There is a moment I remember from a corporate event in Salzburg — maybe two years into performing — when a colleague pulled me aside after my set and said something I have never forgotten.
“The best part,” he said, leaning in like he was sharing a secret, “was when you went off-script. That bit about the guy’s watch. That was gold.”
I smiled and thanked him. What I did not tell him was that the bit about the guy’s watch was not off-script. I had written it three weeks earlier, rehearsed it in my hotel room in Linz, refined the wording twice, tested it at a private event in Graz, and locked it into my set. Every pause. Every glance at the watch. Every raised eyebrow. Scripted.
And his reaction — “that was the best part, the spontaneous bit” — was exactly the reaction I had been trying to produce.
I did not arrive at this understanding on my own. It came from a story I read in Scott Alexander’s Standing Up On Stage that stopped me cold. Alexander describes how he and his wife went to see Dennis Miller perform in Las Vegas. Not once. They saw him multiple times across the span of a week.
On opening night, Miller was everything you would expect. Sharp, fast, unpredictable. He seemed to be riffing off the top of his head. The tangents felt organic. The asides felt spontaneous. The whole performance had the quality of a brilliant conversationalist who happened to have a microphone and a spotlight.
By the end of the week, Alexander and his wife realized something that fundamentally changed the way they thought about performance: everything — including the parts that seemed completely off-the-cuff — was scripted. Word for word. Night after night, the same “spontaneous” observations. The same “in-the-moment” tangents. The same “ad-libbed” asides, delivered with the same timing, the same inflection, the same casual shrug.
What appeared to be the freest, most natural performance they had ever seen was, in reality, one of the most precisely constructed.
The Myth of the Natural
Before I read that story, I had been laboring under a belief that I think most beginners share. I believed that the best performers were the ones who could just get up there and be themselves. That scripting was a crutch. That memorization was for people who lacked the natural talent to improvise. That the mark of a truly great performer was the ability to wing it.
This belief is wrong. Not partially wrong. Completely, dangerously wrong.
The performers who look the most natural are, almost without exception, the most thoroughly prepared. The ones who seem to be making it up as they go along have rehearsed every word until the seams disappeared. The ones who appear to be having a casual conversation with the audience have mapped out every beat of that conversation in advance.
What I was seeing as spontaneity was actually the result of preparation so thorough that it had become invisible.
This was a hard pill to swallow. I come from a world — strategy consulting — where thinking on your feet is genuinely valued. In a boardroom, you really do have to improvise. You cannot script a client meeting when you do not know what the client is going to say. My professional life had trained me to believe that the ability to think in real time was the highest skill.
And it is a high skill. But it is not what performing looks like. Performing is not a conversation. It is not a brainstorm. It is not a meeting where you respond to what the other side brings up. Performing is a crafted experience that you deliver to people who are watching you, and the better you craft it, the more natural it feels to them.
The Paradox in Practice
The first time I tried to fully script a performance, I felt ridiculous. I was sitting in a hotel room in Vienna, late at night, writing down sentences I planned to say out loud to strangers. Every word felt stiff. Every line felt forced. I kept thinking, “I would never actually say this. This sounds nothing like me.”
And that was the first lesson. The script I wrote was not what I would say. It was what I thought I should say. There is a massive gap between those two things. My written words sounded like a press release. My spoken words — when I just talked to someone about the same topic — sounded like a human being.
So I started over. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and just talked. No writing. Just me, explaining what I was going to do, why I was doing it, what was interesting about it. I talked the way I talk when I am excited about something — the way I would explain it to a friend over a glass of wine. And then I wrote down what I had said.
That version sounded like me. And that version became the script.
But here is where the real work begins. Because having a script is not the same as being able to deliver it naturally. Having a script is the starting point. You then have to rehearse it so many times that the words stop being words on a page and start being thoughts you are having in real time.
