After I wrote my first real script — the one I described in the last post — I felt good about it. The rambling was gone. The filler phrases were gone. The nervous narration of my own actions was gone. What remained was cleaner, tighter, more purposeful than anything I had ever said on stage.
Then I ran it through a filter that cut it in half.
The filter came from Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment, and it is one of the simplest and most brutal frameworks I have ever encountered. Weber argues that every moment in your show — every single word you say, every action you take — should target one of three reactions from your audience: rapt attention, laughter, or astonishment.
That is it. Three reactions. Everything else is filler.
When I first read that, I thought it was hyperbole. Nobody could actually hold every word in their script to that standard. It was aspirational, not practical. An ideal to aim for, not a test to pass.
Then I tried applying it, and I discovered just how serious Weber was.
The Exercise
Here is what I did. I printed out the script I had written — the one I was so proud of, the one that had already gone through one round of brutal editing. I grabbed a set of colored highlighters. Green for lines targeting rapt attention. Yellow for lines targeting laughter. Red for lines targeting astonishment.
And then a fourth color — blue — for anything that did not fit any of those three categories.
I went through the script line by line, asking one question of each sentence: which of the Big Three is this targeting? Not which reaction might it accidentally produce. Which reaction is it designed to produce? What is its job?
The green lines were sentences that built tension, created mystery, or drew the audience deeper into the narrative. Rapt attention is not passive — it is active engagement, the audience choosing to invest their focus because what you are saying is genuinely interesting.
The yellow lines were moments designed to make the audience laugh. Not smile politely. Laugh. Genuine humor that earns a vocal response.
The red lines were the magic payoffs. The moments of impossibility. The reveals, the climaxes, the instants where the audience’s understanding of reality gets disrupted.
And the blue lines? The blue lines were everything else. Instructions to volunteers. Procedural transitions. Descriptions of what I was holding. Filler.
I still remember the moment I sat back and looked at the page. There was a lot of blue.
The Uncomfortable Math
I counted. Roughly half my script — a script I had already edited for tightness, a script I was proud of — was blue. Half of what I was saying on stage was not targeting any of the three reactions that define entertainment. It was procedural. Administrative. Functional but not engaging.
Some of it was necessary. You have to give instructions to volunteers. You have to set up the conditions for an effect. You have to explain what is about to happen. Weber acknowledges this — he calls it “necessary instructions or explanations” and treats it as a fourth category, the unavoidable overhead of performance.
But here is the key insight: even necessary instructions should be minimized and, wherever possible, transformed. Can the instruction become funny? Can the setup create anticipation? Can the transition between effects build interest rather than simply marking time?
The answer, in almost every case, was yes. Once I started looking at my blue lines as opportunities rather than obligations, the script began to transform.
Turning Blue into Green
Let me give you an example without revealing any methods.
I had a moment in one of my mentalism routines where I needed a volunteer to write something down. My original line was something like: “What I’d like you to do is take this pen and this card and write down something for me. Don’t show anyone, just write it down and fold the card in half.”
Functional. Clear. Completely blue. It accomplishes the procedural task, and the audience sits there waiting for something interesting to happen.
The revised version reframed the instruction inside a narrative. Instead of telling the volunteer what to do, I told them why what they were about to do mattered. I created a context that made the simple act of writing something down feel like the beginning of an experiment, something with stakes, something the audience wanted to see through. The instruction was still there — the volunteer still knew what to do — but it was embedded in a moment that created genuine curiosity.
Same action. Same information conveyed. But one version is dead air and the other has the audience leaning forward.
This is what Weber means when he says anything that fails to deliver one of the Big Three reactions is filler. It is not that instructions are forbidden. It is that naked, unadorned instructions represent a missed opportunity. Every line of your script is real estate, and dead-air real estate is wasted real estate.
The Rapt Attention Problem
Of the three reactions, rapt attention is the hardest to design for and the easiest to delude yourself about.
Laughter is binary. Either the audience laughs or they do not. You know immediately whether a line is working. Astonishment is similarly clear — the gasps, the expressions, the involuntary exclamations tell you exactly when the impossible has landed.
But rapt attention is quiet. It looks like an audience sitting still and watching. And the dangerous thing is that boredom also looks like an audience sitting still and watching. The difference is internal — one is leaning in, the other is drifting away — and from the stage, especially under lights, it can be very hard to tell which is happening.
