There’s a moment, right before I walk out in front of an audience, where the performance has already begun — even though nobody can see me yet. It’s the moment where I set my face.
For a long time, I didn’t think about this moment at all. I was focused on the technical checklist: props in position, script locked in, set structure confirmed. My mental state in those final seconds was something between focused concentration and controlled anxiety. My face, if anyone had been looking, was serious. Intense. The face of someone preparing to execute a complex operation.
And that was the face the audience saw first. Not dramatic intensity, not visible nervousness — just… seriousness. A professional face. The face of someone about to do their job.
It wasn’t until I read a specific technique in Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment that I realized how much that first face costs you.
Weber’s Backstage Trick
Weber describes a deliberate pre-show ritual: just before walking out, say something funny to someone backstage. Tell a joke, share a ridiculous observation, recall something that makes you laugh. The purpose isn’t to warm up your comedy skills. The purpose is physiological. If you say something funny to someone and they laugh, you smile. And if you’re smiling when you walk out, the first face the audience sees is a warm, open, genuinely smiling face.
Not a performed smile. Not the rictus grin of a nervous performer trying to look friendly. An actual smile, with the muscular engagement around the eyes that distinguishes a real smile from a fake one. The audience reads the difference instantly, because humans are extraordinarily sensitive to facial authenticity. A real smile says: I’m happy to be here, I’m relaxed, and this is going to be fun. A performed smile says: I’m pretending to be happy because I’ve been told that smiling is important.
The specificity of Weber’s advice is what makes it powerful. He doesn’t say “smile when you walk out.” That’s generic advice that produces generic results. He says: create a real reason to smile, in the moments immediately before the audience sees you, so the smile is genuine when it appears.
The distinction matters more than it should.
Why Smiling Isn’t Trivial
I initially dismissed this as a minor detail — a nice touch, but not significant. Then I started paying attention to the research, and to my own experience, and I changed my mind.
There’s a well-documented phenomenon in social psychology: first impressions form in seconds. Some studies put the number as low as a tenth of a second for initial judgments, with more complex assessments of warmth and competence forming in the first seven to thirty seconds. These judgments are remarkably sticky — once formed, they color everything that follows. A positive first impression creates a halo effect that makes subsequent actions appear more favorable. A neutral or negative first impression creates a headwind that you have to overcome for the rest of the interaction.
For a performer, the first impression is the first face. Whatever the audience sees in the moment you appear is the foundation on which their entire experience is built. A warm, genuinely smiling face says: this person is open, approachable, and confident. A serious face says: this person is focused, professional, and distant. A nervous face says: this person is uncertain, and maybe I should be uncertain too.
None of these readings are conscious. The audience doesn’t think “his face was serious, so I will evaluate his performance negatively.” It’s deeper than that. It’s the primate social-signaling system that we all carry, the one that reads facial expressions before language, before content, before anything else. The face comes first, and everything that follows is filtered through it.
Ralphie May — the late stand-up comedian whose masterclass material I’ve studied — makes essentially the same point from the comedy side. His advice for how to tell a joke? Smile. That’s it. If you’re smiling, you’ve already done half the work. The audience sees a smiling face and their mirror neurons fire. They begin to feel what you appear to be feeling. Their defenses lower. Their readiness to laugh increases. The joke hasn’t been told yet, but the conditions for its success have already been established.
May’s insight applies directly to magic, and to any form of live performance. The audience’s emotional state mirrors the performer’s apparent emotional state. If you look like you’re enjoying yourself, they’re more likely to enjoy themselves. If you look like you’re working hard, they’ll feel the effort. The smile is the simplest, most immediate way to set the audience’s emotional baseline.
My Own Pre-Show Ritual
After reading Weber and thinking about it for a while, I started experimenting with deliberate pre-show mood-setting. Not just “remember to smile,” but actually engineering a genuine positive emotional state in the minutes before walking out.
Here’s what I found works for me. I don’t have a backstage joke-telling partner at most of my shows — corporate events often don’t come with a green room full of fellow performers. So I’ve had to adapt the principle to my reality.
My adaptation has a few components. First, I have a small collection of memories — specific, vivid, ridiculous moments from my life — that reliably make me smile when I recall them. I won’t share the specific memories because they’re absurdly personal and would require too much context. But they’re moments of genuine delight, the kind that bring a smile not through effort but through involuntary recall.
In the two minutes before I walk out, I deliberately call one of these memories to mind. Not as a visualization exercise, not as a meditation — just a quick mental replay. Something happened that was genuinely funny, and remembering it makes me smile. That smile is now on my face when the audience first sees me.
Second, I’ve built a physical reset into my pre-show routine. Stand against a wall for posture alignment — shoulders back, spine straight, head level. Three deep breaths, slow exhale. Roll the neck gently. Shake the hands. These actions release the physical tension that accumulates in the minutes before a show and that, if left unchecked, shows up in the face as tightness.
