Permutation tableaux are new objects that were introduced by Postnikov in the context of enumeration of the totally positive Grassmannian cells. They are known to be in bijection with permutations and recently, they have been connected to PASEP model used in statistical physics. Properties of permutation tableaux became a focus of a considerable research activity. In this paper we study properties of basic statistics defined on permutation tableaux. We present a simple and unified approach based on probabilistic techniques and use it to compute the expected values of basic statistics defined on permutation tableaux. We also provide a non--bijective and very simple proof that there are n! permutation tableaux of length n.