I was sitting in a hotel room in Linz, a Tuesday night after a long day of consulting work, when I had one of those moments where a book reaches through the page and grabs you by the collar.
I had been reading Greg Dean’s Step by Step to Stand-Up Comedy — not because I had any ambition to become a stand-up comedian, but because I was trying to solve a problem. My magic performances had funny moments. Some of them reliably got laughs. But I had no idea why. And when I tried to write new comedy lines for my show, the success rate was abysmal. Maybe one in ten attempts would produce something that actually worked on stage. The other nine would sit in my script like dead weight, dutifully delivered, politely received, quickly forgotten.
I needed to understand the mechanics. Not “be funnier” — that is useless advice. I needed to understand the engineering. How does a joke actually produce laughter? What is the mechanism? What is happening in the audience’s brain between the setup and the punch that makes the difference between a laugh and silence?
Dean’s book answered that question with a clarity that genuinely startled me. And the answer was not what I expected.
The Part Everyone Knows
Everyone knows the basic structure of a joke. Setup, then punch. The setup establishes something, the punch subverts it. You hear the beginning of the joke, you form an expectation, and then the punchline surprises you by going somewhere else. Expectation and surprise. Simple.
Except that description, while technically accurate, explains nothing. It is like saying a car works because the wheels turn. True, but it does not help you build an engine.
The question that matters is: how does the setup create expectation? And how does the punch create surprise? What is the mechanism that connects those two experiences?
This is where Dean’s framework goes deeper than anything else I had encountered on comedy structure. And it starts with a concept that changed how I think about both jokes and magic.
The Target Assumption
Here is what actually happens when you hear the setup of a joke.
You do not just hear the words. You immediately, automatically, unconsciously construct an entire scenario in your mind. Dean calls this the “first story.” It is the elaborate narrative you build from the limited information the setup provides.
Take a classic example. Someone says: “I saw my grandmother the other day, probably for the last time.” When you hear that, you do not just register the words. Your brain instantly fills in a much larger picture. You imagine an elderly woman. You imagine declining health. You imagine a poignant family visit, perhaps a hospital room, perhaps a quiet afternoon at a care home. You feel a specific emotional tone — wistfulness, maybe sadness.
None of that was stated. All of it was assumed. Your brain took a few words of setup and extrapolated an entire world.
Now, here is the critical part. Among all those assumptions you just made, there is one that is doing most of the structural work. One key assumption that the entire first story depends on. Dean calls this the “target assumption.”
In the grandmother example, the target assumption is that this is “probably the last time” because the grandmother is dying. That is the load-bearing assumption. Remove it, and the whole first story collapses.
The punch then does something precise and surgical: it shatters that specific assumption and replaces it with a completely different interpretation.
“Oh, she’s not sick or anything. She just bores the hell out of me.”
The target assumption — grandmother is dying — is destroyed. A new scenario snaps into place. And the gap between what you assumed and what was revealed produces laughter.
Why This Matters for Performance
When I read this framework in that hotel room in Linz, I set the book down and stared at the wall for a while. Not because it was complicated. It was beautifully simple. I stared because I was running every funny moment from my performances through this lens and watching them all snap into focus.
Every line that had gotten a big laugh had the same structure. The audience had made an assumption — about what was going to happen next, about what the volunteer was thinking, about what the situation meant — and then something had shattered that assumption. Not a random surprise. A specific, targeted reinterpretation of one element that the audience had understood in one way and that suddenly revealed itself to mean something completely different.
And every line that had fallen flat? Same diagnosis. Either the audience had not made a clear target assumption — the setup was too vague, the situation too ambiguous — or the punch had failed to shatter it cleanly. The reinterpretation was too close to the original assumption, or too far from it, or too confusing.
I had been treating joke writing as a creative exercise. Just think of something funny. Be clever. It turns out that joke writing is an engineering exercise. You are not trying to be clever. You are trying to build a specific cognitive structure in the audience’s mind and then dismantle it in a specific way.
The Reinterpretation
The second mechanism in Dean’s framework is the reinterpretation. This is what the punch actually does: it presents an unexpected but compatible interpretation of something in the setup.
