The first time I accidentally created a running gag, I did not realize what I had done until the third time it happened.
I was performing at a corporate event in Linz — a product launch for a technology company, maybe sixty people in the room. During a mentalism piece early in the set, I asked someone to think of a number. Before they could respond, my phone buzzed audibly in my jacket pocket. It was not part of the show. I had forgotten to silence it. I grimaced, said “Sorry — my psychic abilities do not extend to silencing technology,” and moved on.
The audience laughed. Small laugh, nothing special. I forgot about it immediately.
Twenty minutes later, during a different effect, a prop made an unexpected sound — a small click that was not supposed to be audible. Without thinking, I patted my jacket pocket and said, “Not my phone this time, I promise.” The laugh was bigger. Noticeably bigger. Disproportionate to the joke itself.
Then, near the end of the set, I was doing a prediction reveal and asked a volunteer to open an envelope. As she tore the paper, it made a slight ripping sound that was amplified by the microphone. I looked at the audience, touched my jacket pocket, raised an eyebrow, and said nothing. The room erupted.
Three references to the same accidental moment, each building on the last, each getting a bigger reaction. The third one did not even require words — just the gesture toward the pocket was enough to bring the house down. And as I stood there watching the audience laugh, I thought: something just happened here that I need to understand.
The Mechanics of the Callback
I had stumbled onto one of the most powerful comedy tools in performance, and it took reading Scott Alexander’s lecture notes on building a stand-up act to understand the mechanics behind what had happened.
Alexander has a phrase for it: “Find your Fig Newton.” He references Mac King, whom he calls a “Jedi Master” of callbacks — an artist who ties things from the beginning of his show to apparent accidents later, creating a web of recurring references that makes the entire performance feel intricately constructed. King’s show features a recurring Fig Newton cookie that keeps appearing throughout the act, each appearance building on the comedy of the previous ones. Jeff Hobson uses a recurring sound effect — a zooming airplane noise with a hand swipe over his head. Kerry Pollack has a lie detector that beeps throughout his show whenever he tells a lie. Farrell Dillon shouts the word “Rainbow!” and produces multicolored thimbles over and over.
These are not just structural devices. They are comedy engines. And the comedy they generate is different in kind from any other type of humor.
Here is why. When a comedian tells a joke, the audience laughs because the joke is funny. It is a transaction: comedian delivers humor, audience responds. But when a performer does a callback, the audience laughs for a different reason. They laugh because they get it. They recognize the reference. They are in on the joke. The laughter of a callback is the laughter of membership — it says, “We were here at the beginning, we remember, and now we are all part of this together.”
That membership feeling is extraordinarily powerful. It turns a room full of strangers into a temporary community. It creates what performers call connection and intimacy — the sense that the show is not just something happening at the audience but something happening with them. They are co-authors of the comedy now. The callback does not work without them remembering the original moment. Their memory is part of the mechanism.
Why Each Iteration Gets Bigger
One of the things that mystified me about my accidental phone gag in Linz was the escalation. The first reference got a small laugh. The second got a bigger one. The third — which was just a gesture, with no words at all — got the biggest reaction of the evening. This makes no logical sense if you think of comedy as delivering funny content. The third iteration had the least content. It should have gotten the smallest laugh.
But callbacks do not work on content logic. They work on recognition logic. Each iteration triggers the memory of all previous iterations, and the accumulated emotional weight of the entire sequence lands in a single moment. The audience is not just laughing at the current reference — they are laughing at the whole chain. The comedy compounds.
There is also an element of anticipation that builds after the second callback. Once the audience realizes that a motif is recurring, they start watching for it. They become alert to the possibility. And when it arrives, there is a burst of satisfaction — the pleasure of prediction confirmed — layered on top of the humor itself. This is why the third iteration of a running gag almost always gets the biggest reaction: by the third time, the audience is expecting it and wanting it, and the delivery is a kind of gift.
The parallel to how magic works at a psychological level is striking. In magic, we create expectations and then subvert them. In callbacks, we create expectations and then fulfill them. Both generate powerful emotional responses, but through opposite mechanisms. And in a live performance that combines both — magic that subverts expectations and callbacks that fulfill them — you get a show with extraordinary dynamic range.
Deliberate Versus Accidental Running Gags
After the Linz experience, I started thinking about how to build callbacks deliberately rather than relying on happy accidents. This turned out to be harder than I expected.
The phone incident worked because it was genuinely accidental. If I had planned it from the start, could I have gotten the same result? Yes — but only if the audience believes the initial moment is real. This is the Dennis Miller principle applied to a specific comedy technique. Just as Miller scripted his ad libs to appear spontaneous, the best running gags are scripted to appear accidental.
