There is a moment I keep coming back to from early in my journey. It was a small private show in Graz, maybe thirty people, the kind of event where everyone knows each other and the atmosphere is already warm before the performer walks in. I had been performing seriously for about a year at that point, and I was deep in the phase where I believed the magic itself was the point. That if the effects were strong enough, the techniques clean enough, the reveals surprising enough, the show would work.
The show did work, in a sense. People were fooled. People reacted. The effects landed. When I walked off, the applause was solid.
But the event organizer, a woman I had worked with on the corporate side, pulled me aside afterward and said something that bothered me for months. She said: “Felix, the magic was impressive. But you know what people are going to remember? Not the tricks. The bit where you dropped the joke about the hotel WiFi and the whole room lost it. That is what they are going to talk about tomorrow.”
She was right. I knew she was right because I had heard variations of this feedback before. People did not talk about the card that appeared in the impossible location. They talked about the funny moment, the personal story, the aside where I connected with someone in the front row and something spontaneous happened.
The magic was the framework. But it was not what made the evening memorable.
The Weber Line
Weber puts it bluntly in Maximum Entertainment: “The magic is rarely enough.”
When I first read that sentence, my initial reaction was defensive. What do you mean, the magic is not enough? That is literally what we do. That is the skill we have spent years developing. If the magic is not enough, what was the point of all those hours in hotel rooms with a deck of cards?
But he is right, and the evidence is overwhelming once you start looking for it. Think about the performers who have achieved genuine mainstream success — the names that even non-magicians know. David Copperfield. Penn and Teller. Derren Brown. Dynamo. What do they all have in common? It is not that their magic is the strongest in the world. There are close-up magicians working bar gigs who have technique that would make your hands shake. There are mentalists at local shows whose methods are ingenious beyond what any television performer would attempt.
The difference is not the magic. The difference is the personality, the comedy, the charm, the storytelling, the humanity that wraps around the magic and turns it from a demonstration into an experience.
Copperfield tells personal stories amidst his mega-productions. Penn talks while Teller works, and the combination of comedy and silence creates something neither could achieve alone. Brown frames everything through a lens of psychology and personal philosophy that makes each effect feel like an exploration of human nature rather than a puzzle to solve.
The magic is the skeleton. The personality is the body.
The Puzzle Problem
Weber describes a hierarchy of mystery entertainment that helps explain why magic alone is not enough. At the lowest tier is the puzzle — the spectator sees something impossible and immediately begins trying to figure it out. “How did he do that?” is a puzzle response. It is intellectual, not emotional. It engages the analytical mind rather than the feeling mind. And while it is a valid form of engagement, it is the weakest form of entertainment magic can provide.
Above the puzzle is the trick — a demonstration of perceived skill. And above the trick is the extraordinary moment, which leaves no room for analysis. The viewer gasps rather than grasps.
Here is the key insight: what elevates a puzzle to an extraordinary moment is not better technique. It is presentation. It is the personality, the timing, the framing, the emotional context that transforms “how did he do that?” into “I cannot believe what I just experienced.” And that transformation cannot happen if the performer is offering nothing but the magical effect itself.
A performer who walks on stage and executes a series of impressive effects without personality, without humor, without warmth, without stories — that performer is giving the audience puzzles. Clean, impressive, technically brilliant puzzles. And the audience’s response will be intellectual appreciation, which is a long way from the emotional engagement that makes a show memorable.
The Personality Ingredients
So what does the magic need alongside it? In my experience, after years of trial and error and studying performers far more accomplished than myself, the magic needs at least three things beyond technique.
It needs humor. Not scripted jokes, necessarily — forced comedy is worse than no comedy at all. But genuine humor, the kind that arises naturally from the performer’s personality and from the situations that magic creates. Weber distinguishes between organic humor, which grows out of the magic situation itself, and canned jokes, which are imported from outside. Organic humor is always stronger because it feels spontaneous and real, even when it has been rehearsed.
I discovered early on that my best laughs come from acknowledging the absurdity of what I do. A line like “I realize this looks ridiculous, but bear with me” gets a laugh because it is honest and because the audience is thinking the same thing. It does not undermine the magic; it humanizes the magician. And a humanized magician is infinitely more entertaining than a remote, serious figure performing miracles in a vacuum.
It needs charm — or, more precisely, it needs the loveability factor that I discussed earlier in this series. The audience needs to like you. Not admire you, not respect you, not be impressed by you — like you. The way you like a friend who is showing you something interesting. That warmth, that sense of being in the company of someone you enjoy spending time with, is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Without it, the best magic in the world feels cold.
And it needs personality — the specific, idiosyncratic, unmistakably individual quality that makes you different from every other person who does this. Fitzkee was relentless about this point: personality is the most valuable single product of the entertainment industry. If the audience wants tricks, any magician will do. If the audience wants you, only you will do. And the only way to make the audience want you specifically is to give them something that only you can offer, which is yourself.
What I Had to Learn
For the first year of performing seriously, I was hiding behind the magic. I treated the effects as the star of the show and myself as the delivery mechanism. My personality was present but muted. My humor was occasional but not cultivated. My charm was whatever happened to leak through the cracks in my concentration.
