There is a moment during almost every corporate keynote I do in Austria where someone in the audience says something unexpected. Maybe they challenge a premise. Maybe they make a joke. Maybe they ask a question I was not anticipating. And in that moment, I have roughly two seconds to respond in a way that feels natural, witty, and in control.
For the first year of incorporating magic into my keynotes, those two seconds were the most terrifying part of my entire performance. Not the sleight of hand. Not the mentalism reveals. The moments that scared me most were the unscripted ones — the places where the audience threw me something I had not prepared for, and I had to catch it midair.
I remember a conference in Linz where I was doing a prediction effect and a man in the third row called out, loudly and cheerfully, “He already knows what I am going to say!” The room laughed. Everyone looked at me. And I froze. Not physically — I do not think anyone noticed. But internally, my brain went completely blank. I smiled, said something forgettable like “Well, let us see,” and moved on. The moment was fine. But it could have been so much better. That man had given me a gift — a spontaneous moment of audience energy — and I had fumbled it.
I kept thinking about that fumble on the train ride home. Why could some performers handle those moments with grace and humor, while I turned into a deer in headlights?
The answer came from a story I read in Scott Alexander’s lecture notes on building a stand-up magic act, and it completely reframed how I think about spontaneity.
The Dennis Miller Lesson
Scott Alexander and his wife Jenny opened for Dennis Miller in Las Vegas and had the opportunity to watch his show from the wings for a full week. On opening night, Alexander was struck by how funny and off-the-cuff Miller was. The comedian seemed to be riffing, making spontaneous observations, tossing out ad libs that felt completely in the moment. It was the kind of loose, conversational performance that makes you think the performer is just naturally brilliant — that they are thinking of these things right there on stage, in real time, as they come.
But Alexander watched for a whole week. And by the end of that week, he realized something that fundamentally shifted his understanding of performance: everything was completely scripted. Even what seemed like off-the-cuff spontaneous observations. Even the ad libs. All of it was locked into Miller’s script.
What appeared to be effortless improvisation was the result of thorough, meticulous preparation.
When I read that, I sat back in my hotel room chair and just stared at the wall for a while. Because it explained something I had been observing but could not articulate. The performers I admired most — the ones who seemed to have the quickest wit, the most natural responses, the most relaxed presence on stage — were not actually thinking faster than everyone else. They had prepared faster. They had anticipated the moments. They had rehearsed the “spontaneity.”
The Illusion of the Unrehearsed
We are conditioned to believe that the best moments in performance are the unplanned ones. The magical ad lib. The perfect comeback. We celebrate these moments precisely because they seem to come from nowhere — pure, in-the-moment genius.
But the Dennis Miller lesson reveals something different. The genius is not in the moment. The genius is in the months of preparation that precede the moment. Miller had performed his material enough times to know exactly where audience reactions would land, what kinds of interruptions were likely, and what “spontaneous” responses would get the biggest laughs. He had tested, refined, and locked in his “ad libs” with the same rigor he applied to every other part of his script.
This is not cheating. This is craft. The audience does not care whether a funny moment was planned or unplanned. They care whether it was funny. They care whether the performer seemed in control. A scripted ad lib that lands perfectly every night serves the audience far better than a genuine improvisation that might land brilliantly once and fall flat the next nine times.
Building My Own Library of Spontaneous Responses
After reading about the Miller lesson, I started approaching my preparation differently. Instead of scripting only my core material — the keynote content, the effect presentations, the transitions — I began scripting for the gaps. The unplanned moments. The audience reactions I could not control but could absolutely predict.
Here is what I mean. After performing at enough corporate events around Austria, I started noticing patterns. Certain situations came up again and again. Not the same exact words, but the same categories of audience behavior.
Someone always wants to examine the props. Someone always says they know how it is done. Someone always makes a joke about their spouse or colleague. Someone always takes too long to make a decision when I need a quick choice. Someone always asks to see it again. And at corporate events specifically, someone always makes a joke connecting the effect to their quarterly results or their boss.
These are not random, unpredictable events. They are patterns. And once you recognize them as patterns, you can prepare for them.
So I started building what I think of as a response library. Not a script in the traditional sense — not a rigid sequence of words I planned to deliver in order. More like a collection of prepared responses, each one designed for a specific category of audience behavior. A line for when someone claims to know the secret. A line for when someone takes too long deciding. A line for when someone tries to grab a prop. A line for when the obvious joke presents itself and I need to either make it or acknowledge it.
