Let me tell you about an approach to handling disruption that completely changed how I think about audience control.
The story comes from Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment, and it involves the mentalist Kreskin — one of the most famous performers in the history of the genre. Kreskin was performing, and at some point during the show, a heckler started causing trouble. The specifics of what the heckler did are less important than what happened next: Kreskin dealt with the disruption so smoothly, so seamlessly, so invisibly that the majority of the audience never even realized there had been a problem.
No dramatic confrontation. No withering put-down. No visible moment of tension. Just a disruption that appeared, was absorbed, and vanished — all while the show continued without a perceptible break.
Weber uses this story to illustrate what he considers the highest level of audience control: not the ability to shut down a problem, but the ability to handle a problem so elegantly that it never registers as a problem in the first place.
The distinction matters enormously. And it took me a long time to understand why.
The Confrontation Fantasy
When most performers think about hecklers, they think about the confrontation. The dramatic moment. The devastating comeback that puts the heckler in their place while the rest of the audience cheers. There is an entire genre of performer mythology built around great heckler responses — the perfect line, delivered at the perfect moment, that turns a disruption into a triumph.
I understand the appeal. There is something deeply satisfying about the fantasy of the quick-witted performer vanquishing the disruptive audience member with a single, brilliant retort. It feels like justice. It feels like mastery. And the stories get retold and amplified because they are dramatic and entertaining in the retelling.
But here is what the confrontation fantasy misses: the confrontation itself is a failure.
Not a failure of the performer’s wit. Not a failure of courage. A failure of control. Because the moment there is a visible confrontation — the moment the audience recognizes that a disruption has occurred and that the performer is addressing it — the show has been interrupted. The audience’s attention has been diverted from the performance to the social drama of the heckler interaction. And even if the performer wins the exchange brilliantly, the audience’s focus has been fractured.
The audience did not come to watch a social confrontation. They came to watch a performance. Every second spent on a heckler is a second not spent on the show. And every audience member who was absorbed in the performance has now been yanked out of that absorption to witness a conflict they did not ask for.
The confrontation can be entertaining, certainly. Some performers build it into their style. But it is a recovery, not a prevention. It is treating the symptom after the disease has already manifested.
What Kreskin did was prevent the symptom from manifesting at all. That is a fundamentally different skill.
My Heckler Education
I have a complicated relationship with hecklers, partly because my performance context — corporate events, private shows, keynote settings — does not produce many genuine hecklers. What it produces is something related but distinct: the challenger.
Darwin Ortiz describes this type well. The challenger is not hostile. They are not trying to ruin the show. They are trying to win. They view the performance as a contest — performer versus audience — and they want to be the one who figures it out, catches the move, exposes the method. They are competitive, not malicious. But the effect on the show can be similar.
My first encounter with a serious challenger was at a corporate event in Vienna, early in my performing life. I was doing a close-up set at a cocktail reception, working a group of eight or nine people. One of them — a man who was clearly senior in the company and accustomed to being the smartest person in the room — decided that his role was to narrate his theories about how each effect worked.
“He’s doing something with his right hand.” “Watch the way he holds the deck.” “There’s probably something in his pocket.” Running commentary, delivered loud enough for everyone in the group to hear, intended to demonstrate his superior observation skills.
He was wrong about most of it, which almost made it worse. His theories were distracting the rest of the group not because they were accurate but because they were pulling everyone’s attention away from the experience and toward the analysis. He was turning spectators into detectives.
My response was poor. I got flustered. I tried to speed up, which made my handling less clean. I made a joke that was a little too pointed — “maybe I should let you do the next one” — and while the group laughed, the man’s expression told me he was now genuinely adversarial rather than just competitive. I had escalated.
The rest of that set was tense. I finished it, and it was technically competent, but the atmosphere had been poisoned by a confrontation that I had initiated and could not undo.
The Invisible Redirect
After that experience, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I should have done differently. The answer came from studying performers like Kreskin who operate on a completely different model.
The invisible redirect is not a technique. It is a philosophy. Its core principle is: the audience should never know there was a problem.
Here is how it works in practice. When a disruption begins — a challenger starts commenting, someone gets loud, a phone rings — the performer does not acknowledge the disruption directly. Instead, they redirect the room’s attention so smoothly that the disruption becomes invisible.
The methods vary by situation. Sometimes it is a physical redirect — turning your body slightly so the group’s focus follows you away from the disruptor. Sometimes it is a verbal redirect — asking a question to someone else in the group, pulling the spotlight away from the problem person without making the shift obvious. Sometimes it is an inclusion redirect — incorporating the disruptive person into the effect in a way that gives them positive attention and removes their motivation to compete.
The key is that none of these redirects look like redirects. They look like natural performance choices. The audience does not see a performer handling a problem. They see a performer making interesting choices. The disruption is absorbed into the flow of the show and dissolves.