This is extremely common among adult-onset performers, especially those of us who came from analytical professional backgrounds. In consulting, the content is the star. The presenter is the vehicle. You do not walk into a boardroom and charm people — you walk in and deliver insight. The personality is secondary to the substance.
But entertainment does not work that way. In entertainment, the personality is the substance. The magic is the context. And this inversion took me a long time to understand and even longer to implement.
The shift began when I started consciously developing the non-magic elements of my show. I started writing personal stories into my routines — not fabricated performance pieces but genuine anecdotes from my life. The story of how I started doing magic because I could not bring my music gear to hotel rooms. The story of the terrible clown at the children’s party in Austria that gave me a negative view of magic for decades. The story of meeting Adam Wilber and realizing I was going to have to learn to perform because you cannot co-found a magic company and not be able to do magic.
These stories are not magic. There is nothing impossible about them. But they do something the magic cannot: they let the audience know who I am. They create a context for the effects that transforms them from demonstrations into chapters of a narrative. The audience is not just watching tricks. They are watching a specific person, with a specific history and specific quirks, doing something he is passionate about.
The Stand-Up Lesson
The more I studied performance craft, the more I found myself drawn to stand-up comedy as a parallel discipline. Stand-up comedians face the same fundamental challenge magicians do: they are standing alone in front of an audience, and they need to create a compelling experience using nothing but their personality and their material.
The difference is that comedians have no tricks to hide behind. There is no effect to distract from a weak personality. If the comedian is not funny, engaging, and personally compelling, the set dies. There is no sleight of hand to save them.
This means comedians develop their personality-as-performance skills to a degree that most magicians never approach. They learn to be vulnerable, self-deprecating, observational, and authentic because they have no other choice. The material and the person are inseparable. You cannot separate a comedian’s joke from the comedian telling it.
Magic would benefit enormously from the same philosophy. The effect and the performer should be inseparable. The routine should be so deeply connected to the performer’s personality that it could not be performed by anyone else without fundamental changes. When that integration is achieved, the magic stops being a demonstration and starts being an expression.
Ortiz and the Technique of Showmanship
Darwin Ortiz makes the case in Strong Magic that showmanship is not a personality trait — it is a body of technique, as learnable as any sleight of hand. This reframe was enormously important for me because it meant I did not have to be a naturally charismatic person to develop a charismatic performance. I could study the techniques of comedy, of storytelling, of audience engagement, and build them into my show systematically.
And that is exactly what I did. I studied comedy structure. I learned about setups and payoffs, about callbacks and tags, about the rhythm of a laugh line. I studied storytelling for performers. I worked on vocal variety, on the timing of a pause, on the specific techniques of eye contact and physical stillness that communicate presence.
None of this came naturally. I am a strategy consultant by training. My natural mode is analytical, structured, slightly formal. The warmth, the humor, the spontaneous charm that the best performers project — those were acquired skills for me, built through deliberate practice and honest self-evaluation.
But they were acquirable. That is the point. You do not have to be born funny to be funny on stage. You do not have to be naturally charming to project charm during a performance. You have to study the techniques, practice them, refine them through performance, and gradually integrate them into your show until they feel natural.
The Integration Challenge
The hardest part is not adding personality to your show. The hardest part is integrating personality and magic so seamlessly that the audience cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.
In a poorly integrated show, the magic and the personality alternate. Story, trick, story, trick. Joke, effect, joke, effect. The audience can feel the seams. They can feel the performer switching modes between “entertainer” and “magician,” and each transition costs energy and engagement.
In a well-integrated show, the personality and the magic are woven together so tightly that they feel like one thing. The story leads into the effect. The joke arises from the magic situation. The personal moment happens during the routine, not between routines. The audience does not experience a personality segment followed by a magic segment. They experience a unified performance where everything — words, actions, effects, character — is serving the same purpose.
Achieving this integration is an ongoing project for me. I am not there yet, not fully. There are still moments in my show where I can feel the transition between “Felix the person” and “Felix the performer,” and I know the audience can feel it too. But the gap is narrower than it was a year ago, and narrower than it was two years ago, and the trajectory gives me confidence that the integration will continue to deepen.
The Bottom Line
If you are a magician reading this and you are spending ninety percent of your practice time on technique and ten percent on everything else, you have the ratio inverted.
I am not saying technique does not matter. It does. It is the first pillar, the non-negotiable foundation. But once your technique is solid — once you can execute your effects without conscious effort — the marginal return on additional technical practice drops dramatically. The marginal return on developing your comedy, your storytelling, your charm, your spontaneity, your personality-as-performance skills goes up.
The magic is rarely enough. It is the skeleton, not the body. It is the frame, not the painting. It is the invitation, not the experience.
The experience is you. Your humor, your warmth, your stories, your quirks, your willingness to be a specific human being in front of other human beings rather than a generic magician performing generic magic.
That is what the audience will remember tomorrow. Not the effect. Not the method. Not the technique.
You.
Make sure you are giving them enough of yourself that you are worth remembering.