Let me tell you about two shows that happened within four days of each other. Same city — Vienna. Same general context — corporate event, after-dinner entertainment. Same performer — me. Completely different audiences, and the gap between them taught me more about show construction than any book ever could.
The first event was a product launch for a tech company. The audience was about sixty software engineers and product managers. They filed into the room quietly, sat down in orderly rows, and looked at me with the expression of people who have been trained to evaluate claims skeptically. A few had their arms crossed. Several had their phones out. The energy in the room was approximately that of a Tuesday morning staff meeting.
I opened with my usual comedy piece. It was a piece that had been killing at events for months — physical, funny, interactive. The kind of opener that normally has an audience laughing within the first minute.
It landed with a thud so profound I could feel the air leave the room. Not hostility. Not disapproval. Just… nothing. Polite attention. The kind of reaction that says “We are watching you because that is what we were told to do.”
Four days later, the second event. An insurance company’s annual celebration. Open bar had been running for an hour before I went on. The audience was loud, gregarious, slightly rowdy. They wanted to have fun. They were primed to laugh at almost anything.
I opened with the same piece.
This time, the room erupted. Laughter from the first line. Participation from the front row without being asked. Energy that fed back into my performance and lifted everything.
Same opener. Same performer. Same city. Polar opposite results.
After the tech company event — the quiet one, the difficult one — I sat in my hotel room and stared at my notes and realized the problem was not the opener. The opener was fine. The problem was that I had only one opener. I had built a fixed show, and when the audience did not match the show, I had nothing to offer them except the same material delivered harder, which made everything worse.
That was the night I started building what I now think of as the modular act.
The Insight That Changed Everything
Scott Alexander makes a point in his lecture notes that sounds simple but is actually radical: having more material than you need gives you the freedom to adapt. The professional does not walk into a venue with exactly one show. The professional walks in with a repertoire — a library of tested, rehearsed, performance-ready pieces that can be assembled into different configurations based on the audience, the venue, the time slot, and the energy in the room.
When I first read this, I thought: of course. That makes sense. And then I did nothing about it for months, because developing more material is hard work and I was comfortable with the set I had.
The tech company event was the wake-up call. Comfort is not the same as readiness. Having a good set is not the same as having the right set. And the right set depends entirely on the people sitting in front of you, which means you cannot know in advance exactly what the right set will be.
The only solution is to have enough material that you can adjust. Not improvise — that is a different skill and a dangerous one for someone at my level. Adjust. Swap. Reconfigure. Choose from a menu of tested options rather than serving a fixed meal to every table.
The Modular Grid
After the Vienna double-header, I went back to my hotel room — the same room where I do most of my strategic thinking, usually with a deck of cards in my hand and a notepad on the bed — and I built what I now call the modular grid.
It is a simple matrix. Down the left side, I listed every piece in my repertoire — every opener, every middle piece, every closer, every piece still in development. Across the top, I created columns for the attributes that matter when I am choosing what to perform.
The first column is type: is this piece visual magic, mentalism, comedy, emotional, or a display of skill? This tells me what kind of audience response it is designed to produce.
The second column is energy: does this piece work better with a high-energy crowd or a quiet, focused crowd? Some pieces need audience enthusiasm to land. Others actually work better in silence. Knowing this in advance prevents me from playing a high-energy piece to a room that wants to think and marvel.
The third column is participation level: does this piece require a volunteer on stage, audience members participating from their seats, or no participation at all? This matters enormously for pacing. Too many volunteer pieces in a row and the show bogs down. Too few and the audience feels like spectators at a lecture rather than participants in an experience.
The fourth column is technical requirements: does this piece need a table? Music? A specific stage setup? Specific lighting? Can it be done surrounded, or does it require a proscenium-style layout where the audience is in front of me? These practical constraints determine what is even possible in a given venue.
The fifth column is prep and reset time: how long does it take to set up this piece, and how long to reset if I need to? A piece with a long reset is impractical to follow with something that requires immediate props.
When I filled in this grid, patterns emerged that I had never noticed. I was heavy on comedy pieces and light on quiet, cerebral material. I had too many pieces that required a table and not enough that worked with nothing but my hands and my words. I had several pieces that all needed a volunteer on stage, but only two that worked with audience participation from the seats.
The grid showed me not just what I had, but what I was missing. And it gave me a shopping list for the kind of material I needed to develop next.
How I Used It the Next Time
About a month after building the grid, I was booked for an event in Graz. The brief said “corporate awards dinner, approximately one hundred people, mixed audience of employees and their partners.” Fairly standard.
I arrived two hours early, as I always do now. I talked to the event organizer. I watched the room fill up. I paid attention to how people were sitting, what they were drinking, how they were talking to each other. And I noticed something: the audience was older than I expected. The median age was probably fifty-five. The energy was warm but not rowdy. People were dressed formally. The conversations I overheard were polite, measured, articulate.
This was not a comedy crowd. This was an audience that would appreciate sophistication over slapstick, wonder over laughter, genuine connection over rapid-fire entertainment.
I pulled out my phone and looked at the modular grid. I swapped my usual comedy opener for something more visual and elegant. I replaced a high-energy participation piece with a quieter mentalism routine. I kept my personality piece because it works with almost any audience. And I swapped in a closer that builds through suspense rather than comedy.