This means you cannot simply label a line as “rapt attention” and move on. You have to be honest with yourself about whether the line actually earns attention or merely expects it. A line that conveys information is not automatically attention-worthy. A story beat that seems interesting to you — because you know where it is going — may be dull to an audience that does not.
The test I developed for myself was this: if I removed this line entirely, would the audience notice? Would they feel a gap in the narrative? Would something be missing? If the answer is no — if the line could vanish without the audience caring — then it is not earning its place. It is scenery the audience is not looking at.
The Laughter Standard
Laughter was the category where I was most honest with myself, because laughter is the most unforgiving feedback mechanism in live performance.
When I went through my script looking for lines targeting laughter, I found several that I had marked as humor but that had never actually produced a laugh. They got smiles. A general sense of warmth. But not the vocal, physical response that constitutes genuine laughter.
A smile is not a laugh. A smile is a polite acknowledgment, and polite acknowledgment is not one of the Big Three reactions. The bar for laughter is higher than most performers set it.
This does not mean every performer needs to be a comedian. The best humor in magic is organic — it arises from the magical situation itself, from interaction with volunteers, from the inherent absurdity of what we do. But those moments need to be set up and scripted, because leaving humor entirely to chance means some shows will have it and some will not.
The Astonishment Inventory
Red lines — the astonishment moments — were the easiest to identify and the most interesting to analyze. Every routine has its climax, its payoff, its moment of impossibility. These are the moments the entire performance is built toward.
What surprised me was how few of them there were. In a twenty-minute set, I had perhaps five or six genuine astonishment moments. Five or six instants where the audience experienced something they could not explain. Everything else — the vast majority of the performance — was scaffolding around those moments.
This is not a problem. It is the nature of the art form. You cannot have wall-to-wall astonishment. The moments of impossibility need context, setup, narrative. They need rapt attention and laughter to create the emotional landscape in which astonishment can land with maximum impact.
But recognizing that astonishment moments are rare makes them precious. And precious things deserve to be highlighted, not thrown away. Every line of rapt-attention scripting is building toward one of those red moments. Every laugh is releasing tension that will make the next impossible moment hit harder. The entire script is a delivery system for those five or six seconds of genuine astonishment.
When you see it that way, the blue lines become not just filler — they become active obstacles. Every second of dead air is a second that dilutes the build toward astonishment. Every unnecessary instruction is a speed bump on the road to the moment that matters.
The Revision Process
Armed with my color-coded script, I went through a second revision. This time, I had a specific mandate: reduce the blue.
Some blue lines I cut entirely. They were not needed. The audience did not require the information, or the information could be communicated through action rather than words.
Some blue lines I transformed. The instruction became part of a story. The procedural transition became a moment of humor. The dead description became a beat of genuine interest.
And some blue lines I kept, because they were genuinely necessary and could not be improved. But I made them shorter. Tighter. I stripped every unnecessary word so that the necessary information was delivered as efficiently as possible, minimizing the time the audience spent in procedural mode.
The result was a script that was more than forty percent shorter than my “already edited” first draft. And it was not shorter because it said less. It was shorter because everything in it was working. Every line had a job. Every sentence was targeting a specific reaction.
What This Changes About Performance
Performing a script where every line is a bullet aimed at a specific reaction feels fundamentally different from performing a script full of filler. The energy is higher because there are no dead spots for the energy to drain through. The pacing is tighter because every line is pulling its weight. The audience engagement is deeper because there are no moments where you are asking them to simply wait.
And here is the thing that surprised me most: the performances feel shorter. Not to the audience — they are getting the same amount of stage time. But to me. Because there are no wasted moments, no stretches of time where I am filling space. Every second is active. Every second is aimed at something. The performance becomes a sprint of purposeful communication instead of a marathon of hopeful improvisation.
When I perform now, I hear Weber’s voice in my head before every line: which of the three is this targeting? Rapt attention, laughter, or astonishment? If the answer is none of the above, the line does not belong.
The Exercise I Recommend
If you perform anything — magic, keynotes, presentations, stand-up — try this. Print your script or transcribe what you actually say. Get four colored highlighters. Go through it line by line and ask: which reaction is this designed to produce?
Then count the colors.
If you are like I was, the result will be humbling. Half your script will be blue. But awareness is the beginning of improvement. Once you see the blue, you cannot unsee it. Every unnecessary word becomes a pebble in your shoe, something you cannot wait to fix.
Every word must be a bullet. Anything else is noise the audience has to sit through on the way to the moment that matters.