Third — and this is the part that took the longest to develop — I take a moment to genuinely feel gratitude for being there. Not performed gratitude, not the affirmation-style “I am grateful” that self-help culture promotes. Just a real, unforced recognition that I’m about to do something I love, in front of people who chose to be here, and that’s a genuinely good thing. When I can access that feeling — and it’s not always easy, especially when I’m tired or stressed — it produces a warmth that reads on my face as openness and pleasure.
The combination of these three elements — the memory, the physical reset, and the moment of genuine feeling — means that when I walk out, the first thing the audience sees is a person who appears relaxed, happy, and glad to be there. Not because I’m performing happiness. Because, in that moment, I’ve genuinely created it.
The Physiology of Smiling
There’s a physiological component to this that goes beyond audience perception. Smiling — even voluntarily — triggers a measurable response in the nervous system. The facial feedback hypothesis, which has been tested and refined over decades of research, suggests that the physical act of smiling sends a signal to the brain that modulates emotional experience. You don’t just smile because you’re happy; the act of smiling contributes to the feeling of happiness.
For a performer, this means the pre-show smile does double duty. It communicates warmth to the audience, and it calms the performer’s own nervous system. The pre-performance anxiety that most of us feel — the elevated heart rate, the shallow breathing, the cortisol surge — is modulated by the parasympathetic response that smiling activates. You’re not eliminating the butterflies. You’re adding a counterbalancing signal that says, in effect, “everything is fine.”
I’ve noticed this in my own experience. On nights when I’ve done the pre-show smile ritual, I feel more settled in the first thirty seconds of the performance. The opening flows more easily. My voice is steadier. My movements are more natural. The nervous energy is still there — it always is, and I’ve come to value it — but it’s riding alongside a baseline of calm rather than amplifying a baseline of tension.
On nights when I’ve skipped the ritual — usually because I was rushed or distracted — I can feel the difference. The first minute is harder. The face I’m presenting is more controlled, less natural. The audience takes longer to warm up, and I take longer to find my groove. The correlation isn’t perfect, but it’s consistent enough that I no longer skip it.
The Thirty-Second Window
Think about what happens in the first thirty seconds of a performance. The audience sees you for the first time. They form their initial impression. They decide, unconsciously and almost instantaneously, whether they like you, whether they trust you, and whether they want to spend the next thirty minutes in your company.
Thirty seconds. That’s the window. And the single most influential factor in how the audience fills that window is your face.
Not your clothes, though those matter. Not your opening line, though that helps. Not your first effect, though that sets the tone. Your face. The human face is the primary medium through which we evaluate other humans, and it’s been that way for a hundred thousand years. Before language, before culture, before anything we’d recognize as civilization, our ancestors were reading faces. That’s the system the audience is using when they see you walk out, and it operates faster and deeper than anything you might say or do.
A smiling face activates the audience’s social-bonding apparatus. It signals safety, warmth, and invitation. It says: I come in peace, I’m here to connect, and we’re going to have a good time together. The audience’s mirror neurons respond, and without thinking, they begin to relax. They lean forward slightly. Their own faces soften. The conditions for connection are established before a single word is spoken.
A neutral or serious face activates a different response. Not hostility — the audience isn’t going to boo a serious-faced performer. But reserve. Caution. The unconscious assessment: this person hasn’t signaled that they’re safe, so I’ll wait and see. The audience leans back slightly. They watch with interest but without warmth. The conditions for appreciation are established, but the conditions for connection are not.
The difference between these two openings — smile versus serious — compounds through the entire performance. A warm start builds momentum. A reserved start requires you to overcome inertia. The total gap in audience engagement by the end of a thirty-minute show can be enormous, and it started with a face.
The Hardest Simple Thing
I want to be honest about something: this was harder for me than it should have been.
I come from a professional culture — strategy consulting — where seriousness is associated with competence. You don’t walk into a board meeting grinning. You project intelligence, focus, and gravitas. A smile, in that context, is reserved for moments of interpersonal warmth, not for the opening of a high-stakes engagement.
I carried that conditioning into my performances. Seriousness felt professional. Focus felt appropriate. A big smile felt… lightweight. Unprofessional. Like I wasn’t taking the work seriously enough.
That was wrong. Performance is not consulting. The audience isn’t hiring you for your analytical rigor. They’re hiring you for an experience. And the experience begins with the feeling you create in the room, which begins with the feeling your face communicates, which begins with whether you’re smiling.
It took deliberate practice to override my default. Not practice in the technical sense — I didn’t need to learn how to smile. Practice in the habitual sense. Building the pre-show ritual into my routine so thoroughly that it happens without decision. Making the smile the automatic starting state rather than something I remember to add after the fact.
Now it’s embedded. The memory, the physical reset, the moment of genuine feeling. They happen in the two minutes before every show, as reliably as checking my props and confirming my set list. And the result is that the first face the audience sees is one that says: I’m glad to be here. I’m glad you’re here. This is going to be good.
It’s the simplest thing I do. And I’m increasingly convinced it’s one of the most important.