The question arrived in my head during a taxi ride home from a conference in Vienna, and it has not left since.
I had just performed a forty-minute keynote set for about three hundred people. The show had gone well — strong reactions, good energy, the event organizer was happy. During the reception afterward, I did what I always do: I eavesdropped. Not in a creepy way. In the way that every performer should — listening to how audiences describe what they just saw to each other and to people who were not in the room.
One woman was describing my mentalism piece to a colleague who had arrived late. “He read her mind,” she said. “He asked her to think of something, and he knew exactly what she was thinking. It was insane.”
One sentence. Clear, vivid, accurate. The effect was communicated in its entirety, and the colleague’s face showed immediate interest and regret at having missed it.
A few minutes later, I overheard a man trying to describe a different effect from the same show — a multi-phase piece that I had spent months developing and that I considered one of my more sophisticated routines. His description went like this: “So there were these cards, and he had someone pick one, and then I think he shuffled them, or maybe she shuffled them, and then he did something with the deck, and then there were envelopes, or maybe it was before the envelopes, and then somehow the card was… actually, I am not sure what happened at the end. But it was good.”
That description was the sound of a failed effect.
Not a failed method. The method had worked perfectly. The audience had been fooled. But the experience was so convoluted that the person who had watched it happen, who had been engaged and entertained in the moment, could not describe it to someone else five minutes later.
In the taxi, staring out the window at the Vienna night, I formulated the question that has since become my primary evaluation tool for every effect I perform: could a reporter describe this in one sentence?
The Reporter Test
The premise is simple. Imagine a newspaper reporter was sitting in the audience. Not a magic reviewer. A general-interest reporter covering the event. They have no knowledge of magic, no technical vocabulary, no understanding of methods or categories. They saw what the audience saw. And they need to write one sentence describing the most memorable moment of the performance.
Could they do it?
If the answer is yes — if the effect can be captured in a single, clear, vivid sentence — then the effect has passed the most fundamental test of audience impact. It is understandable. It is memorable. It is describable. It will travel. When the audience members go home and tell their partners, their friends, their colleagues what they saw, they will be able to communicate the experience, and the people they tell will understand why it was astonishing.
If the answer is no — if the effect requires multiple sentences, qualifications, backtracking, or the phrase “you had to be there” — then the effect has a problem. Not necessarily a fatal one, but a structural one that limits its impact and its reach.
Joshua Jay touches on this principle in How Magicians Think when he discusses what makes certain effects resonate with audiences and travel through word of mouth while others, no matter how technically impressive, are forgotten within hours. The effects that spread are the ones people can describe. The effects that die are the ones they cannot.
Why Describability Matters
There is a temptation to dismiss describability as a superficial concern. Who cares if the audience can describe the effect? The point is their in-the-moment experience, right? The emotional impact as it happens?
This thinking misses something fundamental about how magic creates value — both artistic and professional.
The in-the-moment experience is the foundation, yes. But the afterlife of an effect — what happens in the hours and days after the show — is where the real impact accumulates. When an audience member describes your show to someone who was not there, they are doing your marketing for you. They are building your reputation. They are creating demand for your next performance. And the quality of that description depends entirely on whether the effect was describable.
A describable effect generates stories. Stories generate curiosity. Curiosity generates bookings. This chain is direct and measurable. In my experience performing at corporate events across Austria, the effects that generate the most follow-up inquiries and rebookings are never the most technically complex. They are always the most describable. The ones that give the audience a clear, vivid story to tell.
From a purely artistic perspective, describability is also a proxy for clarity. An effect that can be described in one sentence is an effect that the audience fully understood. They grasped the impossible thing that happened. They were not confused by the procedure, distracted by the setup, or lost in the complexity of a multi-phase structure. Their understanding was complete, which means their experience of impossibility was complete. They did not see something confusing. They saw something impossible. And impossibility — clear, unmistakable impossibility — is the goal of every magic performance.
Applying the Test to My Repertoire
After the Vienna taxi ride, I went through my entire working repertoire and applied the reporter test to every effect. The exercise was sobering.
Some effects passed immediately. The mentalism piece that the woman had described as “he read her mind” — one sentence, perfectly clear. A visual transformation that I use as an opener — “he showed an empty hand and then a deck of cards appeared out of nowhere.” A prediction effect — “he predicted exactly what she would choose before she chose it.”
These descriptions are clean, vivid, and dramatic. They communicate the impossible thing that happened. They make the listener wish they had been there. They are, in marketing terms, word-of-mouth gold.
Other effects did not pass. The multi-phase card routine that the man had struggled to describe was the most obvious failure, but it was not the only one. I had a mentalism piece that involved three different spectators and three different revelations, building to a combined climax. In the moment, it was powerful — the room loved it. But when I imagined a reporter trying to describe it, the description ballooned into a paragraph. “He had three people think of things, and then he revealed what the first person was thinking, and then the second person’s thing was connected to the first person’s thing, and then…” By the time you get to the climax, you have lost the listener.
