Imagine a juggler on stage. He is tossing three balls in the air. The audience watches with mild interest. It is pleasant. Impressive in a general sense. Most people understand that juggling takes practice, even if they cannot do it themselves.
Now the juggler puts down one of the balls and picks up a running chainsaw.
The room changes. You can feel it physically — a tightening, a collective intake of breath. Every person in the audience instantly understands what is at stake. They do not need to be told that this is dangerous. They do not need a narrator explaining that chainsaws are sharp and heavy and unpredictable. The object itself communicates the risk. The audience’s appreciation of the juggler’s skill multiplies by a factor of ten, not because the juggling technique is necessarily harder — it might be, it might not — but because the audience now has a frame of reference for what is happening. They can feel the danger in their own bodies.
This is the juggling chainsaw principle, and it contains one of the most important lessons I have learned about performing magic: audiences need help appreciating what you do. They have no reliable frame of reference for the difficulty of magic, no way to intuitively sense what is hard and what is easy, what is remarkable and what is routine. And if you do not give them that frame of reference, they will respond with the polite, moderate appreciation that people offer when they can see that something is impressive but cannot feel why.
The Frame of Reference Problem
Ken Weber makes this point with characteristic directness in Maximum Entertainment: the audience has no way of knowing that any particular moment in your show is special. Unless you tell them.
When I first read that, I bristled. The effects are impossible. Surely the impossibility is self-evident? A card changes in someone’s hand. A thought is revealed that nobody could possibly know. An object vanishes and reappears somewhere it should not be. These things speak for themselves.
Except they do not. Not the way a chainsaw speaks for itself.
The difference is that a chainsaw connects to universal physical experience. Every person in the audience has handled sharp objects. Every person understands gravity, momentum, the consequences of a missed catch. The danger is intuitive. It lives in the body. The audience does not need to think about why juggling a chainsaw is impressive — they feel it.
Magic connects to no such universal experience. Nobody in the audience has ever actually made something vanish. Nobody has ever read a mind. Nobody has a physical, embodied understanding of what these things feel like from the inside. The impossibility exists only in abstract logic: “This should not be possible, therefore it is impressive.” But abstract logic produces an abstract response. It does not produce the visceral, full-body reaction that you get from watching someone toss a chainsaw in the air.
This means that as performers, we have a responsibility that jugglers do not have. We have to build the frame of reference ourselves. We have to create, through our performance, the context that allows the audience to appreciate what they are seeing.
How I Learned This the Hard Way
About a year into performing regularly, I was doing a private event in Graz. Small group, intimate setting, well-educated audience — exactly the kind of room where I thought mentalism would play exceptionally well.
I performed a routine where I identified details about a person’s life that I could not possibly have known. Specific details. Verifiable details. The kind of revelations that, from a method standpoint, were among the most demanding pieces in my repertoire.
The audience was politely impressed. “That’s a good trick,” one person said afterward. “How do you do that?” another asked, in a tone that suggested they assumed the answer was simple.
I was frustrated. Not with the audience — they were lovely, engaged people. I was frustrated with the gap between what I had achieved and how it had been received. From my perspective, I had just done something extraordinarily difficult and genuinely impossible. From their perspective, I had done a trick. A good trick, but a trick. Something that had a method, a gimmick, a technique — and if they knew the secret, they could probably do it too.
They had no frame of reference for the difficulty. They had no way to distinguish between a simple card trick and a complex multi-phase mentalism routine. To them, all magic occupied the same category: “tricks.” Some tricks were better than others, but they were all tricks, and tricks by definition have methods, and methods by definition make the impossible merely mechanical.
The juggler does not have this problem. The audience can see the chainsaw. They understand the stakes intuitively. The magician has to create the stakes from scratch.
Building the Frame
Once I understood the problem, I started experimenting with ways to build a frame of reference for my audiences. Not by explaining the difficulty — that would be both boring and inappropriately self-aggrandizing. But by contextualizing the experience in ways that helped the audience feel the significance of what was about to happen.
One approach that worked immediately was what I think of as the “impossibility audit.” Before performing a mentalism piece, I would casually establish the conditions. “I have never met you before tonight. I do not know your name, your job, where you grew up, anything about you. We are strangers.” This is not scripted patter — it is a genuine, conversational acknowledgment of the starting conditions. And it works because it gives the audience a frame of reference for what follows. When I then reveal something specific about this stranger, the audience can measure the gap between the starting condition and the result. The impossibility has been made tangible.
Another approach is what I call the “invitation to watch.” Before a crucial moment, I slow down and say something like, “I want you to watch this closely, because what happens next should not be possible.” This is not a challenge. It is not a boast. It is a frame. It is the verbal equivalent of the juggler picking up a chainsaw — a signal to the audience that something has changed, that the stakes have increased, that they should pay attention in a different way.
