I have a file on my laptop called “Openers.” It is not organized. It is not pretty. It is a sprawling document of false starts, abandoned lines, half-finished ideas, and a handful of sentences that actually made it into my performances.
The file is over forty pages long.
For context, the opening lines of my six main performance pieces, combined, total about two hundred words. Two hundred words of finished material sitting on top of forty pages of attempts. That is roughly a five percent survival rate, which is terrible if you are measuring efficiency and excellent if you are measuring quality.
I rewrite my opening lines more than any other part of my scripts. More than the climaxes. More than the transitions. More than the volunteer interactions. If I had to estimate, I would say the opening thirty seconds of each piece have been rewritten at least twenty times. Some lines have been through fifty iterations.
This is not perfectionism for its own sake. It is a response to a simple, brutal observation: nothing else in your performance matters if the opening does not work.
The Thirty-Second Window
There is a moment at the beginning of every performance — whether it is a keynote, a magic show, a comedy set, or a conference presentation — where the audience is making a decision. Not a conscious, deliberate decision. An automatic, instinctive one. They are deciding whether to pay attention.
This decision happens fast. Thirty seconds. Maybe less. In that window, the audience is processing everything about you: your voice, your posture, your energy, your confidence, your first words. They are running a quick, unconscious assessment: Is this person worth my attention? Is this going to be good? Should I lean in or check my phone?
Scott Alexander puts it directly in his lecture notes on building a stand-up act: “Hit them right between the eyes up front.” His point is that the opener is not just the first thing you do. It is the thing that earns you the right to do everything else. A strong opener buys you the audience’s attention for the rest of the set. A weak opener means you spend the next ten minutes trying to recover ground you should never have lost.
Ken Weber makes a related point about first impressions and control. The first moments establish who is in charge. If you come out strong, clear, and confident, the audience relaxes into a follower position. They trust you. They let you lead. If you come out tentative, unfocused, or forgettable, the audience does not actively resist you — they simply disengage. And re-engaging an audience that has already checked out is one of the hardest things in performance.
The Consulting Parallel That Made It Click
I understood this principle intellectually for years before I understood it in my body. What made it physical — what made it something I felt rather than just knew — was a connection to my consulting work.
In consulting, we have a concept called the “executive summary.” It is the first page of a strategy document, and it is written last. It is the most important page in the entire document. Not because it contains the most information, but because it determines whether the rest of the document gets read.
A partner at a firm I worked with early in my career told me something I have never forgotten: “Most executives read the first page. Some read the first five pages. Almost none read the whole thing. Your first page has to do the job of the entire document.”
When I started applying that thinking to my performance scripts, the asymmetry became obvious. I had been distributing my creative effort evenly across the entire piece — spending as much time on a transition in the middle as I did on the opening line. But the opening line was carrying disproportionate weight. It was the executive summary of my performance. It was the thing that determined whether the rest of the piece got the audience’s full attention.
The return on investment of polishing your opener versus polishing your middle material is not proportional. It is exponential. A ten percent improvement in your opener produces a much larger improvement in the audience’s experience than a ten percent improvement in your third transition. Because the opener sets the conditions for everything that follows.
What a Good Opening Line Does
Over two years of obsessive rewriting, I have identified what I think a good opening line needs to do. Not every opening hits all of these, but the best ones hit at least three.
It creates curiosity. The audience should hear the first sentence and want to know what comes next. Not because you have promised something — promises are cheap. Because you have said something that opens a question in their mind. A gap between what they expected and what they got.
It establishes tone. The first line tells the audience what kind of experience they are in for. If the opening is funny, they prepare for comedy. If it is mysterious, they prepare for something serious. Getting the tone right from the first sentence saves you from having to recalibrate the audience later.
It sounds like you. Not like a script. Not like a performer’s opening line. The audience’s first impression of your voice should be authentic — the real you, the version that talks to friends, not the version that performs for strangers. If your opening line sounds rehearsed, the audience files you under “performer” rather than “person,” and that categorization is hard to undo.
It is short. My best opening lines are under fifteen words. Some are under ten. The opening is the place for something sharp, clear, and immediate. You can get complex later. First, you have to get their attention.
The Line That Took Forty-Seven Versions
I will give you one example without revealing the details of the effect, because the opening line is not about the method — it is about the experience.
