Why Must the Show Go On?

I've lived by this stupid cliché -- "the show must go on" -- my entire adult life, but I'm finally starting to question it.

My partner Teller and I have been doing various versions of our little RipOff Artistes show for 23 years. How many sho ws have we done? Well, to win a Nobel Prize, all you need is the right number of zeros; everything else is grunt work ("In my universe, Pi is 1." -- Rob Pike). And we've done thousands of shows. We've done more than a thousand and fewer than 10,000 (unless you count birthday parties). The number of zeros is three.

Neither Teller nor I have ever even been late for a show. I think maybe we've arrived a bit late for "half hour" (that's theatrical patois for 30 minutes before "curtain," which is theatrical argot, slang for when the show is scheduled to start), but we've always hit the stage when we were told to. Beyond that, our book and TV specials have all been delivere d on time. Okay, we may not have exactly made the very arbitrary deadline, but our book, "Penn & Teller's How to Play in Traffic," came out the middle of October and our TV special, "Penn & Teller's Home Invasion," will air on ABC on November 10 at 8:00 p.m. -- both as planned. (Yeah, I'm doing a little pimping here, but I'm making a point.)

With freshly broken bones, freshly burned hands, freshly bruised knees, freshly operated-on ears, and a zillion other physical and emotional (ooh, baby) problems, we've hit the boards (arcane theater slang for the stage). If the CDC had been aware of the times we've gone on lousy with influenza strains that you wouldn't wish on a swine, they would have put us in punitive quarantine for the rest of our Typhoid Mary lives. We've filled our bodies with overdoses of over-th e-counter and still had to excuse ourselves from the stage for a moment to vomit. Penn & Teller have taken this "The show must go on" very seriously.

Why?

What could be less important than a show going on? Teller defines "art" as "what we do when the chores are done." By definition, art is not life or death (I'm talking to you, Ms. Jane Alexander; go back to acting -- government money just makes government art). If some night the show doesn't go on, what happens? People don't get to see Penn & Teller. How bad is that? They say, "That's too bad; I was looking forward to the show," they get their money back and go see a movie or maybe have dinner and a chat with someone they love. What harm does that do?

Showfolk are flaky. (Want to unload some homeopathic bottled water? Set up an Amway-type stand at an Equity meeting and you'll make some long green.) We entertainers are not the clearest thinking or best educated in the culture. We're self-centered and undisciplined. If the actual importance of the show were spelled out to all of us, we ll, I'm guessing there are many among us who would cancel shows due to the need to wash our hair or a Comedy Central "South Park" festival (which of course could be canceled due to dirty animator hair). "The show must go on" is a cliché that only promoters really want instilled in the culture.

But who cares about agent/manager/promoter coin?

I think we should adjust our clichés to improve the lives of our progeny. How about we start saying "The plumbing must always be clear" or "The pizza must always be delivered"? If that's too silly, how about "The E.R. must always be overstaffed"? And if that means "ER" isn't on that night, who really cares? We can always have a nice meal with those that we love and chat.