This is what Miller had done. This is what every great performer does. They write it, they rewrite it, they rehearse it, they perform it, they refine it, they rehearse it again, and they keep going until the writing disappears and only the performance remains. What the audience sees is not the script. The audience sees a person who seems to be thinking out loud. But behind that appearance is a structure as precise as an architectural blueprint.
The Safety Net You Cannot See
There is a practical reason why scripting everything matters, and it goes beyond just sounding natural.
When you know every word you are going to say, you are free. Free to notice the audience. Free to adjust your energy. Free to ride a laugh a little longer or cut a pause a little shorter. Free to notice that the woman in the third row looks confused and needs a beat to catch up. Free to notice that the energy in the room has shifted and you need to pick up the pace.
When you do not know your words, you are not free. You are thinking about what comes next. You are searching for the right phrase. You are worrying about whether you are going to stumble. And while all that internal noise is happening, the audience is sitting there watching you not be present with them.
I learned this the hard way at a corporate keynote in Graz. I had a new piece in my set that I had only partially scripted. I knew the broad strokes — the opening line, the key beats, the transition into the effect. But the connective tissue between those beats was improvised. I figured I would just talk through it naturally.
What actually happened was that I spent the entire piece thinking about what to say next. My eyes were not on the audience. My energy was not in the room. My focus was entirely internal, turned inward on the mechanics of language rather than outward on the people I was there to serve.
The piece was fine. Nobody complained. Nobody said it fell flat. But I knew — I could feel — the difference between that piece and the pieces I had fully scripted and rehearsed. The scripted pieces felt like flying. The partially scripted piece felt like driving in fog.
The Ad Lib That Is Not
Once I understood this principle, I started noticing it everywhere. In comedy specials, where every “moment of inspiration” happens in the same spot every night. In TED talks, where the speaker seems to be having a revelation on stage that they have actually rehearsed forty times. In keynote addresses, where the “spontaneous” reference to something that happened at dinner last night was written on the plane three days ago.
I also started building what I now think of as scripted spontaneity into my own work. These are lines or moments that are designed to feel unplanned. A comment about the venue. A reaction to something a volunteer does. An apparent tangent that circles back to the main thread.
None of them are actually spontaneous. All of them are written, tested, and refined. But because they are delivered with the right timing and the right energy — because they are delivered as if the thought just occurred to me — they feel spontaneous to the audience. And that feeling of spontaneity is what makes the audience trust that they are seeing the real me.
This is not deception in any dishonest sense. This is craft. Every actor delivers scripted lines as if they are thinking them for the first time. Every musician plays rehearsed passages as if the notes are flowing out of them in the moment. Every great speaker says words they have said a hundred times as if those words are just now forming in their mind. The goal is not to trick the audience. The goal is to give the audience the best possible version of the experience.
What This Means for the Rest of Us
If you are where I was two years ago — resisting the idea of scripting because it feels unnatural — I want to save you the time I wasted.
Script everything. Write down every word you plan to say. Not as a rigid cage, but as a foundation. You can always deviate. You can always adjust. You can always respond to what is actually happening in the room. But you need a home to come back to. You need a structure that holds you when the moment gets wobbly.
The performers who look the most free are the most prepared. The performers who sound the most spontaneous have rehearsed the most. The performers who seem to be winging it have done more work than anyone in the room can imagine.
That is the Dennis Miller revelation. That is what Alexander saw across a week in Vegas and distilled into a principle that changed his approach to performing.
And it is what I think about every time someone comes up to me after a show and says, “I loved the spontaneous part.”
I smile. I say thank you. And I do not tell them that I wrote that part in a hotel room three weeks ago, standing in front of a bathroom mirror, talking to myself until the words disappeared and only the performance remained.
That is the job. Make the work invisible. Make the preparation disappear. Give the audience the only thing they want: the feeling that what they are seeing is real, and happening for the first time, and could never happen quite this way again.
Even though it happened exactly this way last Tuesday.