I was performing at a corporate holiday event in Linz, maybe two years into doing shows regularly, and I opened the way I always opened. Same lines, same energy, same structure. The set went fine. Decent reactions, polite applause, a few strong moments. Nothing wrong with it.
Afterward, I was packing up my things when the event organizer came over. She was perfectly pleasant, but she said something I have thought about ever since: “That was lovely. We had a magician last year who did something similar.”
She did not mean I had performed the same effects. She meant the experience was interchangeable. I could have been anyone, performing anywhere, for any group. There was nothing about my show that was specific to her company, her event, her people, her evening. I had walked in, pressed play on my mental recording, and walked out.
The audience had been entertained. But they had not felt seen.
The Mental Tape Recorder Problem
Ken Weber identifies this issue in Maximum Entertainment when he discusses technique C of communicating your humanity: acknowledge your surroundings. Reference the venue. The event. The city. Something — anything — specific to this audience, this night, this moment. Show that you are here. Not just physically present, but mentally, emotionally present. That you are performing for these people, not at them.
The opposite is what Weber calls the mental tape recorder. The performer who delivers the identical show in every venue, with every audience, in every city, as if pressing play on a pre-recorded program. The words are the same. The timing is the same. The jokes are the same. Nothing adapts, nothing acknowledges, nothing responds to the reality of the room.
I was the mental tape recorder. I had worked hard on my material, scripted it carefully, rehearsed the timing. And in the process, I had locked it so tightly that there was no room for the actual environment to get in. My show was a sealed unit. The audience could watch it, but they could not be part of it.
Three Sentences
The fix is almost embarrassingly simple. Three sentences at the start of the performance that acknowledge where you are and who you are talking to.
That is it. Three sentences. And the effect on the audience is disproportionate to the effort involved.
Here is what I mean. Let me give you a real example. I was performing at an annual awards dinner for a technology company in Innsbruck. The event was at a venue with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Inn. The company had just closed a major funding round. Before I went on, I talked to a few people at the tables, asked about the evening, picked up a few details.
When I opened, I said something like: “I have to say, performing in a room with this view is going to be a challenge — I might lose half of you to the river. Though from what I understand, after the year this team has had, you’ve earned the right to stare at the mountains for a while. I was told the funding round closed three weeks ago and some of you still haven’t slept.”
Three sentences. Maybe fifteen seconds. Not brilliant comedy. Not a polished routine. Just three sentences that told the audience: I know where I am. I know who you are. I showed up for you specifically.
The shift in the room was immediate. People laughed — not because it was hilarious, but because it was theirs. The reference to their funding round, their venue, their exhaustion was a signal that this performance was not a generic product being dispensed. It was something happening in this room, for these people, on this night.
Why It Works: The Psychology of Being Seen
There is a principle in consulting that I learned long before I picked up a deck of cards: people commit to processes where they feel seen and heard. If a client feels that your analysis could have been produced for any company in any industry, they will treat it as generic advice. If they feel it was built specifically for their situation — even if the underlying principles are universal — they treat it as personal wisdom.
The content might be ninety percent the same. The ten percent that is specific makes all the difference.
Performance works the same way. The audience arrives with a default assumption that the performer is going to do his thing regardless of who they are. They have been to enough events to know the pattern: the entertainment arrives, performs the standard set, leaves. The audience is essentially a prop in someone else’s show.
When you acknowledge the surroundings, you invert that dynamic. You tell the audience that they are not a prop. They are the reason. Their venue, their event, their world — that is the context. You are the guest in their reality, not the other way around.
This is powerful because it is rare. Most performers do not do it. Most professionals in any field do not do it. We are all so focused on delivering our prepared material that we forget to look up and acknowledge the room we are standing in.
My Preparation Ritual
After the Linz experience, I developed a ritual that I follow before every corporate show. It has become as much a part of my performance preparation as checking my props or reviewing my scripts.
I arrive early. At least an hour before I perform, ideally more. And I use that time to gather three pieces of specific information.
First, the venue. Something about the physical space that I can reference — the architecture, the view, the history, even the temperature. Anything that proves I am looking at the same room the audience is looking at.
Second, the organization. Something about the company or group — a recent achievement, a milestone, a challenge they have been working through. I get this from the event organizer, from the company’s website, sometimes from casual conversation with people at the tables. It does not have to be deep insight. It just has to be real.
