There is a moment in Mac King’s show where something appears that has no business being there. A small, seemingly insignificant object that showed up twenty minutes earlier in a completely different context. The audience erupts. Not because the object is inherently funny, but because they remember it from before, and its return in this new, absurd context creates a collision of recognition and surprise that is almost impossible to resist.
I watched that moment on a grainy YouTube clip in a hotel room in Salzburg. It was late, I was procrastinating on rehearsal, and I had been going through videos of performers that other magicians kept recommending. Mac King’s name came up constantly. So I watched. And what I found was not just a funny magician but an architect of laughter who builds his show the way a novelist builds a plot — with seeds planted early that bloom into something bigger later.
That night, I rewound that one moment six times. Not to figure out any method — I was trying to figure out why I was laughing harder the sixth time than the first.
The Fig Newton Principle
Scott Alexander, in his Standing Up On Stage lecture, calls it “finding your Fig Newton.” He uses Mac King as the primary example, writing that King is “a Jedi Master when it comes to these techniques.” The reference is specific: Mac King has a running gag involving a Fig Newton that keeps popping up throughout his show. It appears here, it appears there, and each appearance gets a bigger reaction because the audience has now been trained to expect it while simultaneously being surprised by where it shows up next.
Alexander’s observation is that running gags “become like an inside joke between you and the audience, creating connection and intimacy with them.” That phrase — inside joke — stopped me cold. Because that is exactly what a running gag does. It divides the world into two groups: people who were there from the beginning and understand the reference, and everyone else. When you are in the first group, you feel special. You feel included. You feel like you and the performer share something.
This is not a small thing. This is, in many ways, the holy grail of live performance — making several hundred strangers feel like they are all in on the same private joke with you.
Why Pattern Recognition Feels Good
We are pattern-recognition machines. Our brains constantly scan for repetition, for structure, for “I have seen this before.” When we recognize a pattern, there is a small burst of satisfaction — a micro-reward, a tiny dopamine release from the brain confirming its own prediction.
Now combine that with surprise. A callback does not just repeat something. It repeats something in a new and unexpected context. You get the pleasure of recognition — “I know that thing!” — combined with the surprise of incongruity — “Wait, why is it here now?” Those two feelings arrive simultaneously, and the result is deep, involuntary laughter.
This is why callbacks get bigger laughs than standalone jokes. The standalone joke has to do all the work itself. The callback has been doing setup work for the entire show, and by the time it arrives, it detonates twenty minutes of accumulated context at once.
The Architecture of Mac King’s Show
What makes Mac King exceptional is not that he uses one callback. It is that his entire show is a web of callbacks. Elements from the first routine resurface in the third routine. A comment from the second piece becomes relevant in the fifth. By the end of the show, everything connects to everything else, and the audience has the sensation of having watched something that was designed, that was crafted, that was built with intention from the first word to the last.
I spent a week watching every Mac King clip I could find, pausing and taking notes on a legal pad like I was doing case analysis for a consulting project. What I mapped out looked like a network diagram — lines connecting moments in the first five minutes to moments in the last five minutes. Every piece served multiple functions.
Here is what I noticed about how King plants his running gags. The first mention is always casual — a throwaway, something that seems like a minor detail. Your conscious mind barely registers it. But your subconscious files it away and moves on.
The second mention is the surprise. This is where the audience first realizes that the thing is coming back. This gets a laugh of recognition: “Oh, there it is again.” The laugh is moderate. It is the sound of people connecting the dots.
The third mention — and this is where the mastery lives — is the payoff. By now the audience knows the pattern. They might even be anticipating it. But King finds a way to deliver it that still surprises, either through timing, context, or scale. The third mention is always bigger, stranger, or more absurd than the audience expected. And because they were expecting something, the gap between expectation and reality creates an enormous laugh.
This three-beat structure is not accidental. It is the fundamental rhythm of comedy: establish, reinforce, subvert. King just does it across the span of a forty-five-minute show instead of within a single joke.
What I Tried to Steal (and What I Got Wrong)
After my Mac King research week, I was convinced I could build running gags into my own show. How hard could it be? I had the structure mapped out. I understood the psychology. I just needed to find my own Fig Newton.