I wrote them down. I tested them at small events. I refined the ones that worked and discarded the ones that did not. Over several months, I accumulated maybe thirty or forty prepared responses that I could deploy whenever the right situation arose.
And here is the critical part: because I had rehearsed these responses, I could deliver them with perfect timing and apparent spontaneity. The audience had no idea I had prepared the line. To them, it looked like I had just thought of something clever in the moment. Exactly like Dennis Miller looked on opening night to Scott Alexander.
The Preparation Paradox
There is a paradox at the heart of this approach that took me a while to fully appreciate. The more you prepare for spontaneous moments, the more genuinely spontaneous you become.
This sounds contradictory, but it works like this: when you have thirty prepared responses loaded and ready, you are no longer spending cognitive resources trying to think of something to say. Your brain is freed up. And with that freed-up processing power, you actually do start noticing things in the moment that you would have missed before. You actually do start having genuine improvisational thoughts — because you are relaxed enough to see them.
Before I built my response library, the unscripted moments triggered anxiety. My brain went into problem-solving mode: “What do I say? How do I handle this? What if I mess this up?” That anxiety consumed all available mental bandwidth, leaving nothing for actual creativity.
After building the library, the anxiety evaporated. When someone said something unexpected, I no longer panicked. I either had a prepared response ready, or I was relaxed enough — because I knew I had a safety net — to actually improvise something genuine. The preparation did not kill my spontaneity. It created the conditions for real spontaneity to emerge.
I experienced this most clearly at a product launch event in Salzburg. I was doing a mentalism piece where a volunteer was writing something down, and the CEO in the front row called out, loud enough for everyone to hear, “He is writing your fee on that card!” The room cracked up. And without thinking, I smiled and said — with perfect timing — “If only. But I appreciate the optimism.” It was not a line from my library. It was genuine. But I only had the mental space to find it because the library existed. The safety net let me take the leap.
Categories of Predictable Unpredictability
Let me get more specific about how I organize my preparation for these moments, because the framework might be useful if you ever find yourself in front of an audience.
I break the predictable interruptions into roughly five categories:
First, there are the skeptics. “I know how you did that.” “My uncle does magic, he showed me this one.” “It is in your other hand.” These moments require responses that are warm but redirect attention without confirming or denying anything.
Second, there are the helpers — people who want to assist the performance, sometimes too enthusiastically. They reach for props, they stand up before being invited, they start explaining to their neighbor what is about to happen. These need gentle steering.
Third, there are the comedians — audience members who see an opportunity for a joke and take it. These are actually gifts, because a good response to an audience joke is the fastest way to build rapport with the entire room. The key is to build on their joke rather than compete with it.
Fourth, there are the slow responders — people who take a long time to make a choice, write something down, or follow an instruction. These moments need humor that keeps the energy up without making the person feel pressured or embarrassed.
Fifth, there are the contextual comments — things specific to the event, the venue, the industry, the company. At corporate keynotes, these are incredibly common. Someone connects what I am doing to their work situation. The best responses acknowledge the connection and play along.
For each category, I have a handful of tested lines. Not dozens — just enough that I am never caught empty-handed. And because these lines have been tested in real performance conditions at events across Austria, I know they work. I know the timing. I know the delivery. I know which ones get a chuckle and which ones get a real laugh.
The Ongoing Refinement
My response library is not static. Every time I perform, I pay attention to the moments that caught me off guard — the situations that did not fit neatly into my five categories. After each event, I update the library. I add new lines, refine existing ones, and retire the ones that have stopped working.
This is the other lesson from the Dennis Miller story that is easy to miss. Miller was not performing the same scripted material forever. He was constantly refining, testing new lines, locking in the ones that worked, dropping the ones that did not. The script was alive. It evolved through performance. What Alexander saw during that week in Vegas was not a static artifact — it was a snapshot of a continuously refined body of work.
At a recent conference in Graz, someone said something I had never heard before — a comment so specific to the industry that none of my generic responses would have worked. But because I was relaxed, because the library had my back, I found something in the moment that fit perfectly. After the event, I wrote it down and added it to the collection.
That is the real gift of the Dennis Miller lesson. Not just that great ad libs are rehearsed — though they are. But that the discipline of rehearsal creates the freedom to be genuinely present, genuinely responsive, and genuinely in the moment.
The audience sees spontaneity. What they do not see is the work that made it possible. And honestly, that is exactly how it should be.