I have a mentalism piece that I perform in my keynotes. The piece involves an audience member making a series of choices, and the climax reveals something about those choices that should have been impossible to predict. The piece itself took a few weeks to develop. The opening line took three months.
The first version was informational: I explained what we were about to do. Functional but flat. It gave the audience a roadmap when what they needed was a reason to care.
The second version was a question: I asked the audience something provocative. Better — questions create engagement. But it felt like a TED Talk opening, and I am not giving a TED Talk. I am performing magic. The register was wrong.
The third through tenth versions were variations on personal stories — anecdotes about experiences that led me to develop this piece. Some were too long. Some were interesting but did not connect to what followed. One was genuinely funny but set up a comedic tone that clashed with the serious climax.
Versions eleven through thirty were experiments with different angles: starting with a statement about the audience, starting with a paradox, starting with a physical action and no words at all, starting with a reference to something that had just happened in the room. Each version taught me something about what worked and what did not, but none of them were the one.
Version forty-seven was the one. It was a single sentence. Short. Personal. Slightly unexpected. It created a small moment of curiosity — not a big dramatic hook, just a quiet “hm, what does he mean by that?” from the audience. And it set the tone perfectly for what followed.
I cannot tell you the line, because it is specific to the piece and the context of the performance. But I can tell you that it is nothing fancy. It is not clever. It is not a punchline. It is just right, in the same way that the right word in a sentence is just right — not because it is impressive but because nothing else would fit as well.
The Obsession Is the Point
People sometimes ask me why I spend so much time on opening lines when the audience only hears them for a few seconds. The answer is that those few seconds set the emotional and attentional conditions for the entire piece. An audience that is curious, engaged, and trusting after the first thirty seconds will follow you through transitions that are merely adequate, setups that are merely functional, and pacing that is merely good. An audience that is indifferent after the first thirty seconds will resist you at every step, and no amount of brilliance in the middle or end will fully recover what you lost at the start.
This is not theory. I have tested it. I have performed the same piece with different opening lines and tracked the audience’s engagement throughout. The version with the stronger opener consistently produces better responses at the climax — not because the climax is different, but because the audience arrives at the climax in a different state. They are more invested, more present, more willing to be surprised.
The opener is leverage. It is the point where a small amount of additional effort produces a large amount of additional impact. And leverage is something I understand from my consulting world. You do not improve a system by working equally hard on every component. You identify the leverage points — the places where improvement has cascading effects — and you pour your effort there.
In performance, the opener is the highest-leverage point in the entire script. Everything downstream benefits from getting it right.
The Practical Process
Here is how I work on opening lines now. I write a first draft of the entire piece, including whatever opening comes to mind. I do not agonize over it. I just write something functional and move on.
I rehearse the piece with the functional opener, usually in a hotel room, talking to the mirror. I feel how the opener leads into the rest of the piece. I notice whether it creates momentum or whether there is a dead zone between the opener and the first substantive beat.
Then I start the rewrite loop. I write five alternative opening lines. Then five more. I try different registers — funny, serious, mysterious, personal, provocative. I try different lengths. I try starting with a question, a statement, a story, an action.
I test the most promising ones by saying them out loud. Not reading them — saying them, feeling the weight of the words in my mouth. An opening line has to feel right physically, not just intellectually.
When I find a candidate that feels strong, I rehearse the entire piece with that opener. Does it set up the right tone? Does it create energy that carries into the next section? Does it sound like me? If yes, I have my opener. If not, back to the loop.
Why the Middle Gets Less Attention
I am not saying the middle of a script does not matter. It does. But the middle benefits from a different kind of attention — structural attention, pacing attention, clarity attention. The middle needs to be solid, well-constructed, and free of dead time. It does not need to be rewritten fifty times.
The opening line is different because it is doing a unique job. It is the first moment of contact. It is the handshake. It is the moment where the audience decides, in a way they cannot articulate and probably are not aware of, whether this experience is going to be worth their time.
That decision, once made, is remarkably sticky. An audience that decides you are worth listening to will stay with you through imperfect moments. An audience that decides you are not will resist you even when you are at your best.
Get the opening right. Rewrite it more than anything else. The rest of the script will thank you.