The first time it happened — really happened, the kind of disruption you cannot pretend your way through — I was performing at a corporate dinner in Salzburg. I was midway through a mentalism routine, building toward a reveal, the audience quiet and focused. And then, from the back of the room, came the unmistakable sound of a full tray of glassware hitting a marble floor.
It was catastrophic in terms of volume. Every head in the room turned. The waiter froze. There was a two-second silence that felt like twenty.
And I, in my infinite wisdom, pretended it had not happened.
I kept talking. Same tone, same pace, same words. I barreled through my scripted patter as if the room had not just been hit by an audio grenade. I maintained eye contact with my volunteer. I smiled. I continued.
It was the worst possible response.
The Robot Test
Ken Weber makes this point with devastating clarity in Maximum Entertainment when he discusses technique D of communicating your humanity: react and respond. When something happens during your show — a glass breaks, a phone rings, a baby cries, a waiter drops a tray — acknowledge it. If you ignore it, you look disconnected, pre-programmed, robotic. If you acknowledge it with humor or grace, you look human, present, and in control.
The logic is simple but the instinct runs the other way. When something disrupts your show, your first impulse is to protect the show. Keep going. Maintain the momentum. Do not let the interruption win. You have rehearsed this material, you know where you are headed, and you will not let a dropped tray knock you off course.
The problem is that the audience is not inside your head. They do not know you are being disciplined and professional by continuing. They just see a person who is so locked into his script that he cannot register reality. And that is profoundly alienating.
Think about it from the audience’s perspective. A loud crash just happened. Everyone heard it. Everyone reacted — startled, turned, maybe laughed nervously. It was a shared experience, a moment of collective reality. And the one person in the room who does not react is the performer. The one person who acts as though it did not happen.
What does that communicate? It communicates that the performer is not really here. He is somewhere else — inside his own show, inside his own head, playing a pre-recorded program that does not have a subroutine for unexpected input. He is a machine.
In Salzburg, I could feel it happen. The audience turned back to me after looking at the waiter, and there was a subtle but unmistakable change in their energy. I had failed a test I did not know I was taking. The test was: are you a person or a program? And by not reacting, I had answered: program.
The Power of Acknowledgment
The fix, as with so many things in performance, is simpler than you would expect. You just acknowledge it.
“Well. That sounded expensive.”
“I promise that was not part of the act.”
“I think the waiter just had a bigger reveal than anything I’ve got planned.”
It does not have to be brilliant. It does not have to be comedy gold. It just has to be human. It just has to prove that you heard what everyone else heard, that you are in the same room, experiencing the same reality.
What happens when you acknowledge a disruption is counterintuitive: you gain control by appearing to lose it. The audience laughs, the tension breaks, and suddenly you are more in command of the room than you were before the disruption. You have demonstrated that your performance is not fragile. That you can handle the unexpected. That you are a live human being responding in real time, not a recording.
This is what audiences want. They want to know that what they are watching is live, unpredictable, happening right now. Every disruption you navigate gracefully reinforces this. Every disruption you ignore undermines it.
The Exception That Proves the Rule
Weber makes an important distinction that I initially missed. There is a category of disruption that you should not acknowledge: the minor disturbance that only affects you.
If a prop is slightly out of position and you need to adjust, do not call attention to it. If you momentarily lose your place in the script and recover, do not announce it. If something goes slightly wrong in a way that the audience cannot perceive, do not draw attention to it by acknowledging it.
The rule is about shared reality. If the entire room experienced the disruption — if they heard it, saw it, or felt it — then you must acknowledge it, because pretending it did not happen when everyone knows it did is the definition of being disconnected. But if only you noticed, acknowledging it is the opposite mistake: you are breaking the audience’s experience to address a problem they did not know existed.
I learned this the hard way too. After I had started deliberately acknowledging disruptions, I overcorrected. I began commenting on every tiny thing — a prop that was slightly crooked, a card that came out of the spread at a weird angle, a table that wobbled. I was so determined to seem human and responsive that I started narrating my own technical difficulties.
The audience did not appreciate this. They had not noticed the problems until I pointed them out. By acknowledging things they could not see, I was not demonstrating humanity. I was demonstrating anxiety.
The balance is this: respond to what the audience experiences. Ignore what only you experience.
My Most Instructive Disaster
The moment that really taught me this lesson happened about eighteen months after the Salzburg dinner. I was performing at a product launch event in Vienna, a mid-sized crowd, maybe eighty people. I was doing a card routine that builds to a reveal, and right as I was about to hit the climax, someone’s phone started ringing. Not buzzing. Full ringtone, some pop song, at maximum volume.