The result was a show that felt tailored for that specific room. Several people came up afterward and said something along the lines of “That was exactly right for this group.” They did not know that “exactly right for this group” was a different configuration than “exactly right for the tech company” or “exactly right for the insurance party.” They just knew it felt personal. It felt like I understood them.
That is what the modular act gives you. Not the appearance of spontaneity — the reality of adaptation. You are not winging it. You are choosing from a curated library of tested material based on real-time information about the people in front of you.
The Paradox: More Rehearsal Equals More Spontaneity
This is the thing that took me the longest to understand, and it is the thing that most people get backwards.
The intuition says: if you want to be spontaneous, rehearse less. Leave room for improvisation. Be loose. Go with the flow.
The reality is the opposite. If you want to be genuinely adaptive in performance, you need to have rehearsed more material than you will ever use in a single show. Each piece needs to be so deeply embedded in your muscle memory, so thoroughly internalized, that you can slot it into any position in the set without thinking about it. The transitions need to work in multiple directions — piece A to piece C, piece A to piece E, piece D to piece B. You need to be able to skip a piece, add a piece, rearrange the order, and still maintain a coherent arc.
This only works if every piece is rehearsed to the point of being automatic. If you have to think about the mechanics of a piece while performing it, you do not have the cognitive bandwidth to also think about the audience, the pacing, the overall arc. The pieces need to be on autopilot so that your conscious attention can focus on the only thing that truly matters in the moment: reading the room and serving the people in it.
This is why amateurs have one show and professionals have a repertoire. Not because professionals are more talented — though many are — but because professionals have invested the time to rehearse a deep bench of material to performance-ready standard. They have done the boring, repetitive, unglamorous work of drilling piece after piece until each one is bulletproof. And that investment pays dividends every single time they walk into a room and discover that the audience is not what they expected.
What I Got Wrong at the Tech Company
Looking back at that Vienna tech event, I know exactly what I should have done. The modular grid makes it obvious.
I should have opened with mentalism, not comedy. Engineers respond to the appearance of impossible knowledge, to the demonstration of cognitive abilities that defy explanation. They want to be intellectually challenged, not entertained in the traditional sense. A strong prediction effect or a thought-reading demonstration would have had them leaning forward from the first moment.
I should have positioned my comedy pieces in the middle, not at the opening. By the middle of a show, even the most reserved audience has warmed up. They have given me permission to be funny because I have already demonstrated that I am worth paying attention to. Comedy works after credibility is established. Before credibility, comedy feels like a stranger trying too hard to make you laugh.
And I should have closed with something that demonstrated genuine skill — something that even a room full of analytical minds would recognize as requiring years of dedication and practice. Engineers respect mastery. They respect the visible evidence of disciplined effort. A display-of-skill closer would have left them with the impression that stuck: this person is serious about what he does.
I did not make any of those adjustments because I did not have the material to make them. I had one show, and the show did not fit the room. The modular act exists so that this never happens again.
Building Depth, Not Just Width
One mistake I made in the early days of building the modular grid was focusing on width — adding more and more pieces to the repertoire without deepening any of them. I had a lot of material, but much of it was shallow. Pieces that worked fine but were not exceptional. Pieces that I had rehearsed enough to get through but not enough to perform with confidence under pressure.
The correction came when I realized that a modular act needs depth in every slot. You do not need ten openers. You need three openers, each of which is extraordinary. You do not need eight mentalism pieces. You need four, each of which is rehearsed to the point where it is effortless and devastating. Quality times options is the equation. More options at lower quality is worse than fewer options at higher quality.
Now my approach is to have two or three pieces in each functional category — two strong openers, two personality pieces that work in different registers, three or four middle pieces that offer genuine variety, and two closers. Each piece is drilled, tested, refined, and re-tested. Each piece has been performed in front of real audiences and has earned its place in the grid through actual results, not theoretical potential.
This is a smaller grid than I initially imagined, but it is a more powerful one. Every cell contains a piece I trust completely. And when I am standing backstage at an event, scanning the room, deciding what to play, I am choosing between options that are all excellent. I am not hoping that one of my half-rehearsed pieces will somehow hold up under pressure. I am selecting from a curated collection of my best work.
The Freedom
Here is what it feels like now, after two years of building the modular act.
I arrive at a venue. I talk to the organizer. I observe the room. I watch the audience settle in. And instead of anxiety — instead of the quiet terror of “Will my set work for these people?” — I feel something close to anticipation. Because I know that whatever I discover about this audience, I have material that will serve them. I have options. I have flexibility. I have the freedom to be responsive rather than rigid.
When the organizer says the time slot has changed, I do not panic. I reconfigure. When I see that the audience is not what I expected, I do not push through with the wrong material. I swap. When a piece is not landing for reasons I cannot fully diagnose in the moment, I have the confidence to cut it short and move to something that will work, because I have something else that is just as strong.
This is what Alexander means when he says too much material is freedom. It is not about having a bloated act. It is about having enough depth in your repertoire that you can serve any audience, any time slot, any venue, any energy level. It is about being prepared for the room you find, not just the room you imagined.
The amateur has one show and hopes the audience fits it. The professional has a repertoire and fits the show to the audience.
I am somewhere between those two points, getting closer to the second every month. The modular grid is my map for the journey. And every new piece I add, every piece I refine, every configuration I test in front of a live audience, is another step toward the freedom that comes from being truly, deeply, unreservedly prepared.