I was performing at a corporate holiday party in Salzburg, maybe forty people in a private dining room at a hotel near the Altstadt, and I opened a piece by holding up a deck of cards and saying, “I have here a perfectly ordinary deck of cards.”
The moment the word “ordinary” left my mouth, I watched three things happen simultaneously. A man at the nearest table leaned over to his colleague and whispered something. A woman in the second row narrowed her eyes. And someone near the back — I could not see who — actually said, audible enough for the tables around him to hear, “Sure it is.”
The audience had been relaxed. They had been with me. And in a single sentence, I had turned them into detectives.
I finished the piece fine. The effect worked. But that whisper, that narrowed gaze, that muttered “sure it is” — those stuck with me longer than the applause. Because I had done something I did not realize I was doing. I had told the audience to be suspicious of the very prop I wanted them to ignore.
The Paradox of Reassurance
Think about how this works in everyday life for a moment. Imagine you are at a dinner party and someone says, “I want you to know, I am a completely honest person.” What is the first thing that crosses your mind? You wonder why they felt the need to say that. Honest people do not typically announce their honesty. The announcement itself creates doubt.
Or imagine someone hands you a glass of water and says, “Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe.” Your first thought is not relief. Your first thought is: why would it not be safe? What is wrong with this water that they need to tell me it is safe?
This is the fundamental paradox of unsolicited reassurance. When you address a concern that nobody has raised, you create the concern. You bring into existence the very suspicion you were trying to prevent. The audience was not thinking about whether the deck was ordinary until you told them it was. Now they are thinking about nothing else.
Ken Weber puts this with characteristic bluntness in Maximum Entertainment: never refer to any prop as ordinary. A deck of cards, a coin, a pad of paper, a piece of rope — all of these are presumed to be ordinary unless you raise suspicion or needlessly draw attention to them. The audience does not walk in assuming your props are rigged. They walk in ready to be entertained. It is the performer who introduces the idea that something might be fake, and then tries, clumsily, to argue against the very idea he introduced.
When I first read that, I felt a mixture of recognition and embarrassment. Recognition because I had experienced exactly what Weber described. Embarrassment because I had been doing it for months and had never questioned why.
Where the Habit Comes From
The phrase “This is an ordinary deck of cards” is so widespread in magic that it feels like part of the tradition. You hear it in instructional videos. You read it in trick instructions. You see it in beginner workshops. It is one of the first things new performers say, and it is one of the last things many of them ever examine.
I think the habit comes from a misunderstanding of what the audience needs. When you are learning a new piece, you are acutely aware of what makes the prop special — or, in some cases, not special. You know the deck is unprepared. You know the coin is standard. You know the envelope is genuinely empty. And because you are so aware of this, you assume the audience shares your concern. You think they are wondering whether the deck is normal, so you address the question preemptively.
But the audience is not wondering. The audience has not arrived with a checklist of suspicions. They are thinking about the drink in their hand, the conversation they were just having, whether the parking meter is going to expire. When you walk up and say “This is an ordinary deck of cards,” you are answering a question they never asked, and in doing so, you are teaching them to start asking it.
It is the performer’s anxiety, projected outward and dressed up as audience management.
I learned this the hard way. In my early performances, I was so nervous about people catching me out that I front-loaded every prop introduction with disclaimers. “Just an ordinary deck.” “A regular coin, nothing special about it.” “You can see this envelope is completely normal.” Every disclaimer was me managing my own fear, not the audience’s experience. And every disclaimer was making things worse.
The Experiment
After reading Weber’s advice, I decided to test it. I took three pieces I was performing regularly at the time and I stripped out every reference to “ordinary,” “normal,” “regular,” or “nothing special.” Every single one. I did not replace them with anything. I just removed them.
The first piece opened with a card effect. Where I used to say “I have here an ordinary deck of cards,” I now simply said nothing. I held up the deck, fanned it briefly, and began the piece. No commentary on the deck’s nature. No reassurance. Just action.
The second piece involved a pad of paper. Where I used to say “This is just a regular notepad, nothing written on it,” I now handed it to a spectator without comment and asked them to write something down. No preamble about the pad’s ordinariness.
The third involved an envelope. Where I used to hold it up and say “As you can see, this is a plain, sealed envelope, completely ordinary,” I now simply placed it in view and moved on.
