Seven months after a corporate keynote in Klagenfurt, I ran into a woman I had used as a volunteer. I did not recognize her immediately — I perform at a lot of events, and faces blur together after a while. But she recognized me.
We were both at a business networking event in Vienna. She approached me during the coffee break, very polite, very professional. She said she had enjoyed the keynote, that the effects had been memorable, that her colleagues still talked about the evening. Then she said something that stopped me cold.
“You know, I still think about what you said when I was up on stage. About how I must not read the instructions at IKEA either.”
She said it lightly, with a smile. It was clearly not an accusation. She was not angry. But there was something underneath the lightness — a residue, a thin layer of something that had not quite healed. And in that moment, I understood something about audience interaction that no book or lecture could have taught me with the same force: the moments that a performer forgets in minutes, the volunteer remembers for months.
Maybe forever.
The IKEA Comment
Let me reconstruct what happened, because the context matters.
During the keynote in Klagenfurt, I had brought this woman on stage for an effect that required her to follow a simple sequence of steps. The steps are designed to seem straightforward but create a surprise outcome — that is the whole point. At one stage, she hesitated. She looked at the items in front of her and paused, clearly unsure which action to take next.
This happens constantly. It is a feature of the effect, not a bug. The volunteer’s hesitation builds tension, creates a comedic beat, and makes the eventual reveal more surprising. I knew exactly what was happening and I had a response prepared. But in the moment, instead of using one of my tested, self-deprecating lines — something like “Do not worry, I explain things this badly at home too” — I went slightly off-script. I looked at the audience, then back at her, and said, “I have a feeling you are not the one reading the IKEA instructions at home.”
The room laughed. She laughed too, or appeared to. The moment passed. I guided her through the rest of the effect, got the reveal, sent her back with applause. Standard stuff. I thought nothing more of it.
But seven months later, she was still thinking about it.
The Asymmetry of Memory
There is a fundamental asymmetry in performance that most performers do not fully appreciate until something like this happens to them. The performer is having one experience. The volunteer is having a completely different one.
For the performer, the show is routine. You have done this effect dozens of times. You have made hundreds of comments to hundreds of volunteers. Each individual interaction is a small component of a much larger body of work. It blurs. It fades. You move on to the next show, the next audience, the next volunteer.
For the volunteer, the experience is singular. They were the one on stage. They were the center of attention. Every word you said to them was amplified by the microphone, the lights, the eyes of everyone they know in that room. For them, this was not a routine Tuesday night. This was the night they were on stage at the company event, and the performer said something about their ability to follow instructions.
This asymmetry means that what feels mild to the performer can land heavily on the volunteer. My IKEA comment was not cruel. It was not vicious. It was mild, teasing, the kind of thing friends say to each other. But I was not this woman’s friend. I was a stranger with a microphone and the attention of her entire professional world. In that context, even mild teasing carries weight.
Scott Alexander addresses this directly in his lecture notes about building a stand-up act. He emphasizes that volunteers must be treated with respect — help them up on to the stage, help them back down, show that you care about them. But what struck me even more was the historical principle he references, one that goes back over a century to the great English magician David Devant.
Devant’s motto, which has become one of the most quoted principles in magic, was simple: “All done with kindness.”
Four words. And when I encountered them for the first time after the Klagenfurt incident, they carried the weight of lived experience.
What Devant Understood
David Devant was performing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an era when magic was entertainment for the masses — music halls, theaters, public shows. His audiences were not sophisticated consumers of ironic humor. They were families, workers, couples on dates. And Devant understood something that many modern performers have forgotten: the volunteer is not a prop. The volunteer is a guest.
“All done with kindness” does not mean all done with blandness. Devant was a showman. His performances had energy, humor, and surprise. But the humor was never at the volunteer’s expense. The surprise was never the volunteer’s humiliation. Everything — every interaction, every comment, every physical handling of the person on stage — was conducted with an underlying current of genuine care.
This is not just a nice ethical principle. It is a strategic one. When the audience perceives that the performer treats volunteers with kindness, they relax. They stop worrying about being called up. They stop evaluating the performer’s character and start enjoying the performance. They give themselves over to the experience completely, because they trust that nobody is going to get hurt.
That trust is perhaps the single most valuable asset a performer can have. And it is fragile. One moment of unkindness — even mild, even teasing, even the kind of thing that “anyone would laugh at” — can crack it. And once cracked, it does not easily heal.
