Penn and Teller have never gone on record as to why Teller never speaks, but there are some things you can infer: 1 - It's showmanship. Penn is the funnyman, Teller is the straightman, an essential part of a classical comedy routine. Magic acts go back a long way, so maybe this is a tribute of sorts to the early days of stage magic, especially as it appeared in the vaudeville days. 2 - It gets your attention, huh? This pulls you into the act and helps distract you from the machinations of the tricks. With Penn talking a mile a minute, he gets the lion's share of your attention, giving Teller the space to do whatever he needs to do to work the props.

Teller's soft-in-the-middle build is 49-year-old average guy. He stands a full five-feet-nine. But because his partner is a 285-pounder with a cro-magnon forehead and occupies the same approximate space as a brewing tank, Teller is, and will be, eternally, "the little one." Is he the one who doesn't talk? No. And yes. On stage, Teller is silent, (Decades ago, he discovered, performing on the college party circuit, that working wordlessly held his audience's attention better than heckling frat boys hepped up on jello shots. But when Teller speaks, he articulates precisely, with immaculate grammar, every bit as captivating as Penn, but in a mannered, professorial way. He is a master of make-you-believe. He's been doing it since the age of five. Which is small consolation when you find yourself in his world, attempting to sort what you believe from what you see: an itinerant poet, teatotaling rebels, an intelligent lout, an eloquent mute, an enduring partnership between men who aren't friends, and at the heart of it all, the man himself, a scholar of Latin called Teller who regurgitates needles for a buck. If you have seen them, you think you know them. You think you know why they are bad. They are insolent, irreverent, cool. But you have seen what they want you to see, an illusion. That's what Penn & Teller, and Teller do. That's who they are. They are cool, or rather, the act is cool because it is a partnership between a pair of incurable perfectionists. Penn's rants are the life's work of a voracious diarist. Teller, for his part, suckles that knuckle, fretting incessantly over the smallest detail.

At a very young age Teller met a very wealthy man. He told him: "Teller I want to make a bet with you. I bet that if you don't speak a word from your next birthday onward, I will give you a million dollars a year." Teller accepted and never spoke again after his birthday that year. Then, later on in life, he met a 285 lbs cro-magnon foreheaded man named Penn and noticed that bhe didn't need to speak a word with him around. Even though the wealthy man died a few years back, Teller still collects a million a year from the man's family. He left it for him in his last will and testament. Teller in reality dosen't need Penn. He just needs to keep his mouth shut and keep making millions on the side.