Mac King’s Fig Newton does not announce itself as a planned comedy device. It appears. It seems random, quirky, maybe even like a mistake. And then it appears again. Each appearance is funny precisely because it seems to be organically emerging from the performance rather than mechanically inserted into it.
When I set out to create my own deliberate running gag, I started with the wrong approach. I tried to design something clever and insert it into the show — a specific prop that would keep appearing at inopportune moments. It was engineered, logical, structurally sound. And it fell completely flat. The audience could sense the architecture. There was no surprise in the recurrence because the setup telegraphed that recurrence was coming.
Finding What Was Already There
The breakthrough came when I stopped trying to invent a running gag and started looking for one that already existed naturally in my performance.
I went back through my post-performance notes and looked for recurring elements. Not things I had planned, but things that kept happening on their own. Moments that reliably generated energy. Phrases I had started using without thinking about it.
And I found something. There was a particular phrase I had been using at the moment right before a reveal — a sort of verbal tic that I had developed unconsciously. I would say, “Now, here is the thing…” and then pause before showing the outcome. It had become a signature without my intending it. At several events, I noticed that the audience would lean forward slightly when I said it, because they had learned from earlier effects in the set that “here is the thing” meant something surprising was coming.
That was my Fig Newton. Not a prop. Not a sound effect. A phrase.
Once I recognized it, I started refining it deliberately. I made sure to use it at the same structural moment in each effect — just before the reveal, after a pause. I made the delivery consistent: same tone, same rhythm, same slight head tilt. And then I started playing with it. In one effect, I would say “Now, here is the thing…” and then deliberately not do the reveal, building anticipation. In another, I would start to say it and then stop myself, as if the magic was happening before I was ready. In the final effect, I would say it with absolute confidence and deliver the biggest reveal of the evening.
The audience started reacting to the phrase itself. By the third or fourth time I used it, I could see people nudging their neighbors, smiling in anticipation. They knew it was coming. They were waiting for it. And when it arrived, the laugh that preceded the reveal warmed up the reveal itself — the audience was already in a state of shared pleasure before the magic even happened.
The Inside Joke Economy
Here is what running gags and callbacks really create: an economy of inside jokes.
An inside joke is one of the most powerful bonding mechanisms in human social life. It says, “You and I share an experience that outsiders do not have access to.” When a performer creates a running gag, every person in the audience becomes part of that inside joke. If someone walked in halfway through the show and saw the audience losing their minds over a gesture toward a jacket pocket, they would be completely confused. The humor belongs exclusively to the people who were there from the beginning.
This exclusivity makes the audience feel special — participants rather than spectators. At corporate events, this effect is particularly valuable. The running gag becomes something the team shares. I have had event organizers tell me that phrases from my performance became running jokes in their office — that people would say “Here is the thing…” before presenting quarterly results, and everyone would laugh. That cultural penetration extends the impact of the performance far beyond the evening itself.
Building Your Own Callback Architecture
Let me share what I have learned about structuring callbacks effectively.
First, the initial moment needs to feel genuine. Whether it is actually accidental or carefully scripted to appear accidental, the origin must not feel manufactured. The audience should believe it just happened.
Second, the second occurrence needs to seem like coincidence. The audience should feel like they are discovering the pattern, not being shown it. This discovery is half the pleasure.
Third, the third and subsequent occurrences can be increasingly deliberate. By this point, the audience knows the gag exists. They are looking for it. Now you can play with their expectations — delay it, subvert it, deliver it without words, or set it up and then not do it. The audience has become your collaborator.
Fourth, the final callback should be the biggest. Save the most satisfying version for the end of the performance. This ties the whole show together. The audience leaves feeling that everything was connected, that the performance was a single, coherent experience rather than a sequence of unrelated pieces. This sense of coherence is what Alexander means when he says running gags make you look “super polished.”
The Meta-Lesson
The biggest laughs do not come from the cleverest jokes. They come from shared experiences between the performer and the audience. Callbacks are the purest expression of this principle: the humor is generated not by content but by relationship. A joke is delivered. A callback is discovered. A joke is consumed. A callback is co-created.
Find your Fig Newton. It does not have to be a cookie. It can be a phrase, a gesture, a look, a recurring situation. What matters is that it feels genuine, that it recurs naturally, that the audience discovers the pattern rather than being told about it, and that each recurrence builds on the last.
When you find it, you will know. Because the laughter will be different. Warmer. More intimate. More like recognition than reaction.
That is the sound of an inside joke being born. And once your audience has one of those with you, they are yours.