I practiced this. Deliberately. After the Vienna incident, I started putting myself in situations where I could practice invisible redirects. Close-up performances at social events, where interruptions are constant and the audience is informal. Walk-around at parties, where you never know who is going to say what.
I developed a toolkit. If someone starts narrating theories, I give them something to hold — a card, a coin, whatever is in the effect. Their hands are now occupied, and their attention has shifted from analysis to participation. If someone is being loud, I move the group’s attention to someone else by asking a question that requires focus: “What are you thinking of right now? Don’t say it yet.” The loud person is now part of an audience that is concentrating, and social pressure does the silencing without my saying a word.
If someone is genuinely antagonistic — which is rare in corporate settings but does happen — I use the most powerful redirect of all: I make them my assistant. “You seem like you’ve got sharp eyes. I need someone I can trust for this next piece. Would you help me?” This is transformation through inclusion. The person who was working against the show is now working for it. Their energy, which was disruptive, is now channeled into a role that serves the performance.
The Prestige Factor
Ortiz writes about a concept called prestige — the sense of authority and command that a performer projects. Prestige, when it is strong enough, prevents challenges from arising in the first place. An audience member who feels the performer’s absolute mastery is less likely to try to compete, because the competition feels futile.
This is the deepest level of the Kreskin approach. The ideal is not to handle disruptions invisibly. The ideal is to project such complete command that disruptions do not occur. The performer’s presence is so authoritative, so confident, so clearly in control that the audience instinctively defers.
I am not there yet. I may never fully get there, because prestige of that magnitude is partly a function of experience and reputation that accumulates over decades. But I have noticed a correlation in my own performances. On nights when I am at my most confident — when the Superman is fully in place, when the material is flowing, when my presence is strong — the audience is better behaved. Not because they are being controlled, but because they are responding to the same social signals that govern all human interaction. Confidence invites deference. Authority invites respect. Command invites cooperation.
On nights when I am less confident — when I am tired, or performing unfamiliar material, or in a venue that does not suit me — the challengers appear more frequently. They sense the lower level of command and respond to it. Not consciously. Not maliciously. Just instinctively.
The Silence After the Redirect
There is a moment in any invisible redirect that I find particularly powerful: the silence after.
When you handle a disruption visibly — when you fire off a witty comeback or directly address a heckler — there is always a moment of social tension. The room is evaluating: who won? Was that too harsh? Is the heckler going to escalate? There is a beat of uncertainty, and the performer has to push through it to get back to the show.
When you handle a disruption invisibly, that moment does not exist. There is no tension because there was no confrontation. There is no evaluation because there was nothing to evaluate. The show simply continues. The disruption was a ripple that appeared and vanished, and the surface of the performance is smooth again.
The audience does not applaud an invisible redirect. They do not tell you afterward that they admired how you handled that difficult moment. Because they did not notice the moment. It was invisible by design.
This is the paradox of the highest level of audience control: the better you do it, the less anyone knows you did anything at all. The most skilled redirect is the one that nobody sees. The most effective handling of a heckler is the one that nobody remembers.
Learning from Kreskin’s Example
What I took from the Kreskin story was not a specific technique. It was a standard. The standard against which I now measure my own handling of disruptions.
After every performance that involved any kind of audience challenge — a loud talker, a challenger, a distracted group, a ringing phone — I ask myself: Did the rest of the audience know there was a problem? If the answer is no, I handled it well. If the answer is yes, I have something to learn from.
This standard is harder to meet than the confrontation standard. It is much easier to fire off a clever line than to invisibly redirect attention. It is much more satisfying, in the moment, to win a public exchange than to dissolve a problem before anyone notices. The confrontation gives you a story to tell. The invisible redirect gives you nothing except a show that was not disrupted.
But the show that was not disrupted is the better show. Every time. Without exception.
The audience came for an experience. The experience should be seamless. The seams — the disruptions, the challenges, the problems — should be invisible. Not because they do not exist, but because the performer has the skill and the discipline to keep them invisible.
My Current Approach
Today, when I sense a disruption forming, my first instinct is no longer to address it. My first instinct is to redirect around it. To use movement, attention, inclusion, and the natural momentum of the performance to absorb the disruption before it fully manifests.
I do not always succeed. There are disruptions that are too loud, too persistent, or too public to handle invisibly. In those cases, I address them — briefly, warmly, and with enough humor to defuse the tension. But these cases are rare. Most disruptions, in my experience, can be handled without the audience ever knowing.
And when I pull it off — when a potential problem dissolves into nothing and the show continues without a ripple — I think about Kreskin. Standing on stage, facing a heckler, and handling it so smoothly that the audience never knew.
That is not just crowd management. That is art. That is the highest expression of Pillar Four — control so complete that it is invisible. Control that does not look like control. Control that looks like a show that simply went perfectly from start to finish.
Nobody applauds invisible control. But the show applauds it for you, in the way it flows, in the way the audience stays absorbed, in the way the experience remains unbroken.
That is the standard. I am still working toward it. But at least I know what I am working toward.