The owner fumbled with it. It kept ringing. Five seconds. Ten seconds. It felt like it would never stop.
This time, I did not power through. I stopped. I waited. I looked at the person with what I hoped was a warm, amused expression and said: “Take your time. I’ve been rehearsing this for months — I can wait another thirty seconds.”
The room laughed. The person silenced their phone, embarrassed but smiling because I had defused the awkwardness rather than amplifying it. I paused a beat, then said: “Now. Where were we? Oh right — the impossible part.”
The reveal that followed got one of the strongest reactions I have ever received. Not because the effect was different. Because the audience had just watched me navigate an unexpected moment with grace and humor, and that demonstration of presence made them trust me more, not less. They were more invested because I had proved I was real.
The Consultant’s Parallel
I think about this constantly in my consulting work, because disruptions in client presentations are the norm, not the exception.
Someone’s phone rings during a strategy presentation. A senior executive walks in twenty minutes late. The projector fails. A fire alarm test goes off. The coffee arrives loudly in the middle of a critical point.
The consultants who handle these moments well — who pause, acknowledge the disruption, perhaps make a light comment, and then smoothly resume — always command more respect than those who try to pretend nothing happened. The ones who power through disruptions as if they are running a recording signal to the room that they are on a one-way broadcast, not a conversation.
I have been in client meetings where an interruption, handled well, actually strengthened the relationship more than the content of the presentation. Because the interruption was real. The prepared slides were planned. And people trust real more than they trust planned.
The Uri Geller Principle
There is a fascinating example from the world of mentalism that I have always found instructive. Uri Geller, whatever you think of his claims, was a master of turning disruptions to his advantage. When things happened unexpectedly during his performances or television appearances — and they did, frequently — he would not ignore them or fight them. He would fold them in. Something falls off a shelf? “Oh, that sometimes happens when I’m concentrating. The energy gets away from me.” A light flickers? “Did you see that? This is why I find this work so fascinating — you never know what will happen.”
Geller turned disruptions into evidence. Every unexpected event became another data point supporting his persona. It was brilliant, regardless of your opinion on anything else about his career, because it meant that disruptions made his show stronger, not weaker.
Now, I am not suggesting anyone adopt Geller’s specific approach — that is his character, his framework, and it requires total commitment to a particular persona. But the underlying principle is sound: disruptions are opportunities, not threats. They are moments where the audience’s attention is at its most focused, their awareness at its most acute. What you do with that heightened attention defines you as a performer.
Training Yourself to React
The hardest part of this is not understanding the principle. It is training yourself to override the panic response.
When something goes wrong during a show, your nervous system fires. Adrenaline hits. Your instinct is fight or flight, and in the context of performance, flight means retreating into the script, clinging to the planned sequence as if it were a life raft.
I had to actively practice responding to disruptions. Not in a hotel room — you cannot simulate a waiter dropping a tray in a hotel room. But I started paying attention to disruptions in everyday life and using them as practice opportunities. A car alarm in the street. A construction noise outside a meeting room. A colleague’s phone going off. I would notice my instinct to ignore it and then deliberately acknowledge it instead.
Over time, this built a new default response. Now, when something unexpected happens during a show, my first impulse is to address it, not to suppress it. The acknowledgment comes naturally — not always with a perfect quip, but always with presence. Sometimes a look is enough. A raised eyebrow, a pause, a smile that says: yes, I heard that too.
The Deeper Lesson
The deeper lesson of react and respond is not really about disruptions at all. It is about the nature of live performance.
A live performance is defined by its unpredictability. It is the thing that separates what you do on stage from what a YouTube video does. A video is the same every time. A live performer is different every time, because the room is different, the audience is different, and things happen that nobody planned for.
Every time you acknowledge a disruption, you are celebrating that liveness. You are telling the audience: this is happening right now. This has never happened exactly this way before and will never happen exactly this way again. You are part of this moment, and so am I.
Every time you ignore a disruption, you are denying that liveness. You are telling the audience: this is a recording. What is happening in this room does not matter. I am going to deliver my program regardless of reality.
The audience came for the live experience. Give it to them. React. Respond. Be here.
After the event in Vienna — the one with the phone call — the event organizer told me something I have never forgotten. She said: “The best part of the whole show was when the phone went off. Because after that, we knew everything else was real.”
She was right. And she taught me something I could not have learned from any amount of rehearsal in a hotel room: the moments when the plan breaks are the moments when the performer is revealed. And if you are present, human, and responsive in those moments, the audience will follow you anywhere.