I have a recording from one of my earliest full-length performances. It was a corporate event in Vienna — a product launch for a tech startup where I had been asked to weave some magic into the evening’s entertainment. I had a thirty-minute set. I had rehearsed the effects until they were solid. I was nervous but prepared.
What I was not prepared for was what I would discover when I watched the recording back the following week.
The magic was fine. Not perfect, but fine. The audience responded. The effects landed. What was not fine — what was, in fact, actively cringe-inducing — was what I said between the effects.
“For my next trick, I’m going to need a volunteer.”
“Now I’d like to show you something with these cards.”
“What I’m going to do next is a little experiment.”
“Okay, for this next piece, I’ll need everyone to think of a number.”
I counted. In a thirty-minute set, I used some variation of “for my next trick” or “what I’m going to do next” six times. Six times I stopped the show to announce, in the most procedural language imaginable, that I was about to transition from one thing to another.
It was like watching someone narrate their own GPS directions. “Now I’m going to turn left. Next, I’ll be taking the highway. What I’m going to do after that is merge into traffic.” Nobody wants that. Nobody needs the play-by-play of your navigation. They want to arrive somewhere interesting.
The Anatomy of a Dead Phrase
Ken Weber, in Maximum Entertainment, identifies “For my next trick” and its cousins as obvious and meaningless. Those two words — obvious and meaningless — are precisely the problem.
Obvious because the audience already knows you are about to do something next. They are sitting in a room watching a performer. They understand that the show has a sequence. They do not need a chapter heading.
Meaningless because the phrase communicates zero information about what is coming, why it matters, or why they should care. “For my next trick” tells the audience nothing except that you are done with the last thing and starting a new thing. It is a verbal road sign that says “road continues.” Of course the road continues. They are sitting on it.
But the deeper damage is subtler than that. These transitional phrases do not just waste time. They actively deflate the energy you have built.
Think about what happens in a well-constructed performance. You finish an effect. The audience reacts — surprise, laughter, applause. There is a wave of energy in the room. That wave is your most valuable asset. It is the momentum that carries you into whatever comes next. It is the audience leaning forward, thinking “What else can this person do?”
And then you say, “For my next trick.”
The wave breaks. The energy disperses. The audience mentally downshifts from “What will happen next?” to “Oh, he’s setting up the next thing.” You have taken a moment of anticipation and converted it into a moment of administration. You have told the audience, in effect, that the show has a seam — that what they just experienced and what they are about to experience are separate, disconnected units linked by nothing more interesting than sequence.
The Phrases That Need to Go
It is not just “For my next trick.” There is an entire family of transitional phrases that do the same damage:
“Now I’d like to show you…” — Nobody asked what you’d like. This is about them, not you. And “show you” frames the performance as a demonstration rather than an experience. You are not showing. You are involving.
“What I’m going to do next is…” — This is preview mode. It tells the audience the plot before the scene starts. Why would you do that? Films do not pause between scenes to explain what the next scene will be about. Neither should you.
“Okay, so for this next piece…” — The “okay, so” is a verbal runway — a warm-up lap before you actually start talking. It communicates that you are gathering yourself, which communicates that you are not fully in control. And “for this next piece” is the same road-continues sign.
“Let me show you one more thing.” — “One more thing” signals that you are aware of the audience’s patience and are apologizing in advance for testing it. It says “I know you might be getting tired of this, but here’s another one.” That is not confidence. That is anxiety wrapped in courtesy.
“I’d now like to move on to…” — Move on? This is not a board meeting. You are not advancing through an agenda. If it feels like an agenda, something has gone terribly wrong.
All of these phrases share two characteristics. First, they are content-free — they communicate nothing about what is coming, only that something is coming. Second, they break the fourth wall of the performance by drawing attention to its structure. They remind the audience that they are watching a show, which is the opposite of what you want.
Why We Default to These Phrases
I spent some time thinking about why I — and apparently most performers early in their development — lean so heavily on these transitional announcements. The answer, I think, is fear.
Specifically, the fear of silence between routines.
When you finish an effect and need to begin the next one, there is a gap. A moment where the previous thing has ended and the next thing has not started. That gap feels dangerous. It feels like you might lose the audience. It feels like the show might stall. And so you fill the gap with words — any words — to maintain the illusion that you are still in control, still performing, still driving the show forward.