The Scar Tissue of Public Embarrassment
After the encounter in Vienna, I started paying more attention to how people talk about their experiences as volunteers.
At a dinner party in Graz, a friend mentioned that she had been called up on stage by a comedian years earlier. The comedian had made a joke about her height, and the audience had laughed. She had laughed too, in the moment. But years later, her voice still had an edge when she talked about it. “I was wearing heels to look taller and then he made a whole thing about it.” She was still processing it.
A fellow consultant told me about being a volunteer at a magic show as a teenager. The performer had mimed his shaking hands with exaggerated trembling. “I was not actually that nervous until he said that,” he told me. “Then I was. And everyone could see.” He was in his late forties. He had been carrying that memory for thirty years.
This is how human memory works. Experiences of public exposure or humiliation are encoded more deeply and retrieved more easily than neutral experiences. The amygdala tags emotionally significant events for priority storage. The more public the moment, the deeper the encoding.
When you embarrass someone on stage, you are not creating a fleeting moment. You are creating a memory that may outlast everything else about your performance.
The Whispered Thank-You
Alexander describes a technique in his notes that I have adopted and that has become one of the most important parts of my audience interaction. It is small, almost invisible, but its impact is disproportionate.
When a volunteer is about to leave the stage, you lean in and whisper something kind. “Thank you so much.” “You were brilliant.” “I really appreciate your help.” It has to appear casual and unrehearsed — a genuine, private moment between you and the volunteer, not part of the show. The audience sees you lean in and say something, but they cannot hear what. They see the volunteer smile. And that moment — that small, apparently spontaneous act of human kindness — does more for your likability than any clever joke could ever do.
I started doing this at every performance, and the difference was immediate. Not in terms of audience reaction — though that improved too — but in terms of how volunteers behaved after they left the stage. They went back to their seats glowing. They were happy. They told their table mates something positive. The energy they carried back into the audience was warm, not wounded.
This is the opposite of what happens when you send a volunteer back after making them the butt of a joke. Then they return to their seat with a forced smile and a desire to disappear. Their table mates offer sympathetic comments. The energy is protective, not warm. And that energy spreads.
Rewriting My Approach
After the Vienna encounter, I went through every piece of material in my repertoire and identified every moment where the humor could potentially be perceived as targeting the volunteer. I found more of them than I expected.
Some were obvious — direct comments about the volunteer’s actions, decisions, or characteristics. Those were easy to redirect. I simply changed the target from the volunteer to myself or to the situation in abstract terms.
But some were subtler. A raised eyebrow when the volunteer does something “wrong.” A look at the audience that says “can you believe this?” A pause that implies the volunteer has made a mistake. These are not verbal — they are physical, tonal, implied. And they can be just as damaging as an explicit joke, because the volunteer feels the implication even if they cannot point to specific words.
I eliminated all of them. Every eyebrow raise that could be interpreted as mockery. Every conspiratorial look at the audience. Every pause designed to make the volunteer seem foolish. Gone.
In their place, I built moments of partnership. When the volunteer hesitates, I hesitate with them — making it clear that we are figuring this out together. When the volunteer makes an unexpected choice, I react with genuine surprise and interest rather than comedic exasperation. The result is that my volunteers now leave the stage as heroes. They return to their seats with stories to tell that do not sting. And months later, if they remember the experience at all, they remember it fondly.
The Deeper Lesson
People remember how you made them feel. Not what you said. Not what you achieved. Not the quality of your presentation or the cleverness of your insights. They remember the feeling. And if the feeling was even slightly humiliating, that is what sticks.
In every interaction where you have more power than the other person — and the performer-volunteer relationship is one of the most extreme power imbalances in normal social life — you have a choice. You can use that power for a laugh, or you can use it to make someone feel valued. The laugh fades by the end of the evening. The feeling of being valued — or humiliated — can last a lifetime.
Devant figured this out over a hundred years ago. “All done with kindness” was not sentimentality. It was wisdom. It was an understanding that performance is not just about what happens on stage. It is about what happens in the minds and hearts of the people who participated, long after the curtain comes down.
I think about the woman from Klagenfurt often. Not with guilt, exactly — the comment was mild, the intent was not malicious, and she bore it gracefully. But with gratitude. Because she taught me something, seven months after the fact, that I needed to learn. She taught me that the audience member I made fun of remembers it. Maybe not angrily. Maybe not bitterly. But they remember.
And if given the choice between being remembered for a clever joke and being remembered for making someone feel like a hero, I know which one I choose. Every time.