The biggest laugh I ever got on stage was also the moment I am most ashamed of.
It was a corporate event in Vienna, maybe two years into incorporating magic into my keynote presentations. I had a volunteer on stage — a friendly guy from the marketing department, mid-forties, clearly a good sport who had been pushed forward by his colleagues. He was helping me with a prediction effect, and at one point he made a small mistake. Not a real mistake — the kind of “mistake” that is built into the routine, where the volunteer does something that seems to go wrong before the revelation puts everything right.
But in the moment, before the reveal, I went for the joke. I made a comment about his decision-making skills. Something along the lines of, “Well, this explains a lot about your company’s marketing strategy.” The room erupted. It was the biggest laugh of the entire evening. His colleagues were practically crying. Even he laughed, or seemed to.
I rode that wave of laughter through the rest of the effect, landed the reveal, and sent him back to his seat feeling pretty good about myself. I thought I had nailed it. I thought I had found the sweet spot of comedy and magic — the place where the humor amplifies the effect and the effect amplifies the humor.
I was wrong.
What I Missed
After the event, during the mingling period, I noticed the volunteer sitting at his table. He was not mingling. He was not laughing with his colleagues anymore. He was just sitting there, nursing a drink, looking like someone who wanted to leave but felt obligated to stay.
I did not connect it to my comment at first. It was only when one of his colleagues came over to me, half-joking, and said, “You really got Stefan good — he is still recovering,” that something clicked. The colleague meant it as a compliment. I heard it as a warning.
I walked over to Stefan’s table and said something casual. He smiled, shook my hand, told me the show was great. But there was something in his eyes. A flatness. The smile was polite but it did not reach the rest of his face. And I realized, with a sinking feeling, that my “biggest laugh” had come at a real cost. I had made this man the butt of a joke in front of his professional peers. For him, that moment was not a highlight of the evening. It was the part he wished had not happened.
I drove home that night thinking about what I had done. Not in some dramatic, flagellating way — I did not think I had committed some unforgivable sin. But I knew I had made a mistake. I had prioritized the laugh over the person. I had treated a human being as a prop for my comedy. And the worst part was that I had not even noticed the damage until it was too late to fix it.
The Principle I Had Violated
It was around this time that I came across Judy Carter’s principle in The New Comedy Bible. Carter, who is herself a former magician turned comedy coach, frames it simply: use humor with compassion, and do not punch down. The idea is that comedy should always punch up — at power, at institutions, at absurdity, at the performer themselves — never down at someone who is already in a vulnerable position.
And what is more vulnerable than being a volunteer on stage?
Think about it. You have asked someone to leave the safety of their seat, walk up in front of their colleagues, and participate in something they do not understand and cannot control. They have put themselves in your hands. They have trusted you. And in that moment of trust, you have more power than anyone else in the room. The audience is watching you. The sound system amplifies your voice. The lights are on you. The volunteer has none of these advantages.
When you make that person the butt of a joke, you are punching down. Hard. It does not matter that the room laughs. It does not matter that the volunteer seems to take it well. You have exploited a power imbalance for a cheap laugh, and everyone in the room — whether they articulate it or not — has registered what kind of person you are.
That registration happens at a level below conscious analysis. People do not sit there thinking, “The performer has exploited a power differential for comedic effect, and this reveals a character flaw.” They just feel something shift. A tiny crack in the trust. A small recalibration of how safe they feel in your hands. And once that crack appears, everything that follows — every effect, every joke, every moment of supposed connection — is filtered through it.
The Trust Economy of Performance
I have come to think of every performance as a trust economy. You walk out on stage with a certain amount of trust from the audience — they have chosen to be there, they want to have a good time, they are rooting for you. That starting trust is your capital. Every interaction either deposits into that account or withdraws from it.
A genuine laugh — one that comes from cleverness, from shared recognition, from self-deprecation — is a deposit. The audience likes you more. They relax. They lean forward. They are more willing to participate, more willing to suspend disbelief, more willing to go wherever you want to take them.
A hostile laugh — one that comes at someone’s expense — is a withdrawal. And here is what makes it so dangerous: the withdrawal is much larger than the deposit a genuine laugh would have been. You can build trust for twenty minutes through warm, generous comedy and then destroy it in a single moment of cruelty.
