Penn And Teller: Bullshit! (thing)

So, is Penn & Teller: Bullshit! fun? Definitely.

Thought-provoking? Yes.

Honest? Not so much.

Whie the magician duo often make solid points, the simple fact is that they do indeed have an agenda of their own, and, well, they're not above bending the truth in their favor. Which isn't so bad when you're putting on a stage performance, but is when you're trying to argue a point.

Some of the more notable points:

The "Numbers" episode in the fourth season (where Penn and Teller spout off on how statistics can lie) is a nice example of hubris, though to understand this, you have to have seen the gun control episode in season 3. In that episode, the duo present in the defense of their thesis an American Enterprise Institute researcher by the name of John Lott.

Yep, that John Lott. The one who got caught cooking the numbers in his book More Guns, Less Crime, not to mention his crossdressing sockpuppetry on Amazon.com. And all this came out well in advance of the gun control episode. So, it's hard to take their arguments about lying with statistics with a straight face, knowing that they're more than happy to do it themselves

Then there's the simple fact that Penn and Teller control who is on the show, and that they can pick and choose who gets airtime - which is a good way to stack the deck rhetorically. It's not apparent in some of the episodes like the PETA episode (all you need to do to make Ingrid Newkirk look like an idiot is give her enough rope to hang herself), but in some of the others, like the gun control episodes, it's pretty clear that the opposition is, well, a tad thinner than it could be. (Seriously, they couldn't find any police chiefs to appear on the show?)

And then there's the decision to have on the reparations episode a man by the name of HK Edgerton. A man who walks around the town of Asheville, North Carolina in a Confederate uniform. Oh, and he's black, and a former president of the local NAACP chapter. Sounds perfect for rebutting reparations, right?

Of course, what the duo fail to mention is that the Asheville NAACP fell into decline under Edgerton, and that his departure was not amicable - he was booted after trying to push the NAACP chapter to work with a lawyer with ties to white supremacist groups. Somehow, disclosing that might have somewhat discredited Edgerton.

And then there's the fact that some of these episodes are really nothing more than advanced exercises in intra-glass house stone tossing - they admit as much at the end of the "Pet Love" episode.

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That's not to say that watching the show isn't worth the time - Penn and Teller do bring up good points, and they do deflate the egos of those that need it.

It's just that you need to remember that they too have an agenda, and in many cases, what Penn and Teller are pushing is, well...bullshit.