One of their innovations has been to explain some of their tricks to the audience after performing them. It's done out of respect for the audience -- something Penn says is lacking in most magic acts that try to convince you of the magician's supernatural powers. "There's this feeling of smugness. You know, you've usually got magic as a form created and perfected by outcast male children who couldn't get laid. And that's exclusively it, that's 100 percent it. Because people have been burnt so badly by magicians -- being insulted by this greasy guy in a tux with a lot of birds insulting women in front of a mylar curtain to bad white-boy Motown music -- because they'd lived through that, we thought a peace offering would be showing them how the trick was done."

If Penn and Teller don't believe in magic, they don't think too highly of religion or superstition, either. When asked how this works itself out in the show, Teller responds, "Uh . . . blatantly? Blatantly and constantly?" In one of the more pointed bits of the new show, Penn declares Teller a messiah with truly miraculous healing powers, which they then demonstrate. True, all he can really heal is torn-up polyester, and that power was given to him by "space aliens," but it's as legitimate as folks bending spoons with their mind or getting in touch with your dead relatives. "So this is a mockery that we make of this," says Teller. "Our primary means of expressing our skepticism is mockery."

Still, belief in the supernatural dies hard. Penn and Teller witnessed this phenomenon first-hand when they held a series of séances in Los Angeles. They explained from the very beginning that they were going to be lying the entire evening, and that the whole thing was a sham; but in the end, their own competence as magicians did them in. "We would have people come up to us and say, `That had to be real. You guys must be psychic,' " Teller explains. "And we went, `No, give us some credit. That was a really hard trick. And we did it really, really well.' I just hate having my field dismissed as a fictitious natural force."

Both will admit to having learned a lot about the art of lying over the years, since they started out as street performers in 1975. Even Teller, who doesn't speak during the act. "For me the whole thing is how understated can I be and still get the point across in a way that is really convincing. I think people just sort of forget by the end of the show that I'm not talking. They just take it for granted that I express what I express in my way and Penn does it his way."