There is a recording from a corporate event in Salzburg that I have watched maybe fifty times. Not because it is good. Because it is educational in the way that only failure can be.
The video shows me performing a mentalism effect for about sixty people. I am confident. I am hitting my marks. My scripted jokes are landing — or rather, they are arriving on time and being received with the kind of polite, dutiful laughter that corporate audiences produce when they can tell you are trying to be funny and they want to be supportive.
Then, about eight minutes in, something unscripted happens.
The volunteer — a man in his early fifties, senior management of some kind, the sort of person who radiates quiet authority — is supposed to be concentrating on a thought. I have asked him to think of something specific. He closes his eyes. There is a moment of silence. And then his phone rings.
Not a subtle vibration. A full ringtone. Something classical. Vivaldi, maybe. It echoes through the conference room like a proclamation.
His eyes snap open. He looks mortified. The audience holds its breath. And I say, without thinking, without any plan at all: “I was going to read your mind, but apparently your phone beat me to it.”
The room explodes. Not polite laughter. Real laughter. The man starts laughing too, fumbling to silence his phone, and I add: “Do not worry, I have already written down my prediction. Whatever Vivaldi told you, I got there first.”
More laughter. Bigger. The kind where people are turning to each other, shaking their heads, wiping their eyes. The tension that the phone interruption created has been transformed into energy, into connection, into a shared experience that the audience will remember far longer than whatever scripted jokes I had planned.
When I watch that recording, I can see the exact moment the show changes. Before the phone rings, I am performing. After the phone rings, I am alive. There is a different quality to everything — my posture, my voice, my timing. I am present in a way that my scripted material had not required me to be.
That recording became a turning point. Not because I decided never to use scripted material again — that would be reckless. But because it forced me to confront a question I had been avoiding: why did the unplanned moment feel more authentic than anything I had rehearsed?
The Problem with Pre-Written Comedy
Let me describe what my show looked like before the Salzburg epiphany.
I had a collection of comedy lines. Some I had written myself. Some I had adapted from other performers — with credit and modification, but still, adapted. They were pinned to specific moments in my effects. After this move, say this line. After the volunteer does that, deliver this joke. It was methodical. It was organized. It was dead.
Not dead as in getting no laughs. Some of them worked fine. Dead as in lifeless. There was no blood in the comedy. It was mechanical. I could feel myself shifting into “joke mode” — a slightly different energy, a slightly different vocal register, a faint change in body language that signaled to the audience: here comes the funny part.
And audiences are smart. They can feel that shift even if they cannot name it. They know when a performer is delivering prepared material versus when a performer is genuinely reacting to the moment. The laughter for the former is polite. The laughter for the latter is real.
Ralphie May, in his Standup Masterclass, talks about something that cut me to the bone when I first encountered it. He argues that audiences can smell inauthenticity from a hundred meters away. That the most important thing in comedy is not technique, not timing, not word choice — it is truth. The audience has to believe that what you are saying is real. That it comes from a genuine place. That you mean it.
When I heard that, I understood why my scripted jokes felt hollow. They were not coming from a genuine place. They were coming from a script. I was performing the jokes, not living them. And the audience could tell.
The Shift
The shift did not happen overnight. It happened in stages, over months, through a series of performances where I gradually loosened my grip on the scripted comedy and started paying attention to what was actually happening in the room.
The first stage was simply allowing myself to react. This sounds obvious, but it was harder than you might think. When you have a scripted show, your attention is split between the audience and the script. You are simultaneously in the moment and ahead of the moment, thinking about what comes next. That split attention makes genuine reaction almost impossible, because genuine reaction requires full presence.
I started with small experiments. During a show at a conference in Innsbruck, I decided that for one specific effect, I would not use any of my pre-written comedy lines. I would do the effect, and if something funny happened, I would respond to it. If nothing funny happened, I would let the effect speak for itself.
Something funny happened. The volunteer shuffled the cards with an intensity that was so exaggerated, so committed, that it became comedic on its own. I did not have a joke for this. I just looked at the audience with an expression that said, “Are you seeing this?” The audience laughed. The volunteer laughed. And the laughter grew because it was genuine — it was a real reaction to a real moment, not a performance of comedy.
That tiny experiment gave me the courage to try a bigger one. At the next event, I cut two of my three scripted comedy lines from a particular effect and replaced them with what I started calling “open windows” — moments where I would pause, observe, and see what the situation offered.