I was resistant to this at first. It felt like selling. Like carnival barking. Like drawing attention to my own impressiveness in a way that seemed antithetical to the understated, genuine presence I was trying to cultivate. But then I watched performers I admire — people who project quiet confidence and genuine humility — and I noticed they all do some version of this. They all, in their own way, tell the audience when something special is about to happen. They just do it with such subtlety that it does not feel like selling. It feels like sharing.
The Difference Between Framing and Bragging
There is a crucial distinction here that took me a while to calibrate. Framing is not the same as bragging.
Bragging sounds like: “What I am about to do is incredibly difficult. Most magicians cannot do this. I have spent years perfecting this technique.”
Framing sounds like: “I want you to hold this coin in your closed hand. Feel its weight. Feel the edges. In a moment, something is going to change, and I want you to be paying attention when it does.”
The first version centers the performer. It is about how impressive the performer is. The audience hears it and mentally prepares to evaluate a claim — “Is this really that hard? Let me watch carefully and see if I can figure it out.”
The second version centers the experience. It is about what the audience is about to feel. It invites them into the moment rather than asking them to admire the moment from a distance.
The framing I have found most effective is almost always about the spectator’s experience rather than the performer’s skill. “You chose this card completely freely — nobody influenced your choice.” “You wrote this word in your mind and never said it aloud.” “There is no way I could know this.” These statements are not about me. They are about the conditions. And by making the conditions explicit, they give the audience the frame of reference they need to appreciate the impossibility.
The Austrian Executive Test
My corporate audiences here in Austria tend to be analytical. They are executives, engineers, consultants. They are accustomed to evaluating claims, identifying methods, and reverse-engineering processes. They are, in other words, exactly the kind of audience that will categorize magic as “tricks with methods” unless given a reason to experience it differently.
I have developed a test I apply to every new routine: would an Austrian executive know why this is remarkable? Not “Would they be fooled?” — most effects will fool most people, at least momentarily. The question is whether they would feel the remarkableness, or merely acknowledge it intellectually.
If the answer is “They would acknowledge it intellectually but not feel it,” the routine needs framing. It needs context. It needs the equivalent of a chainsaw — something that makes the impossibility intuitive and embodied rather than abstract and logical.
Sometimes this framing is verbal. Sometimes it is structural — the way the routine is designed creates the frame naturally. A prediction sealed in an envelope before the show begins is its own frame. The audience can see the envelope sitting there throughout the event. They know it has been there since before any choices were made. The physical presence of the envelope creates the context that makes the final reveal powerful. No verbal framing required.
Other times, the frame comes from the spectator’s own participation. When someone shuffles a deck, writes down a word, hides an object — they are creating the conditions that make the subsequent impossibility feel real. Their own actions become the frame of reference. They know they shuffled fairly because they did it. They know the word was freely chosen because they chose it. The impossibility is grounded in their own experience.
What Fitzkee Understood Eighty Years Ago
There is a line in Fitzkee’s Showmanship for Magicians that I keep returning to: never descend from a level once gained. The idea is that each moment in your performance should build on the previous one, and once you have established a certain level of impact, you cannot afford to drop below it.
This connects to the framing problem because bad framing — or no framing — causes exactly that descent. When the audience understands why something is special, their engagement rises. When the next moment arrives without context, their engagement drops. The performer has gained a level and then descended from it, not through weak material but through insufficient framing.
The juggler never has this problem. Each time the chainsaw goes up, the audience re-engages. The frame of reference refreshes automatically. But in magic, the frame must be continuously maintained. Each new impossibility needs its own context, its own “here is why this matters,” its own equivalent of the chainsaw catching the light as it spins.
My Current Practice
I now treat framing as a skill equal in importance to the effects themselves. For every routine in my set, I have explicit answers to three questions:
What does the audience need to know before this moment to appreciate it fully? These are the conditions, the constraints, the impossibilities made explicit.
How will I communicate those conditions without lecturing? Usually through natural conversation, through the spectator’s own actions, through the physical setup of the routine.
What is the “chainsaw” — the specific element that makes the difficulty intuitive rather than abstract? Sometimes it is the spectator’s own memory of shuffling the deck. Sometimes it is the sealed envelope that has been visible for an hour. Sometimes it is a simple statement: “You have never told anyone this.”
These three questions have improved my performances more than any amount of technical practice. Because the technique was always there. The impossibility was always real. What was missing was the bridge between the performer’s reality and the audience’s experience — the frame that transforms “That’s a good trick” into “That should not be possible.”
The juggler has the chainsaw. The magician has to build one from scratch, every single time. It is more work. But when you build it well, the result is something the chainsaw cannot achieve: not just danger appreciated, but impossibility felt. Not just “That looks hard” but “That cannot be real.” Not just awe at a skill, but wonder at the nature of reality itself.
That is the prize at the other end of the framing problem. And it is worth every ounce of effort it takes to get there.