“For my next trick” is not a transition. It is a panic response dressed in a tuxedo. It is the performer’s equivalent of holding an umbrella in a rainstorm — it does not stop the rain, but it makes you feel like you are doing something.
The irony is that the gap itself is not the problem. A brief moment of silence between routines can actually be powerful. It gives the audience time to process what they just experienced. It creates a beat. Music has rests between notes, and those rests are part of the music. But most performers, myself very much included in my early days, cannot tolerate the silence. It feels empty, so we fill it with empty words.
What to Say Instead
Once I recognized the problem, I needed alternatives. You cannot simply remove the transitions and leave nothing — the show would feel like a series of unconnected segments, which is its own kind of problem. The question was how to move from one effect to the next in a way that maintained energy and interest instead of draining it.
Here are the approaches that worked for me.
The callback. This is the most powerful transition I have found. You reference something from the previous effect that connects to the next one. “You noticed how freely you were able to choose any card in the deck? That sense of a free choice is going to matter in a moment, because…” This does two things: it validates the audience’s experience of the previous effect, and it creates a bridge of meaning to the next one. The audience does not feel the seam because there is no seam — just a continuous thread of ideas.
The thematic bridge. This works particularly well in keynote settings, which is where I do most of my performing. Instead of transitioning between tricks, I transition between ideas. “That demonstration illustrates how our assumptions shape what we see. But there’s another layer to this. Let me ask you something…” The magic becomes an illustration of a larger point, and the transition is between points, not between tricks. The word “trick” never enters the conversation.
The question. Ask the audience something. Not a procedural question (“Would you like to see another one?”) but a genuine question that engages their thinking. “Have you ever been absolutely certain about something and then discovered you were completely wrong?” A question like that does three things: it engages the audience actively, it creates suspense about where you are going with this, and it bridges into the next effect naturally because the effect presumably illustrates the answer.
The story opening. Begin the next routine with a story before the audience even realizes a new routine has started. “Last month I was at a conference in Innsbruck, and the keynote speaker said something that I have not been able to get out of my head…” By the time you introduce the props or the volunteer, the audience is already inside the narrative. There was no transition because there was no announcement. The new routine simply began.
The direct command. Sometimes the most effective transition is no transition at all — just a confident, direct shift. “Stand up for me.” Two seconds after the previous effect’s applause. No explanation, no preview, no preamble. The audience responds to the confidence of the command and the surprise of the shift. This requires good timing and a certain amount of nerve, but when it works, it is electric.
The Deeper Principle
What all of these alternatives have in common is that they maintain the audience’s emotional engagement across the gap between effects. They do not announce the structure of the show. They do not draw attention to the seams. They treat the performance as a continuous experience rather than a sequence of numbered items.
This is a principle I first encountered in Weber’s work and have since seen confirmed everywhere I look — in great keynote speakers, in stand-up comedians, in film editing. The best transitions are invisible. The audience should never feel the shift. They should arrive at the next moment without realizing they left the previous one.
In film, this is called a match cut — cutting from one scene to another in a way that feels continuous rather than jarring. The visual composition carries across the edit, so the audience’s eye does not have to reorient. The emotional throughline carries across the edit, so the audience’s feelings do not have to reset.
Your transitions should work the same way. The emotional composition should carry across. The audience’s engagement should not have to reorient.
What I Did With That Vienna Recording
I went back to that recording from the product launch in Vienna and used it as raw material. I transcribed all six of my transitional phrases and then, for each one, wrote three alternative transitions using the approaches I have described. I was not trying to find the perfect alternative. I was trying to break the habit of defaulting to the obvious, meaningless announcement.
Some of those alternatives were good. Some were terrible. But the exercise forced me to think about transitions as creative opportunities rather than administrative necessities. And that shift in thinking was the real breakthrough.
In the performances that followed, I experimented. I tried callbacks. I tried questions. I tried story openings. I tried direct commands. Not all of them worked every time. But even the ones that did not quite land were better than “For my next trick,” because at least they were attempting to do something — to connect, to engage, to maintain momentum.
And the ones that did land? They transformed the show. The audience stopped experiencing a sequence of effects and started experiencing a journey. The transitions became as interesting as the effects themselves. In some cases, they became more interesting — because a well-placed question or a perfectly timed callback can generate just as much engagement as a moment of magic.
That is the goal. Not just to avoid the boring phrase, but to replace it with something that earns its place. Every second of your performance is real estate. “For my next trick” is a vacant lot. Fill it with something that people want to visit.