Third, something human. A detail from talking to actual people at the event before I go on. A name, a joke someone made, a comment about the evening. Something that connects me to a specific person in the room, which by extension connects me to everyone.
These three pieces of information become my opening three sentences. They are never fully scripted — I know the information, and I find the words in the moment. This keeps them feeling spontaneous rather than rehearsed.
The Danger of Overdoing It
I should note that there is a wrong way to do this, and I found it through trial and error.
Early on, after I had discovered the power of acknowledging surroundings, I went overboard. I would spend the first two or three minutes of my set doing extended riffs on the company, the venue, the industry. I was so pleased with the audience’s response to specificity that I kept piling it on.
The problem was that I was not a comedian doing a corporate roast. I was a magician. And after a certain point, the audience was thinking: When is he going to do something magical?
The acknowledgment works because it is a bridge, not a destination. Three sentences establish connection. Then you move into the performance. The specificity at the top flavors everything that follows — it creates the feeling that the entire show is for this audience — but you do not have to keep proving it all night.
Think of it like seasoning. A little salt transforms a dish. A lot of salt ruins it.
The Mid-Show Callback
What I have found works even better than the opening acknowledgment is what I think of as the mid-show callback. You reference the venue, the company, or a specific moment from earlier in the evening at a point during the show where nobody expects it.
For example, I was performing a mentalism piece at a pharma company’s retreat in Salzburg. Earlier that evening, their CEO had given a speech about the importance of paying attention to details. During my routine, at a moment where I was about to reveal a prediction, I said something like: “Your CEO told you to pay attention to details. Let’s see if I was paying attention.”
The audience erupted. Not because it was clever — because it was contextual. It proved that I was not just performing at them. I was performing with them. I was inside their evening, part of their event, responsive to their world.
This kind of callback is only possible if you are genuinely listening during the event, not just waiting in a side room for your cue. You have to be present. You have to be paying attention. You have to care about where you are.
The Hotel Room Contrast
Here is the thing that strikes me about this principle. I spend an enormous amount of my life in hotel rooms. Two hundred nights a year, for years, in rooms that are designed to be identical. The same bed, the same desk, the same view of another building or a parking lot. Hotel rooms are the ultimate generic environment — spaces deliberately stripped of specificity.
My practice happens in those rooms. I sit on the bed, or at the desk, or sometimes on the floor, and I run through my material. And in those rooms, the material is sealed, self-contained, complete. It does not need a context because there is no context. There is just me and the cards and the mirror.
But the performance is never in a hotel room. The performance is always in a real place, with real people, for a real reason. And the performer’s job is to bridge the gap between the sealed, generic rehearsal and the specific, contextual moment of the show.
Acknowledging your surroundings is how you build that bridge. It is how you take the material you practiced in a hotel room in Graz and make it belong to a ballroom in Klagenfurt.
The Universal Principle
This extends well beyond magic. In consulting, the most effective presentations I have ever given — the ones that actually changed a client’s thinking — were the ones where I started with something specific to their world. Not a generic framework, not an industry overview, not the same slide deck I had used for the last three clients. Something that proved I understood their context.
A colleague of mine once told me that the secret to a great consulting pitch is the first two minutes. If the client feels seen in the first two minutes, they will listen for an hour. If they feel they are receiving a generic product, they tune out in five.
Three sentences. That is all it takes. Three sentences that prove you are here, in this room, with these people, on this night. That you did not just show up with a pre-loaded program. That you are paying attention.
What I Tell Myself Before Every Show
I have a personal reminder that I run through in the minutes before I go on. It is not a mantra or an affirmation. It is a question.
What is true about this room that is not true about any other room?
If I can answer that question, and if I can work the answer into my first thirty seconds, everything that follows lands differently. The audience stops watching a performance and starts participating in an experience. They feel that this show — this specific version, tonight — is theirs.
And the strange thing is that the material is ninety-five percent the same as it was in every other room. The effects are the same. The scripts are mostly the same. The structure has not changed.
But those three sentences at the top — those fifteen seconds of specificity — transform something generic into something personal. They turn an interchangeable evening into this evening.
The event organizer in Linz was right. What I gave her audience that night was similar to what any magician might have given them. I was performing my show in their room, but I was not performing for them.
I never made that mistake again.