What happened — or rather, what did not happen — was the most instructive part of the entire experiment.
Nobody questioned the deck. Nobody examined the pad suspiciously. Nobody asked about the envelope. The audience accepted every prop at face value, exactly as Weber predicted they would. The props were unremarkable, so the audience did not remark on them. They were just objects, part of the scene, taken for granted the way you take for granted the glass on the table or the pen in someone’s hand.
The absence of suspicion was not just comparable to what I had been getting before. It was noticeably better. Without the disclaimers, the audience’s attention went where I wanted it — to the effect, to the story, to the interaction. With the disclaimers, some fraction of their attention had always been diverted to evaluating the prop. I had been spending words to create a problem and then spending the audience’s goodwill to solve a problem that should never have existed.
The Deeper Principle: Don’t Answer Unasked Questions
This goes beyond props. It is a principle that applies to everything you say during a performance, and honestly, to everything you say in professional life generally.
In my consulting work, I had learned this lesson years earlier, just in a different context. When presenting a strategic recommendation to a board, you do not open with “I know some of you might be skeptical about this.” The moment you say that, every person in the room who was not skeptical starts to consider whether they should be. You have given them permission to doubt you. You have practically asked them to doubt you.
The better approach — in a boardroom and on a stage — is to present with confidence and let the audience form their own response. If they have questions, they will ask. If they have concerns, they will raise them. Your job is not to preempt every possible objection before it arises. Your job is to present your material so well that most objections never arise in the first place.
On stage, this means trusting the audience. Trusting that they have come to be entertained, not to catch you. Trusting that they will accept a deck of cards as a deck of cards unless you give them a reason not to. Trusting that silence about a prop’s nature is more convincing than any verbal assurance you could offer.
What to Do Instead
If you cannot call a prop ordinary, what do you do? The answer is surprisingly simple: you do not do anything. You just use the prop. Pick up the deck. Fan it. Deal from it. Let the audience see it in action without commentary. Props gain credibility from how you handle them, not from what you say about them.
If you need the audience to examine a prop — and sometimes you do, for the effect to work — frame it as participation, not verification. “Would you hold this for me?” is a thousand times more natural than “Would you like to examine this and confirm that it is a perfectly ordinary, regular, standard deck of fifty-two playing cards?” The first is a request for help. The second is a confession that you are worried about something.
There is a subtlety here that took me a while to appreciate. When you hand someone a prop without disclaimers and without asking them to verify it, you are communicating confidence. You are saying, through your behavior rather than your words, that there is nothing to worry about. And confidence is far more reassuring than any verbal guarantee.
In my keynote speaking, I often use a small prop — something I weave into the presentation to bridge from the business content into a moment of magic. The transition works precisely because I do not announce the prop or qualify it. It appears as a natural part of the presentation, just another object on stage, until suddenly it becomes something unexpected. If I stopped and said “Now, this is a perfectly ordinary envelope,” the surprise would be compromised before it even arrived. The audience would be waiting for the trick instead of being caught by it.
The Words You Keep
Since cutting “ordinary” from my vocabulary, I have become much more sensitive to other words that do the same thing. “Just” is one. “I’ll just place this card here.” That word “just” is doing nothing except signaling that you think the audience might find this suspicious. “Simply” is another. “I’ll simply shuffle the cards.” The word “simply” implies complexity that you are trying to minimize. If it were actually simple, you would not need to say so.
I now run every line in my script through what I think of as the “unasked question” test. Is this line answering a question the audience has actually asked? Or is it answering a question that exists only in my head — a projection of my own anxiety about whether the effect will hold up?
If the question exists only in my head, the line gets cut. No exceptions.
The Liberating Side
The surprising thing about removing these disclaimers is how much lighter the performance feels. When you stop narrating the nature of your props, you have more time and space for the things that actually matter — the story, the humor, the interaction, the moments of genuine connection with the audience.
All those words I was spending on reassurance — “ordinary,” “regular,” “nothing special,” “as you can see” — were consuming valuable seconds that could have been filled with something entertaining. They were not just neutral. They were actively working against me. They were making the audience more suspicious while making the performance less engaging. A double loss, paid for with words that sounded professional but were anything but.
The deck is ordinary. The coin is normal. The envelope is standard. You know it. The audience will assume it. The only person who needs to stop worrying about it is you.
So stop saying it. And watch what happens when you do.