I also found effects that lived in an ambiguous middle ground — describable, but not vivid. “He did something with a rope and it changed length” — technically accurate, but flat. The description communicates what happened without communicating why it was astonishing. A successful reporter-test sentence should make the listener react. It should provoke “wait, how is that possible?” or “what do you mean, he knew what she was thinking?” A flat description communicates information without generating emotion.
The Harder Question: What Do You Do About Failures?
Identifying the problem is the easy part. The hard part is deciding what to do about it.
For the multi-phase card routine, the answer was clear: cut it. The effect was too complex for the reporter test, and no amount of presentation work was going to simplify a three-phase procedure into a one-sentence description. The complexity was structural, baked into the design of the effect. The only fix was to remove it from the show and replace it with something cleaner.
This was painful. I had spent months on that routine. But Darwin Ortiz provides the intellectual framework for this kind of decision in Designing Miracles: “The audience should never be made to work.” If the audience has to work to follow your effect, the effect is too complex. And if an audience member who just watched the effect has to work to describe it, the effect is too complex. The two criteria are expressions of the same principle.
For the mentalism piece with three spectators, the answer was different. The underlying effect was strong — the climax was genuinely powerful. The problem was the journey to get there. I started experimenting with versions that reduced the visible complexity. Fewer steps. Fewer spectators. A more streamlined path to the same destination. The goal was to preserve the impact of the climax while simplifying the experience enough that the reporter sentence became: “He predicted exactly what three people would do, written on a piece of paper that was sitting there the whole time.” Still a single sentence. Still vivid. But it required restructuring the presentation to make the journey as clean as the destination.
For the rope effect, the answer was presentation. The effect itself was simple and clear — it passed the structural test. But the presentation was not vivid enough to generate an exciting reporter sentence. I reworked the patter to connect the effect to a theme that resonated more strongly in my keynote context, and the reporter sentence became something I was happier with.
The One-Sentence Test as a Design Principle
The reporter test is not just an evaluation tool. It is a design principle. When I develop new material now, I start with the reporter sentence. Before I choose a method, before I develop a presentation, before I rehearse a single move, I write the sentence.
“He borrowed a ring, it vanished from his hand, and it was found inside a sealed box that had been sitting on the table the whole time.”
“He asked someone to think of any word in any language, and he wrote it on a board before they said it out loud.”
“She shuffled the deck, cut it anywhere she wanted, and the card she cut to was the only one with a different colored back.”
If the sentence is vivid and clear and makes me react as a listener, the effect is worth developing. If the sentence is complicated, vague, or requires explanation, I have not found the right effect yet.
This is the discipline of the director’s eye applied at the earliest possible stage. Most performers develop an effect and then discover, after weeks or months of work, that the audience experience is muddled. The reporter test catches this problem before you invest the time. It is a filter applied at the idea stage, and it is the most efficient filter I have found.
What the Test Does Not Measure
I want to be clear about the limitations of this approach, because like any single tool, it can be misapplied.
The reporter test measures clarity and describability. It does not measure emotional depth. Some of the most powerful moments in magic are atmospheric, emotional, experiential — they create a feeling rather than a describable event. A beautiful manipulation routine performed to music may not pass the reporter test in the traditional sense, but it may produce an experience that is deeply moving and memorable.
The test also does not measure deceptive strength. An effect can be perfectly describable and still be weak if the audience suspects they know how it was done. Describability and impossibility are separate qualities, and both are necessary for great magic.
What the test does measure, reliably and ruthlessly, is whether the audience can carry your magic out of the room with them. Whether the experience you created will survive the transition from live performance to verbal description. Whether your magic has legs.
And in the professional world of corporate entertainment and keynote speaking, where every show is an audition for the next show, having magic with legs is not optional. It is the foundation of a sustainable career.
The Final Test
I will close with a challenge I give myself regularly and that I think every performer should adopt.
After every show, find someone who watched it and ask them to describe their favorite moment. Do not prompt them. Do not suggest effects. Just ask: “What was the thing that stuck with you?”
Listen to the description. Was it one sentence? Was it vivid? Did it communicate the impossible thing that happened? Did it make you, hearing it described back to you, feel that the effect had landed the way you intended?
If yes, that effect has passed the ultimate test. It is not just a good trick. It is a good story — a story the audience tells for you, in your absence, carrying your magic into rooms you will never enter and conversations you will never hear.
If the description is confused, vague, or requires multiple attempts, you have work to do. Not on the method. On the clarity. On the structure. On the fundamental question of whether the audience understood what they were supposed to experience.
The reporter test is not the only way to evaluate material. But in my experience, it is the most honest one. Because the audience’s description of your show is the truest mirror you will ever find. It reflects not what you intended to show them, but what they actually saw.
And that is the only thing that matters.