I keep a notebook. Not a pretty one — a battered Moleskine that travels with me in my bag, crammed with scribbles, diagrams, arrows, and crossed-out ideas. The notebook is where my show lives in its rawest form: a record of what I have tried, what worked, what failed, and why.
A few months ago, I sat down in a hotel room in Vienna after a corporate event and opened the notebook to a fresh page. I wrote the title of every piece in my current set, one per line. Then, next to each title, I wrote one sentence answering a single question: what job does this piece do that nothing else in the set does?
If I could answer the question clearly and immediately, the piece stayed. If I hesitated, if the answer was vague, if the best I could come up with was “It’s a good piece” or “The audience likes it” — the piece went on probation.
This was the most ruthless editing session I have ever conducted on my own work. When I was done, I had cut two pieces entirely, restructured the placement of three others, and fundamentally changed my understanding of what a set list is. It is not a playlist. It is not a sequence of things you can do. It is a roster of employees, each with a specific role, and if any of them cannot justify their salary, they are out.
Slot One: The Opener
The first piece has one job. One. It must answer the question the audience is silently asking from the moment I step in front of them: should I pay attention to this person?
That is the only question that matters in the first ninety seconds. Not “Is he talented?” Not “Is this going to be amazing?” Just “Is this worth my attention?” If the opener answers yes, I have bought myself time. If it fails to answer, I am playing catch-up for the rest of the show, and catching up from a weak opening is one of the hardest things in performance.
My opener is visual, fast, and slightly unexpected. It does not rely on audience participation — I have not earned that right yet. It does not rely on humor — the audience does not know me well enough to laugh with me. It relies on a simple, clean moment of impossibility that says: something unusual is happening here. This person can do something you cannot explain. Pay attention.
The opener is the shortest piece in my set. It lasts about two minutes. And every second of those two minutes is load-bearing. There is no warmup, no introduction, no preamble. I walk out and the magic starts almost immediately. This is deliberate. The audience has been sitting through speeches, presentations, dinner courses, possibly an awards ceremony. They do not need another person who starts by thanking the organizer and making small talk. They need a reason to shift from polite attendance to genuine engagement.
The opener provides that reason. That is its job. Its only job. And it earns its spot because no other piece in my set could do that job as efficiently.
Slot Two: The Bridge
After the opener, there is a brief transition — a few words, a moment of acknowledgment, a shift in register — and then what I think of as the bridge piece. This piece has a different job: it establishes the kind of show this is going to be.
The opener says “pay attention.” The bridge says “this is what you are in for.”
My bridge piece is conversational. It involves some interaction with the audience — not heavy participation, but a moment of genuine exchange. I ask someone a question. I respond to their answer. There is a lightness to it, a warmth, a sense that we are in this together. And within that conversational frame, something impossible happens. Something that makes the audience realize this is not just visual spectacle. There is a mind at work here. There is something they cannot pin down.
The bridge piece earns its spot because it transitions the audience from passive observation to active involvement. After the opener, they are watching me. After the bridge, they are engaged with me. That is a different relationship, and building it early is essential for everything that follows.
Slot Three: The Personality Piece
This is the piece I have written about before — the moment in the show where the audience learns who I am as a person, not just as a performer. It is the most important piece in the set, and it took me the longest to develop.
The personality piece is not about magic. Or rather, the magic is secondary to the story. This piece has a narrative — a personal story about my own journey, something real, something that reveals my character and my perspective. The magic happens within the context of the story, amplifying the emotional beats rather than serving as the main attraction.
Ken Weber’s framework helped me understand why this piece matters so much. The audience needs to know who you are. Not your resume, not your credentials, not your list of achievements. Who you are as a person. What you care about. What makes you laugh. What you have struggled with. If you communicate your humanity effectively, the audience invests in you — and when they are invested in you, everything else in the show lands harder because they care about the person performing it.
The personality piece earns its spot because it is the emotional anchor of the set. Without it, the show is a sequence of impressive demonstrations. With it, the show is a human story illustrated by moments of impossibility. The difference between those two things is the difference between entertainment and experience.
Slot Four: The Depth Piece
After the personality piece, the audience knows me and trusts me. This is the moment when I can take them somewhere deeper.
My depth piece is mentalism. It is quieter than the pieces that precede it. Less visual, more psychological. It involves the audience in a way that feels genuinely intimate — as if something is happening between us that cannot be explained by props or preparation or technique. This piece lives in the territory that Derren Brown writes about: the space between what is possible and what the audience believes is possible.
The job of the depth piece is to shift the register of the show. Up to this point, the energy has been building — from the visual impact of the opener through the warmth of the bridge and the emotional connection of the personality piece. The depth piece changes the frequency. It asks the audience to stop laughing, stop clapping, and simply wonder. To sit in a state of genuine uncertainty about what is real and what is not.
This piece earns its spot because it adds a dimension to the show that nothing else provides. Without it, the show would be entertaining but single-dimensional — all on one plane of experience. The depth piece adds a second plane: the plane of mystery. And that second plane is what makes people talk about the show the next day. They remember the funny bits. They remember the impressive visuals. But what they cannot stop thinking about is the moment that felt real.
