There is a specific kind of credibility that comes from someone who has walked the exact path you are walking. When I found out that Judy Carter — author of The New Comedy Bible — started her career as a magician before becoming a comedy coach, something clicked in a way that no other comedy resource had managed.
Here was someone who had stood on stages with props, loaded suitcases with magic apparatus, done the exact thing I do — and then pivoted to comedy and built an entire methodology around making people funny. Her transition was not a tangent. It was validation. If magic skills and comedy skills were truly complementary, then a magician who became a comedy authority was the ultimate proof of concept.
I read her work the way you read a letter from someone who has already traveled your road. Not with detachment, but with urgent recognition.
The Story That Made Me Trust Her
Carter tells a story that I cannot get out of my head. She was booked to perform at the Chicago Playboy Club — a magic show, with props, with the whole apparatus. Hugh Hefner was going to be in the audience. And then her luggage did not arrive. The airline lost her bags. All her tricks, all her props, everything she needed for the show — gone.
The club manager told her she was going on anyway. So she walked on stage with nothing and said, “United Airlines is a better magician than I am. They made all my tricks vanish.” The audience laughed. She started describing the tricks she would have done and how amazed they would have been, and they kept laughing. That night, she discovered that she was funnier without her props than with them. Her authenticity — her honesty about the disaster — created a connection that the magic had never fully achieved.
That story hit me because I know the feeling of hiding behind props and effects. I know what it is like to let the magic do the connecting instead of doing it yourself. Carter’s accidental comedy debut is a reminder that the performer is always more interesting than the performance. The person is always more compelling than the trick. And sometimes you have to lose all your tricks to discover that.
The Ten Commandments
Carter’s framework for comedy development begins with what she calls the Ten Commandments of Comedy. These are not joke-writing techniques. They are principles of professional conduct and creative integrity. And reading them as a magician, I was struck by how many of them apply directly to magic performance, not just comedy.
The first commandment is: Thou shalt not steal. Do not borrow jokes from other comics, from the internet, from books. The audience wants to hear your original voice. That is your bankable asset. In magic, this translates directly. Do not present someone else’s routine as your own creation. Do not copy another performer’s presentation word for word. Find your own voice, your own framing, your own way of presenting the material.
The second: Thou shalt not lie. Truth is stranger and funnier than fiction. Authenticity is the secret sauce. As Dave Chappelle says, the hardest thing to do is to be true to yourself, especially when everybody is watching. This one resonated deeply with me because my entire blog is built on the premise that honest storytelling about the journey — the real journey, including the failures — is more valuable than polished fiction.
The third through fifth commandments cover building a social media presence, paying your dues through stage time, and networking. As a consultant who has built businesses, the networking one felt like coming home — it is how ecosystems function.
The sixth: Bash the powerful. Punch up, not down. This maps directly to magic: humor at the expense of a volunteer who has made themselves vulnerable is never acceptable. Humor at the expense of yourself is fair game.
The seventh: Never use age as an excuse. Rodney Dangerfield got his big break at forty-four. Lewis Black broke through at forty-eight. I came to magic as an adult, years past the age when most people assume performing careers begin. This commandment is not just motivational for me — it is foundational.
The eighth: Work clean. For keynotes and corporate events, this is non-negotiable. Every moment of humor has to be appropriate for every person in the room.
The ninth: Do not try to be funny. Trying too hard to get laughs is like trying too hard to get love on a date. Develop material that communicates your ideas in a way that is authentically funny. This is the commandment I struggle with most.
The tenth: Write every day. Your funny bone is a muscle — use it or lose it. This connects directly to the Seinfeld Strategy.
The Seinfeld Strategy
The Seinfeld Strategy is one of those ideas that is so simple it almost sounds trivial, until you actually try to do it, at which point you discover it is one of the hardest disciplines in the world.
Jerry Seinfeld, when asked for advice by a young comic, did not talk about joke structure or stage presence or timing. He said: write every day. Get a big wall calendar. Get a red marker. For each day that you write, put a big red X on that day. After a few days, you will have a chain. Your only job is to not break the chain.
Notice what Seinfeld did not say. He did not say “write good material every day.” He did not say “write a finished joke every day.” He said write. The emphasis is on the habit, not the output. The quality will come from the consistency. But the consistency has to come first.
