the malevolent forces behind his one bad decision and choose art over evil. This is the thumbnail story arc of “Felony Juggler,” the rollicking, ribald, and compulsively readable semi-autobiographical novel by Penn Jillette, whom nearly every household in America knows as the talking half of the magical comedy duo “Penn & Teller.” The raw-boned hippie is obviously an 18-year-old Mr. Jillette, and the street juggler stories are almost entirely true. Fans who are looking for anecdotes that chronicle his rise from street performer to longest-running act in Vegas history will find them here. Did he really skip college and opt to hop a train instead, winding up in Montreal instead of Chicago? Yes. Did he employ Philadelphia street toughs to corral large crowds in his direction? Yep. Did he really make an exceptional living juggling and raking in piles of cash? Yes. Did he once publicly humiliate a snooty string quartet, juggling their violins while banishing them from his turf? Indeed. Did a smooth, funkadelic-style street card magician in a sequined tuxedo try to strong arm him into doing a bank job at a Burger King? Yes, he did. Penn Jillette at Brooklyn’s Bell House, May 13, 2025. David Hiroshi JagerYet in true Penn Jillette fashion, none of it is verifiable. It is also entirely mixed in with monologues, metaphysical asides, raunchy jokes, and pure hilarious bluster. Sitting down Tuesday night at Brooklyn’s Bell House to launch the book, Mr. Jillette confirmed that he did, in fact, live a life that almost exactly resembles the details of his young character, complete with associates whose names he has changed. He was even, he confesses, offered to participate in a risky bank heist in exactly the manner explained in the book, where a smooth and ultimately sinister fellow street performer said he needed Mr. Jillette as a “white guy who could talk.”Mr. Jillette wisely refused that offer, and his life unfolded in the direction we all know: Vegas magician and host of TV shows and documentaries devoted to comedy, art, science, and the unmasking of shibboleths. In this novel, however, he asks the question: “What if I had agreed? What would have happened to my life? My art?”This is Mr. Jillette’s third rodeo as a novelist, his 12th as an author, and, as always, his unconventional approach to magic bleeds through in his approach to fiction. He breaks the fourth wall continuously — not just as his own fictional self, but as Penn working behind his fictional self. We go down rabbit holes tangential to the story, and we come back up again. It’s all pushed onto the page in his brisk, high-octane fashion that fairly punches the storyline along. What we have is a jangly, occasionally tatterdemalion riff on “Tristam Shandy,” another autobiography that gets very amusingly sidetracked. It’s an engrossing, utterly unique funhouse ride that is part Herbert Gold, part Kinky Friedman, and 100 percent Penn Jillette. Yet those antics always have very precise and finely tuned inner workings, just as his stage patter keeps one part of the audience’s brain engaged as the trick itself unfolds. The heart of the story is a simple question: What is the dividing line between art and crime? What is the difference between a man who pursues art and love, and a man who deploys violence for wealth and power? For Mr. Jillette, a profoundly moral person who has been obsessed with fairness for nearly his entire life, it’s an existential question. What is it, precisely, that an artist will not do, and how does crime contravene it? Joan Baez and Bob Dylan on August 28, 1963, during the Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. Via Wikimedia CommonsAfter a hair-rising hairpin turn in the story, in which our semi-fictional hero finds himself released from a very scary kidnapping, Mr. Jillette gives us one of the strangest confrontations between a hero and a crime boss ever put to paper. Not to give the ending away, but we have a criminal who longs to be an artist, and an artist who suddenly realizes he is not, and never has been, a criminal. The theme of Bob Dylan returns and we are left, after a fashion, in the middle of a melancholy Dylan tune. The novel asks us: What is the power that art tells its truth to, and can that power ever redeem itself through song?Mr. Jillette has always had a love-hate relationship with magic, a medium that he considers historically ungenerous in its presentation, hiding simple illusions under a cloak of distasteful ostentation. He has worked with Teller during his 50-year career to make the art of magic far more democratic and participatory, to show that the illusions of magic needn’t be hidden from the audience but can be shared in a way that doesn’t diminish their wonder. This novel similarly treads a line between illusion and reality. Teller is there, as he is night after night in Vegas, using his blustery barker voice to tell you what he is doing, and having a great deal of fun in the bargain. The real magic, however, comes down to the fine line between ugly worldliness and aspirational artfulness, the dividing line between those of us who deploy illusion for art and those that use violence for gain. For all of its herky-jerky wildness, Mr. Jillette wants us to believe that, in the end, it all comes down to true love and a song.

Penn Jillette, in Rollicking, Ribald ‘Felony Juggler,’ Follows Paths Not Taken on Road to Stardom as Comic Magician

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