David Blaine – conjurer to the downtown demimonde – has confined himself in a ventilated Plexiglas “coffin” six feet below Donald Trump’s Upper West Side rail-yard development site, with plans to emerge next week. Penn Jillette, the voluble and portly half of Penn & Teller, has a few choice words for the publicity-hungry magic man.
It sounds like the kind of stunt a Poughkeepsie morning D.J. would pull. It’s not magic – it’s not even endurance. Endurance is dragging a Chevrolet for a mile. My mom sits in the same place for five days, and she’s 90! He’s sitting in a box without eating – big deal! Mahatma Gandhi did the same thing for, what, 187 days? Bobby Sands did it for a year and a half. Compared with this guy, Karen Carpenter had a point! I’d love to do something like that, frankly, but I haven’t had five days off in a row since ‘92. David Blaine is an attractive man who can do a card trick – that’s like a seven-foot jockey. There has not been one single good-looking magician in the 150,000 years people have been doing magic. Right now, there’s me, a big, fat, square-headed guy, and David Copperfield, a troll. So Blaine realized, “Hey, I’m the only good-looking magician in history – all I have to do is lie here in a box!” If I was doing it, I’d switch in a dummy in a second, but he’s not gonna – his time isn’t valuable enough. I guess if I was that good-looking, I’d just lie there, too.