Carter reinforces this with a specific protocol: set a timer for ten minutes. Write without stopping until the timer goes off. Write anything. Even if it is “I cannot think of anything to write.” Then put an X on your calendar. Done. That is the day’s work.
When I first tried this, I was skeptical. I am a strategy consultant. I am trained to optimize for outcomes, not processes. Writing for ten minutes with no quality filter felt like the opposite of everything I know about efficiency. But I tried it, sitting at the desk in my apartment in Vienna, with a cheap paper calendar pinned to the wall and a red marker that I had bought specifically for this purpose.
The first week was painful. I wrote garbage. Not even funny garbage — just garbage. Observations about my day that had no comedic potential. Descriptions of hotel rooms that were neither interesting nor amusing. Half-formed thoughts about magic that went nowhere.
The second week was slightly less painful. Somewhere in the garbage, there were occasional sentences that made me smile. Not laugh — smile. A turn of phrase that had a comedic angle. An observation about a corporate audience that had the seed of something.
By the third week, I was finding material. Real material. Not polished, not performance-ready, but material that had the structural potential to become something. The consistency of writing every day had trained my brain to look for comic angles in everything I encountered. I was walking through the world differently. A meeting with a client was not just a meeting — it was a potential source of observational humor. A frustrating experience at an airport was not just frustrating — it was material.
The Seinfeld Strategy works because it changes how you see the world, not just how you write. The ten minutes of daily writing is the visible practice. The invisible practice is the twenty-three hours and fifty minutes when your brain, having been trained to look for comedy, runs a background process that scans everything for comic potential.
I keep the calendar. The chain is not unbroken — there are gaps, sometimes several days long, when travel or work or exhaustion wins. But the practice is alive. And the red X’s on the calendar are, in their own way, as satisfying as any audience reaction.
Finding Your Comedy Voice
One of Carter’s most important ideas is that funny is something you are or you are not. The book will not make you funny. But if you are funny — if you have the wiring for it — the book will show you how to channel that wiring into structured material.
This distinction is important and honest in a way that many comedy instruction resources are not. A lot of comedy books imply that anyone can be funny if they follow the right formula. Carter says the opposite: the formula is a tool, and it only works if you have the raw material to feed into it. What the formula does is organize and amplify what is already there.
For me, this was liberating rather than discouraging. I know I am not a natural comedian. I do not walk into a room and make people laugh with my presence. But I am a natural observer, and I am naturally self-deprecating, and I have a genuine fascination with the absurdity of corporate culture. Those are comedy raw materials. They are not the same raw materials that a club comedian would have, but they are mine, and they are authentic, and Carter’s framework helps me build on them rather than trying to become something I am not.
Carter’s emphasis on authenticity is relentless. Your authentic topics, your authentic reactions, your authentic perspective — these are the foundation. The techniques — act outs, turns, mixes, lists of three — are the construction tools. But the foundation has to be real. If you build comedy on fabricated premises, the audience will sense the falseness, even if they cannot articulate what is wrong.
This maps perfectly onto magic performance. The best magic presentations are built on genuine interests, genuine personality, genuine perspective. When I present a mentalism piece about decision-making, it works because I genuinely find decision-making fascinating. The fascination is real. The comedy I layer on top of it is constructed, but the foundation of genuine interest makes the construction feel organic.
What the Former Magician Taught the Current One
Carter’s journey carries an implicit lesson: the skills transfer. The timing she developed doing magic shows became the timing she uses to teach comedy. The audience-reading, the rehearsal discipline, the show construction — all of it carried across. If Carter could take magic skills and apply them to comedy, then the reverse is natural too. The two crafts share more DNA than either community typically acknowledges.
The Ten Commandments are pinned to the wall in my office now, next to the Seinfeld Strategy calendar. Do not steal. Do not lie. Pay your dues. Work clean. Write every day. They are not magic-specific or comedy-specific. They are performance-specific.
And they were written by a woman who started where I started: on a stage, with props, wondering why the audience was not connecting. Her answer was to find her voice — not the magician’s patter, but the authentic, truthful voice underneath the apparatus.
I am still looking for mine. But I know now that the voice is in there. You just have to write every day until you find it.
Red marker. Big X. Do not break the chain.