My first attempt was terrible. I was performing at a corporate event in Linz — about forty people, a conference room that had been rearranged into a makeshift theater. I decided to plant a running gag involving a pen that kept appearing in increasingly unlikely places throughout the show. The pen would be behind someone’s ear, then inside a sealed envelope, then in my shoe.
The problem was that I telegraphed it. On the first mention, instead of making it casual and throwaway, I held up the pen and said something like, “Let me just set this pen aside for later.” Which is the equivalent of a novelist writing, in the first chapter, “The gun on the mantelpiece would become very important later in the story.” I was so excited about the callback that I could not resist pointing to it, and by pointing to it, I killed it.
The second problem was worse. My “callbacks” were just the same pen showing up in different places. There was no escalation. The second mention was not more surprising than the first. The third mention was not more absurd than the second. It was just a pen, in three places, and the audience reaction was approximately: “Oh, there’s that pen again.” Not laughter. Just acknowledgment.
I had built a pattern without building a trajectory. A running gag needs to go somewhere. Each return needs to raise the stakes, shift the context, or increase the absurdity. King’s Fig Newton does not just appear three times. Each appearance is funnier, more unexpected, and more integrated into whatever is happening in that moment. The gag evolves. Mine just repeated.
The Lesson from the Failed Pen
That failed pen gag in Linz taught me something crucial: a callback is not just a repetition. It is a repetition with variation. The audience needs to recognize the element, but they also need to be surprised by what it is doing this time. Recognition without surprise is just repetition, and repetition is boring.
So I went back to my notes and rewatched the Mac King clips with different eyes. This time I was not looking at what recurred. I was looking at how it changed each time it recurred. And the pattern was clear. Each return of a running gag element shifted the element’s function.
The first time, it might be a prop. The second time, it might be a punchline. The third time, it might be the solution to a problem. Same object, different role each time. That is what creates the escalation. That is what makes the third mention funnier than the first — because by the third time, the element has accumulated meanings. It is no longer just a Fig Newton. It is a Fig Newton that has been a snack, a mystery, and now a resolution.
Building Callbacks Into a Non-Comedy Show
I am not a comedian doing a forty-five-minute comedy show. I am doing keynote presentations enhanced with magic and mentalism. Building running gags into that kind of show is different from building them into a pure comedy act. But the principle still applies — maybe more powerfully, because in a show that is not purely comedic, a well-placed callback creates a moment of unexpected levity that feels like a gift.
I eventually shifted from prop-based gags to verbal callbacks. A phrase from the opening that comes back in a different context later. This worked much better because verbal callbacks are subtler. The audience does not see them coming. And when the phrase returns with a completely different meaning, the recognition-plus-surprise combination fires exactly the way it is supposed to.
The Inside Joke Effect
The deepest lesson I took from studying Mac King is not about comedy mechanics. It is about community. When a running gag works, it creates a temporary community in the room. Everyone who was there from the beginning shares a reference. They look at each other when the callback lands. They laugh together in a way that is different from laughing at a standalone joke, because this laugh says, “We were here. We remember. We are in on this together.”
Alexander lists other performers who use running gags effectively — Jeff Hobson with his airplane noise, Kerry Pollack with a lie detector that beeps throughout the show, Farrell Dillon shouting “Rainbow!” and producing thimbles. Each has found their Fig Newton. And in each case, the running gag does more than generate laughs. It creates a throughline, a sense that the show is one unified experience rather than a collection of separate pieces.
That is what I am still working toward. I am not at the Mac King level — the man has been refining his show for decades. But I keep experimenting, and when a callback lands and the room erupts with the warm, inclusive laughter of people all remembering the same thing at the same time, there is nothing in performance quite like it.
Find Your Fig Newton
If you take nothing else from this, take the question that Scott Alexander implicitly asks every performer: What is your Fig Newton? What is the element in your show that could become a through-line, a recurring touchpoint, an inside joke between you and your audience?
It does not have to be a prop. It can be a phrase, a gesture, a character trait, a running theme. But it has to be plantable early, returnable later, and capable of evolving each time it returns. If it just repeats without evolving, you have a tic, not a gag. If it evolves without being recognizable, you have lost the thread.
The sweet spot is in the middle: recognizable enough to trigger the pleasure of pattern recognition, surprising enough to trigger the delight of incongruity. That intersection is where the biggest laughs live. Mac King lives there permanently.
The rest of us are still looking for the address.