I want to tell you about the flattest thirty minutes of entertainment I have ever produced.
It was about two years into my performing life. I had put together what I considered a solid set — five effects, well-practiced, reliably strong, linked by decent transitions. I performed it at a corporate event in Salzburg. The audience was engaged. They laughed at the right moments. They reacted at the reveals. By every measurable standard, it was a successful show.
But when I watched the recording afterward, following the five-viewing protocol I described earlier in this blog, I noticed something I had not felt from the inside. The show was all one thing. One texture. One tone. One energy level. One mode of engagement from start to finish.
Every piece was verbal — me talking to the audience, setting up premises, making jokes, delivering reveals. Every piece involved cards or small objects. Every piece was performed at roughly the same physical distance from the audience. Every piece was in the same emotional register: light, conversational, upbeat. There was no shift in mood. No change in pace. No moment where the show became something different than it had been for the previous ten minutes.
It was like eating pasta for five courses. Good pasta. Well-made pasta. But by course three, you are not tasting the pasta anymore. You are just eating.
Scott Alexander writes about this in his lecture notes on building a stand-up act, and his framing is what finally made me understand the problem. He talks about “layers and peaks and valleys” — the undulations in mood, tone, energy, and engagement that keep a modern audience alive and responsive. A great show, he argues, moves from high energy to low-key, from comedy to emotional moments, from talking pieces to silent musical numbers. The variety itself is a fundamental structural element, not decoration.
When I read that, I looked at my set and saw what it was missing: texture.
What Texture Actually Means
Texture in a show is not about the quality of individual moments. It is about the diversity of experience types the audience moves through over the course of the performance. A show with one texture — all comedy, or all drama, or all high energy — quickly becomes predictable, regardless of how good each individual moment is. A show with varied texture keeps the audience in a state of pleasant uncertainty about what comes next, which is one of the most powerful forms of engagement there is.
Think about the dimensions you can vary. Volume — loud and energetic vs. quiet and intimate. Pace — rapid-fire interactions vs. slow, deliberate gestures. Emotional register — comedy, wonder, warmth, drama, mystery, vulnerability. Mode of engagement — talking pieces, silent pieces, interactive pieces, demonstrations of skill. Physical space — stage front, in the audience, close with a volunteer, using the full width of the room. Props and objects — cards, coins, mentalism without props, borrowed objects, large visual effects.
These are the tools of texture. And in my early shows, I was using approximately one of them.
The TV News Analogy
Alexander makes a comparison that resonated deeply with me because of my professional life: the modern TV news screen. Think about what a news broadcast looks like today. There is the anchor speaking. There is a ticker running along the bottom. There is a graphic in the corner. There is a live feed in a split-screen. Multiple streams of information are running simultaneously, and the viewer can shift their attention between them.
This is not accidental. It reflects an understanding that modern audiences have been trained — by the internet, by social media, by years of multi-screen consumption — to process information in varied, rapid bursts. They get bored faster. They need more frequent changes of stimulus to remain engaged. This does not mean you should turn your show into a chaotic information overload. But it does mean that holding a single texture for thirty unbroken minutes is fighting against the way modern minds work.
The solution is not to speed everything up or to cram in more material. The solution is variety. Frequent shifts in texture that give the audience’s attention system something new to latch onto. Not every thirty seconds — that would be chaotic. But every five to eight minutes, something about the experience should shift noticeably. A change in energy. A change in emotional register. A change in the mode of engagement.
This is exactly what happened when I started restructuring my set.
Mapping My First Thirty Minutes
After reading Alexander’s lecture notes and cross-referencing them with Weber’s principles about building to a climax, I sat down with a notebook and mapped my existing set. For each piece, I noted:
- Emotional register: comedy, wonder, mystery, warmth, drama
- Energy level: high, medium, low
- Mode: talking, silent, interactive
- Prop type: cards, mentalism, borrowed objects, none
- Physical space: stage front, in audience, with volunteer
The result was damning. Every piece was comedy-to-wonder, medium energy, talking mode, card-based, stage front. Five pieces, one texture. The audience’s experience was a straight line — not just in terms of intensity (which I discussed in the previous post about contrast) but in terms of the kind of experience itself.
No wonder the show felt flat even when individual effects hit. The audience had no reason to shift gears. No reason to re-engage their attention in a new way. No moment where the experience changed character and surprised them not with impossibility but with variety.