I saw this clearly at an event in Graz, not my own performance but someone else’s. A comedy magician was working a corporate dinner and was genuinely funny. The audience was with him completely. Then he brought a volunteer up and spent five minutes making jokes about the man’s appearance. Nothing vicious — just mild ribbing that a lot of performers consider fair game.
The room laughed. But I watched the dynamic shift in real time. People who had been leaning forward were now leaning back. The energy changed from “this is fun” to “I hope he does not pick me.” The performer had lost something he could not get back.
That distance is the cost of hostile humor. And it is almost impossible to close once it opens.
The Self-Deprecation Alternative
After the Vienna incident, I made a deliberate decision to restructure where the humor in my performance comes from. Instead of making volunteers the target, I started making myself the target.
This was harder than it sounds. Self-deprecating humor requires a kind of confidence that took me a while to develop. You have to be secure enough in your competence to joke about your incompetence. You have to trust that the audience will get the joke — that they will understand you are being playfully humble, not genuinely admitting you have no idea what you are doing.
But once I found the balance, the difference was immediate and dramatic.
Here is a simple example. In several of my keynote effects, there is a moment where something seems to go wrong — where the prediction appears to be incorrect, or the volunteer’s choice seems to have derailed the effect. Before my shift in approach, I might have directed the humor at the volunteer: “Well, you have managed to break the one thing I asked you not to break.” After the shift, I redirect it at myself: “Right. This is exactly what happened in rehearsal and I told myself it would be fine.”
The laugh is just as big. Sometimes bigger. But the quality of the laugh is completely different. When the humor is directed at me, the audience is laughing with the volunteer, not at them. The volunteer feels safe. They feel included. They feel like a partner in the comedy rather than its victim. And the rest of the audience? They relax. They think, “If something goes wrong when I am up there, the performer will take the hit, not me.” That thought makes them more willing to volunteer. It makes them more willing to participate. It makes the whole room warmer.
The Corporate Context Trap
I want to address something specific to the corporate events that make up most of my performance context, because this is where hostile humor does its worst damage.
At a corporate event, the people in the audience are not strangers who will never see each other again. They are colleagues. They have to work together tomorrow morning. They have hierarchies, rivalries, insecurities, and politics that are completely invisible to the performer but very much present in the room.
When you make a joke about a volunteer at a corporate event, you are not just affecting that individual in the moment. You are affecting their professional standing in front of their peers. You are creating a story that will be retold at the office on Monday. You are giving their rivals ammunition and their direct reports a reason to see them differently.
I once made a mildly teasing comment to a volunteer at a team-building event in Innsbruck — just a light joke about how quickly she had made a decision. Afterward, the event organizer pulled me aside and told me the woman was the newest team member and had been struggling with imposter syndrome. My comment, which I had meant as a compliment wrapped in humor, had landed as sarcasm.
You do not know what is going on in people’s lives. You do not know their insecurities, their office dynamics, their personal struggles. When you stand on stage with a microphone and make a joke about someone, you are operating with incomplete information. The safe play — always — is compassion.
The Compassion-Comedy Spectrum
Let me be clear about something: humor with compassion does not mean humor without teeth. It does not mean safe, vanilla, please-everyone comedy that never takes a risk. The distinction is not between edgy and safe. The distinction is between where the edge is directed.
You can be absolutely savage about yourself. You can be merciless about absurd situations. You can be cutting about institutions, about technology, about the universal experience of being a confused human being trying to make sense of the world. All of that is fair game and can be devastatingly funny.
What you cannot do — or rather, what you should not do — is direct that edge at someone who has trusted you enough to stand next to you on stage. That trust is sacred. It is the foundation of everything you do as a performer. The moment you betray it for a laugh, you have told the entire room something about yourself that no amount of clever material will erase.
What I Would Say to Stefan Now
If I could go back to that corporate event in Vienna, I would not cut the joke entirely. The moment called for humor — the audience expected it, the situation demanded it. But I would redirect it. Instead of “Well, this explains a lot about your company’s marketing strategy,” I would say something like, “Well, this explains a lot about my prediction abilities.” Same moment. Same energy. Same opportunity for a big laugh. But the target is me, not him. And Stefan goes back to his seat feeling like a hero who helped make something amazing happen, instead of feeling like the punchline.
That is the whole principle in one example. Same comedy. Same energy. Different target. Completely different outcome.
The laugh you get at someone else’s expense disappears by the end of the evening. The trust you build by treating people with compassion stays long after the last card is dealt and the last prediction is revealed.