Just when the FCC doubles the fines for saying naughty bits on the radio, just when even the accidental blurting of a bad word threatens to bring the wrath of the feds down upon broadcasting companies, Penn Jillette expands his media empire to radio.

After more than three decades of blasting through the conventions of the magic world - in the stage and television shows he does with his silent partner, Teller - Penn Jillette has launched a daily, one-hour talk show that aims to poke holes in the pretenses and poses of the nation's cultural and political elites.

Onstage at the Rio hotel or on his Showtime cable show, Mr. Jillette plays the wizard who's going to give it to you straight - a shtick that entails plenty of bad words in service of making the audience believe there is no bull in this performance.

"Howard Stern was considered a shock jock," Mr. Jillette says. "But I'm sorry, anyone with his ratings was not outside the mainstream. He was the mainstream. Eminem [insults] George Bush, and he has the No. 1 one album in the country. That is the mainstream."

Nice argument, but Mr. Jillette's deal with CBS Radio requires him to agree to use only safe and legal words, and the company's monitors screen his every utterance before allowing it to continue over their airwaves. Not long ago, Mr. Jillette devoted one show to the history of circumcision, and in discussing 19th-century attitudes toward the male organ, "I used the word 'masturbation' in a nonprurient way. I thought the network probably should not have dumped the word, but they did. It was a little sad that they'd been beaten up so much that they were that jumpy."

Mr. Jillette comes to radio seeking a respite from the imperative on television or in the movies to keep moving. "In those forms, you got to give 'em shiny things," he says. "You just cannot have talking heads. But people are doing other things while they listen to the radio, and that allows you to go longer and do more."

Mr. Jillette, whose raspy, damaged voice comes off as welcoming and unrehearsed on the radio, goes on each day and riffs with his sidekick, Mike Goudeau, "like we're at a dinner table after the meal with friends." They flit from politics to sex, practical jokes, monkeys, religion, science and the foolishness that suffuses modern life.

"I'm a libertarian, so I agree with Rush Limbaugh more than I disagree with him, but I also agree with the left more than I disagree with them," Mr. Jillette says. "I mean, guns and drugs are the same issue, but try convincing either the left or the right of that."

Growing up in Greenfield, Mass., Mr. Jillette listened late at night to WOR in New York, an AM powerhouse where the late, legendary storyteller Jean Shepherd spun his improvisations on themes of nonconformism and the power of the individual.

"They were really and deeply saying the same thing," Mr. Jillette contends. "Don't talk about anything unless you care passionately about it. Whereas so much entertainment now consists of people sitting around saying, 'What can we make fun of, what's in the news, what's easy to grab?' "

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