The First Change: Adding Silence
The first change I made was to insert a piece performed entirely in silence, accompanied by music. I discussed this briefly in the previous post, but I want to go deeper into why it mattered.
For twenty minutes, my voice had been the constant thread — setting up premises, delivering punchlines, interacting with volunteers. Because it was constant, the audience’s attention to it was gradually diminishing. Not because they were bored, but because constant stimuli lose their perceptual salience. My voice had become background hum.
When the music started and I stopped talking, the shift was electric. Not because the silent piece was objectively better. Because it was different. The audience’s auditory system, adapted to my voice, suddenly encountered its absence. That absence was itself a stimulus.
I could see it in their bodies. People who had been leaning back suddenly leaned forward. The quality of their attention changed because the quality of the experience changed.
And when the music ended and I spoke again, my voice was fresh. A re-entry. Something that had been absent and had now returned, engaging in a way it had not been for the previous five minutes.
That single addition transformed the energy of the entire set. Not because the piece itself was transformative, but because the variety was.
The Second Change: Emotional Range
The next change I made was to vary the emotional register. My early set was consistently light — comedy and wonder, comedy and wonder, comedy and wonder. I was afraid of anything that felt too serious or too personal. I was a consultant who did magic at corporate events. I thought the audience wanted to be entertained in the conventional sense: make them laugh, make them gasp, send them back to the bar happy.
But the performers I most admired all had at least one moment of genuine emotional depth. A point where the comedy paused and something real emerged. A personal story. A moment of vulnerability. A piece that was simply trying to be true.
So I added one. A piece where I talked briefly about why I got into magic — the consultant who was alone in hotel rooms, night after night, who bought a deck of cards because he needed something to do with his hands. Not a long story. Not maudlin. Just honest. And I followed it with an effect that connected to that story emotionally — something about transformation, about finding something unexpected in something ordinary.
The response was immediate and unmistakable. The audience connected with that moment in a way they did not connect with the comedy or the wonder. Not because it was better. Because it was different. Because it engaged a part of their emotional spectrum that the rest of the show had not touched. They were feeling something new, and that novelty of feeling created a moment of genuine intimacy.
And — this is the important part — the comedy that followed it was funnier. The wonder that came after was more wondrous. Because the emotional shift had reset their baseline, made them vulnerable, opened them up. The valley of genuine feeling made the subsequent peaks higher.
The Framework I Use Now
Here is the practical framework I have developed for ensuring texture variety in my sets. It is not rigid — I adjust based on the event, the audience, the time slot. But it gives me a structure to build from.
I think of each piece in my set as having a “texture profile” across five dimensions: energy (high to low), emotion (comedy to drama), mode (talking to silent), engagement (solo to interactive), and visual character (intimate to spectacular). I map each piece on these dimensions and then arrange them so that adjacent pieces are different on at least two or three dimensions.
If piece one is high energy, comedy, talking, solo, and intimate, then piece two should shift at least two of those dials. The most important shifts, I have found, are in emotional register and mode of engagement. Shifting from comedy to genuine warmth, or from talking to silence, creates the most noticeable texture change. Energy and visual character are secondary dials that fine-tune the experience.
The Living Show
The result of this approach is a show that feels alive. Not in the sense of being wild or unpredictable — the structure is very deliberate. But alive in the sense that it breathes. It has rhythms. It moves. It is not a single sustained note but a composition with distinct movements, each serving a different purpose and engaging the audience in a different way.
Alexander’s phrase keeps coming back to me: layers and peaks and valleys. That is what a varied-texture show feels like. Not a straight line. Not even a simple upward slope. A landscape with contours — rises and dips and flat stretches and dramatic ascents. A journey where the scenery changes, where each new section offers something the previous section did not.
This is what I was missing in that flat thirty minutes in Salzburg. Good material, performed competently, in one unvarying texture. Like pasta for five courses. The solution was not better pasta. The solution was a menu.
I still perform card effects. I still tell jokes. I still talk to my audiences in the conversational, slightly blunt style that is natural to me. But now those elements exist within a structure that also includes silence and music, genuine emotion and personal story, spectacle and intimacy, high energy and quiet contemplation. The variety is not an afterthought. It is the architecture.
And the audiences feel it. They may not be able to articulate why the show feels more engaging, more alive, more like a journey. But they feel the difference between a monotone and a melody. Everyone does.
The texture is the melody.