More often than not, the situation offered something. Not always comedy. Sometimes it offered a moment of genuine tension, or a beautiful piece of audience interaction, or a volunteer who said something surprising and interesting that I could build on. But when it offered comedy, the comedy was always better than what I had scripted.
Learning to Set Up the Situation
Here is the thing that took me the longest to understand: being spontaneously funny is not about being naturally quick-witted. It is about creating situations where comedy is likely to emerge.
When I watched performers who were great at in-the-moment comedy, I assumed they were simply funnier people than I was. But the bigger truth is that they were skilled at constructing situations that had comedy built into them. These moments are not random. They can be engineered — not the specific joke, but the conditions that make jokes possible.
For example, I learned that the way I frame a volunteer’s task dramatically affects whether comedy will emerge. If I say, “Please shuffle the cards,” nothing interesting is likely to happen. But if I say, “I need you to shuffle these cards, and I want you to know that the entire outcome of this experiment depends on how well you do this” — now I have created pressure. The volunteer is suddenly performing for the audience, and anything they do that deviates from a “perfect” shuffle becomes funny by contrast.
I did not script a joke. I scripted a situation. And the situation produced comedy on its own.
The Vulnerability Required
I want to be honest about what this transition cost me, because it was not free.
Scripted jokes are safe. You know what you are going to say, and you have a reasonable expectation of what the response will be. In-the-moment comedy requires giving up control. It requires being fully present, fully responsive to what is happening right now. It requires the vulnerability of not knowing what you are going to say next and trusting that the situation will provide.
For a strategy consultant who makes his living through preparation and planning, this was deeply uncomfortable. My professional instincts screamed: prepare more, script more, control more. The idea of standing in front of sixty corporate executives with an open window in my script — a moment where I had nothing planned and was relying on the situation to provide — felt like jumping without a parachute.
But here is what I discovered. The audience does not experience that vulnerability as weakness. They experience it as authenticity. When they can see that you are genuinely reacting to the moment, genuinely surprised by what the volunteer just did, genuinely amused by the situation that just unfolded, they trust you more. They lean in. They become collaborators in the experience rather than spectators of a performance.
What I Still Script
I do not want to give the impression that I abandoned all scripted material. That would be irresponsible. My opening lines are scripted — the first thirty seconds set the tone. My transitions between effects are scripted — those are structural joints that need to be solid. My recovery lines are scripted — if something goes wrong, I have responses ready while my brain catches up.
But the comedy within the effects themselves? That is increasingly unscripted. Or rather, it is scripted at the situation level, not the dialogue level. I know what dynamic I am creating. I know what kind of pressure the volunteer will feel. I know where the gaps between expectation and reality are likely to appear. I do not know what specific words will come out of my mouth when those gaps appear. And that is fine. That is, in fact, the point.
The Practice of Presence
Being funny in the moment is a skill, not a talent. It can be practiced. But the practice does not look like what you might expect.
You do not practice being funny. You practice being present. You practice noticing. You practice paying attention to the volunteer’s body language, the audience’s energy, the social dynamics in the room. You practice responding to what is actually happening rather than what you expected to happen.
My specific practice method is this: during rehearsal, I run through my effects with deliberate interruptions. I ask a friend to do something unexpected when they are volunteering. I practice reacting rather than performing. I practice the pause — the moment between the unexpected event and my response, where I am fully present and scanning for the comic angle.
Most of the time, what I say in practice is not particularly funny. That is fine. I am not practicing the joke. I am practicing the attention, the presence, the willingness to respond. The funny comes when the conditions are right. My job is to be ready for it.
What the Salzburg Recording Taught Me
I still watch that recording from Salzburg sometimes. Not the whole thing. Just the phone moment. The shift in energy. The transformation from a competent performer delivering scripted material to a present human being navigating a real moment with real people.
The pre-written jokes in that show were fine. Adequate. Professional. The phone moment was alive. Electric. Unforgettable.
The difference was not talent. It was not luck. It was presence. I was fully in the room when the phone rang. I was not thinking about my next line. I was not monitoring my script. I was here, now, with these people, in this moment. And from that presence, comedy emerged that no amount of scripting could have produced.
The day I stopped telling jokes and started finding comedy in the moment was not a single day. It was a gradual shift, measured in dozens of performances and hundreds of small experiments. But the direction was always the same: toward the real, toward the present, toward the kind of humor that can only exist when a performer trusts the moment more than the script.
That trust is terrifying at first. And then it becomes the most liberating thing about performing.