Slot Five: The Escalation
Now the show is building toward its climax, and the escalation piece has the most straightforward job in the set: raise the stakes.
This piece is bigger, more visual, more impossible than anything that has come before. It involves direct audience participation — someone from the room, on stage or standing in the audience, playing an active role in something that defies explanation. The participation adds energy and unpredictability. The audience watches one of their own encounter the impossible firsthand, and their vicarious experience amplifies everything.
The escalation piece works because of its placement. If I opened with it, it would be impressive but decontextualized — just a big trick by a person the audience does not know or care about. After four pieces that have built credibility, connection, personality, and depth, the escalation piece arrives in a context where the audience is fully invested. They have traveled with me. They trust me. They like me. And now I am showing them something that dwarfs everything they have seen so far.
This piece earns its spot because it is the bridge between the body of the show and the closer. It takes the energy from “engaged” to “electric.” It sets up the emotional conditions that the closer will exploit.
Slot Six: The Closer
I have written extensively about closers in earlier posts, so I will not repeat the full philosophy here. But in the context of the set list and the “earn your spot” audit, the closer’s job is simple and absolute: be the thing they remember.
My closer is my strongest piece. Not the most technically difficult — though it is demanding. Not the most elaborate — it is actually quite clean and direct. It is my strongest piece in the sense that it produces the biggest, deepest, most lasting reaction. It is the moment when everything the show has built toward converges into a single point of impact.
The closer earns its spot because nothing else in the set could end the show. I have tested this. I have tried closing with other pieces — pieces that are strong, pieces that get great reactions in the middle of the set — and they do not work as closers. They lack the finality, the emotional weight, the sense of culmination that a closer requires. A good middle piece is not a good closer. A closer is a piece that says “This is the end, and it is the end because there is nowhere higher to go.”
The Pieces That Did Not Survive
The two pieces I cut during my audit were both good. I want to be clear about that. They were not bad pieces. They got solid reactions. They were well-rehearsed. I enjoyed performing them.
But when I asked “What job does this piece do that nothing else does?” I could not give a clear answer. One of them was a comedy piece that overlapped in function with my bridge piece — it also built rapport and got laughs, but it did so in a way that was redundant. Having both was not variety. It was repetition in a different costume.
The other was a visual piece that was impressive but did not advance the emotional arc. It was a lateral move — the audience’s emotional state after watching it was roughly the same as before. It did not deepen the connection, raise the stakes, or shift the register. It was just another impressive thing in a show that already had impressive things. And in a set where every minute matters, “another impressive thing” is not enough justification.
Cutting those pieces was difficult. I had invested time in developing them. I had good memories associated with performing them. But Weber is right when he says to edit ruthlessly. The word he uses is instructive: “Chop unnecessary words, delete sentences, demolish whole routines.” Demolish. Not set aside. Not shelve for later. Demolish, in the sense of acknowledging that they do not serve the show in its current form and removing them without sentimentality.
How I Audition New Material
When I develop a new piece, it does not go directly into the set. It goes through what I think of as an audition process.
Stage one is solo rehearsal. I work the piece in my hotel room until it is technically solid and the script is locked. This stage is about me and the material, with no audience pressure.
Stage two is low-stakes performance. I test the piece in situations where the stakes are low — informal gatherings, small groups of friends, the kind of setting where a rough edge or an awkward moment will not damage my professional reputation. This stage is about discovering how the piece works with real human beings, which is always different from how it works in rehearsal.
Stage three is integration testing. I slot the piece into my set at a professional event, but in a non-critical position — not as the opener, not as the closer, but somewhere in the middle where it has room to succeed or fail without taking the show down with it. This stage is about discovering how the piece interacts with the other pieces around it. Does it maintain the arc? Does it offer something the set needs? Does it complement or compete with its neighbors?
Stage four is the audit. After several performances, I ask the question: does this piece earn its spot? If yes, it stays. If no, it goes back to development or gets cut entirely.
This process is slow. It takes months to move a new piece from concept to permanent member of the set. But the slowness is the point. The set list is not a place for experiments. It is a place for proven material — pieces that have survived the gauntlet of development, testing, and honest evaluation.
The Set as an Argument
Here is the way I think about my set list now, after the audit. It is not a collection. It is an argument. Each piece is a paragraph in a larger argument that builds from premise to evidence to conclusion.
The opener is the thesis statement: this is worth your time. The bridge is the first piece of evidence: here is the kind of experience you are about to have. The personality piece is the emotional appeal: here is who is making this argument and why you should care. The depth piece is the complication: here is something that challenges your assumptions. The escalation is the dramatic evidence: here is something that proves the thesis beyond doubt. The closer is the conclusion: remember this.
Every paragraph must advance the argument. Every paragraph must do something the others do not. And if any paragraph is redundant, tangential, or weak, it undermines the argument as a whole.
This is how I think about building a set now. Not as a question of “What should I perform?” but as a question of “What argument am I making to this audience, and does every piece serve that argument?”
The pieces that earn their spot are the ones that serve the argument. Everything else, no matter how good it is in isolation, is noise.
And in a thirty-minute show, there is no room for noise. Every minute is a minute the audience is giving you from their life. Every minute must justify the gift.
That is the standard. That is the audit. That is the set list.