Read Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! for Free Online Page B

have to pretend it’s hard work. It isn’t.
    The Celebrity Apprentice
is more honest, in that creepy kind of way that the guy who admits he’s a racist is more honest. It doesn’t pretend to be about something beautiful like dance. I think business is beautiful, but
The Celebrity Apprentice
has nothing to do with business. No actual business skills are tested. It’s not even a real game about fake business. I can tell you the rules of chess (I know the rules well enough to lose to anyone). I can’t tell you the rules to
The Celebrity Apprentice.
No one can tell you the rules of
The Celebrity Apprentice.
No one. Donald Trump just does what he wants, which is mostly pontificating to people who are sucking up to him, while the network people try to manipulate him into making the highest-rated show they can. Trump can’t be manipulated, so the show isn’t even fair in that way. Annie Duke, the poker genius, and
TCA
veteran, said to me, “It’s a pretend game, about pretend business, where you get pretend fired.” Donald Trump couldn’t fire me. I work for Penn & Teller and he’s never owned any part of us. Trump tried to book Penn & Teller once in Vegas at one of his casinos, but we were priced out of his budget. He can’t fire us from the Rio, because he doesn’t own any of Caesars.
    TCA
pretends to be about raising money for charity. That’s true, but only so far. If I had not taken time off from the Penn & Teller show to do
The Celebrity Apprentice—
if Teller and I had just done our show, gotten usual pay—I could have donated four times the amount of money that Trump had pledged to give my charity if I won the whole damn shooting match. Opportunity Village, “my” charity that helps intellectually disabled adults to enter society, got a lot of attention because I was on
The Celebrity Apprentice
, and that does count for something. And when I was “fired,” my real bosses at Caesars, who own the Rio and the Penn & Teller Theater, said, “Oh, you wanted a quarter million for Opportunity Village? We don’t have to do some jive TV show; we’ll just write a check.” They wrote the full winning amount to Opportunity Village and everyone was happy. But
The Celebrity Apprentice
people are honest. They don’t pretend it’s about something beautiful, and they don’t pretend it’s fair. It’s venal people clawing at stupid, soulless shit in front of the modern-day Scrooge McDuck in order to stay famous.
    The producers of
TCA
are a couple of really groovy women whom I grew to know a little and like a lot. They wanted the show to be honest, and they kept it honest. I didn’t watch the show, but I didn’t hear about any edits that were really disingenuous. They had to tell a story, and stories are never real, but they showed a view of the show that was certainly as accurate as the one you’re reading now. I never saw them lie, or push someone to get the reaction they wanted. They just let it happen with integrity and honesty. For one “task,” Donald Trump asked us to create a Macy’s store display and print ads for his new fragrance. Is there anyone who wants to smell like Donald Trump? Mr. Trump thinks so, so we were asked to create advertising. Instead of the usual twenty grand that the show would give to the winning “team leader’s” charity, Donald floated the promise that if he “loved” our promotional material, he would give
one hundred thousand dollars
to his “loved” one’s charity. Five times the amount that was arbitrarily assigned to this “task.” In other words, if Trump got an ad that he could actually use for his stink-pretty juice, he would pay about twenty percent of what he would have to pay in the free market to hire a professional to do the job properly. Trump was willing to donate one-fifth of what the campaign would be worth to charity. I got fired for coming up with the slogan “You Earned It.” They thought that slogan was “pompous.” My slogan for a perfume