Compatible is the key word. The reinterpretation has to work. It has to be a legitimate alternative reading of the setup information. If it is not — if the punch introduces something completely unrelated — the audience does not laugh. They are confused. Or they groan, which is worse.
Think about the grandmother joke again. “She just bores the hell out of me” is a reinterpretation that works because “probably for the last time” genuinely can mean “I do not want to visit her again.” The setup supports both readings. The punch reveals the reading you were not expecting.
This principle illuminated something I had been struggling with in my magic scripts. I had been trying to write jokes where the punch was clever, surprising, unexpected. But I had not been checking whether the punch was a legitimate reinterpretation of the setup. Sometimes my punches were non sequiturs — they surprised the audience, sure, but they did not connect back to anything in the setup. There was no link. No bridge. Just a sudden left turn that left people disoriented rather than amused.
The rule is this: the reinterpretation must shatter the target assumption while remaining compatible with the original setup information. The audience should be able to look back at the setup and think, “Oh, that could have meant this other thing.” If they cannot make that backward connection, the joke fails.
Applying This to My Scripts
Armed with this framework, I went back through every comedy line in my show. All of them. I sat in my hotel room with a notebook and dissected each one.
For every line, I asked three questions. First: what is the target assumption? What is the audience assuming at this point in the effect? If I could not name a specific assumption, the line had no foundation. It was trying to be funny in a vacuum.
Second: what is the reinterpretation? What new meaning does the punch reveal? Is it a genuine alternative reading of the setup information, or is it a non sequitur dressed up as a joke?
Third: is the target assumption strong enough? This turned out to be the most important question. The strength of the laugh is directly proportional to the strength of the assumption. If the audience barely assumes anything — if the first story is weak and vague — then shattering it produces a weak, vague reaction. But if the audience has committed deeply to a specific assumption, shattering it produces an explosive response.
This is why organic humor — the comedy that arises naturally from the magical situation — tends to outperform standalone jokes. During a magic effect, the audience is making extremely strong assumptions. They are committed. They are invested. They genuinely believe they know what is happening. When something shatters that belief, the reaction is enormous. The target assumption was not just a casual inference. It was a conviction.
What I Got Wrong at First
I should be honest about the mistakes I made when I first started applying this framework. The biggest one was overthinking. I would sit at my desk in Vienna, trying to engineer jokes from scratch using the target-assumption-and-reinterpretation model, and the results were mechanical and lifeless. They had the structure of jokes without the soul of comedy.
The problem was that I was starting from the mechanism instead of starting from the truth. The best comedy comes from genuine observations, real situations, actual human dynamics. The mechanism — target assumption, reinterpretation — is the skeleton. But you need flesh on the bones.
When I stopped trying to engineer jokes in isolation and started paying attention to the assumptions that actually exist in my performance situations, everything changed. The framework became a lens rather than a blueprint. I was not constructing jokes from scratch. I was noticing opportunities for comedy that were already embedded in the situations I was creating.
The Parallel That Kept Me Up at Night
The thing that really got under my skin about Dean’s framework was how directly it mapped onto what I already understood about magic.
In a joke, the setup creates a target assumption that the punch shatters. In a magic effect, the presentation creates a set of beliefs about what is possible that the climax shatters. The audience builds a “first story” — this is an ordinary deck, this is a normal coin, this situation has only one possible outcome — and then the effect reveals a “second story” that was hiding inside the first one all along.
Setup and punch. Method and effect. First story and second story. The structural DNA is identical.
I will write more about this parallel in a later post, because it deserves its own exploration. But I want to note it here because it was the realization that fused my study of comedy into my study of magic. They are not separate disciplines. They are two applications of the same cognitive architecture.
Understanding how jokes work did not just make me funnier. It made me a better magician. Because once you understand that the audience is always building stories from assumptions, and that your job is to guide which assumptions they build and then shatter the right ones at the right time, you have a framework that applies to every moment of every performance.
The setup is not just the first half of a joke. It is everything you do to guide the audience’s expectations. The punch is not just a funny line. It is any moment where reality diverges from assumption. And the hidden assumption — the target assumption that the audience makes without realizing it — is the most powerful tool in your entire arsenal.
Whether you use it to make them laugh or make them gasp is just a question of degree.