I think there's a point being missed here.
Think of the way Penn & Teller perform: They engange the audience and invite them to think. They let the audience in on the secert, in short, they treat their audience as their equal. They take the conventional tricks, e.g. cups and balls, putting a person in a box and breaking that person apart, etc, expose them and still make it entertaining. And moreso, they have the audience leave the show with something that isn't found elsewhere.
What Teller was illustrating was a kind of performance that doesn't bring the audience in, doesn't let them think, essentially it's a string of showy tricks. The equivallent of going up to a person and say "wanna see a trick?". No thought behind it, no story, nothing to draw in the audience and treat them as equals and involve them as part of what's going onstage.