I had been performing for about a year when I asked Adam Wilber a question that, in retrospect, revealed exactly how lost I was.
We were on a call about Vulpine Creations business, and I mentioned that I had been working on my act and could not figure out why some sections landed and others did not. The material was all solid. The techniques were clean. The structure made sense. But there were stretches in the middle where the energy in the room would dip, and I could not identify why.
Adam asked me a question that I did not have an answer for. “For each of those sections,” he said, “what are you going for? What’s the reaction you want?”
I started to answer something about building toward the next effect, about setting up the premise, about establishing context. Adam cut me off gently. “No,” he said. “What reaction? What do you want the audience to do? Laugh? Gasp? Lean in? What?”
I realized I had no idea. I had been constructing my show like a consultant builds a presentation — logical flow, clear structure, supporting points building to a conclusion. But I had never thought about it in terms of specific, targetable audience reactions. It had never occurred to me that every moment needed to be aimed at producing a specific response in the people watching.
That conversation sent me back to a framework I had read about but not yet truly absorbed.
The Big Three
Ken Weber, in Maximum Entertainment, lays out a framework so simple it almost seems too obvious to be profound. But like most truly useful ideas, its power is in the application, not the statement. Here it is:
Every moment in your show should target one of three reactions.
One: rapt attention. The audience is deeply engaged. They are leaning in, hanging on your words, following the story with genuine investment. They are fascinated, charmed, intrigued, or emotionally moved. They are not just watching. They are absorbed.
Two: laughter. The comedy reaction. A genuine laugh, not a polite chuckle. Something in the moment struck them as funny — a surprise, an absurdity, a recognition, a perfectly timed observation. The laugh is involuntary. It comes out of them before they decide to produce it.
Three: astonishment. The magic payoff. The moment of impossibility. The gasp, the wide eyes, the half-second of stunned silence before the reaction hits. The moment when reality as they understood it is violated and their brain short-circuits trying to process what just happened.
That is it. Three reactions. Everything your audience experiences during your show should be producing one of those three responses. If a moment is not producing rapt attention, laughter, or astonishment, it is not producing anything useful. It is dead air.
Why Only Three
When I first encountered this framework, my analytical brain wanted to complicate it. What about wonder? What about suspense? What about emotional connection? What about intellectual curiosity? Surely there are more than three reactions that matter.
But the more I sat with it, the more I realized that Weber had not oversimplified. He had distilled. Wonder, suspense, fascination, emotional engagement — these all live under the umbrella of rapt attention. They are different flavors of the same fundamental state: the audience is deeply, genuinely engaged with what is happening in front of them.
The framework is not saying there are only three emotions an audience can feel. It is saying there are only three categories of productive response. Either the audience is absorbed (rapt attention), amused (laughter), or stunned (astonishment). Those are the three gears of entertainment. You are always in one of them, or you are in neutral. And neutral is where audiences start checking their phones.
This distinction between specific emotions and categories of response was important for me. It meant I did not need to engineer complex emotional journeys for every moment of my act. I needed to make sure every moment was doing one of three jobs. That is a tractable problem. That is something I could actually work with.
Mapping My Own Show
The first thing I did after fully absorbing this framework was print out my show script and go through it line by line with three colored highlighters. Blue for rapt attention. Yellow for laughter. Red for astonishment.
The exercise took two hours. When I finished, I looked at the pages and felt slightly sick.
There were large stretches of unhighlighted text. Whole paragraphs where I was talking but not targeting any reaction. Sections where I was explaining, setting up, moving from one thing to the next, filling time with words that served no purpose other than getting me from point A to point B. I had been treating those sections as necessary connective tissue. In reality, they were dead zones where the audience had nothing to react to and therefore nothing to keep them invested.
The highlighted sections — the moments I could clearly identify as targeting rapt attention, laughter, or astonishment — were the moments I knew worked. They were the peaks in my show. The problem was that between the peaks, there were valleys of nothing. Not bad moments. Not embarrassing moments. Just… nothing moments. Moments where the audience was waiting, passively, for the next interesting thing to happen.
What Rapt Attention Actually Requires
Of the three reactions, rapt attention is both the most common and the most misunderstood. Most performers think they have rapt attention when they actually have mild attention. There is a difference, and it is the difference between someone who is watching your show and someone who has forgotten they are watching a show.
Rapt attention means the audience is so engaged that they have lost awareness of themselves as an audience. They are in the story. They are invested in the outcome. They care about what happens next — not because you told them to care, but because you created conditions where caring was the natural response.
This does not require elaborate storytelling or theatrical staging. It requires genuine engagement with the moment. When I tell the audience about a challenge I faced, about a moment when something went sideways during a performance in Vienna and I had to think on my feet, their attention shifts from observation to investment. They are no longer watching a demonstration. They are inside a story, wondering what happened next. That is rapt attention.
The key, I discovered, is stakes. Rapt attention requires the audience to feel that something is at risk. It can be emotional stakes, narrative stakes, even the simple stake of curiosity — will this work or won’t it? Without stakes, attention stays mild. With stakes, attention becomes rapt.
What Laughter Actually Requires
Laughter is the reaction that most performers either chase too aggressively or avoid entirely. I started in the avoidance camp. My consulting background had trained me to be informative and authoritative, not funny. Humor felt risky. What if nobody laughed? The silence after a failed joke is one of the most painful experiences in performance.
But Weber’s framework reframed laughter for me in a way that made it less terrifying. The best laughter in magic, he argues, is not from jokes. It is from the magic situation itself. The surprise, the absurdity, the spectator’s spontaneous reaction, the moment when something unexpected happens and the audience’s natural response is to laugh.
This kind of organic humor is available to every performer regardless of whether they consider themselves funny. It arises from the gap between expectation and reality, from the human moments that occur naturally when you involve real people in impossible situations. A spectator’s genuine look of confusion when a card appears in their pocket. The moment when you build enormous tension and then the resolution is delightfully unexpected. These are not jokes. They are comic situations that emerge from the magic itself.
Once I understood this, I stopped trying to be funny and started creating conditions where funny things would happen naturally. The laughter increased. Not because I became a comedian, but because I stopped blocking the humor that was already trying to emerge from the material.
What Astonishment Actually Requires
Astonishment is what most magicians think they are always producing. They are usually wrong.
True astonishment — the gasping, open-mouthed, turn-to-your-neighbor-and-grab-their-arm kind of reaction — is rarer than most performers realize. What they are actually producing most of the time is mild surprise. “Oh, that’s clever.” Not “WHAT JUST HAPPENED?”
The difference is in how the moment is framed, not in how the technique is executed. I learned this the hard way. I had effects in my show that were, from a technical standpoint, deeply impressive. Complex, multi-phase routines with multiple impossibilities layered on top of each other. And the audience reaction was… polite appreciation. They could see that something impressive had happened, but they were not astonished.
Then I had simpler effects — direct, clean, one-phase moments of impossibility — that got massive reactions. Not because the technique was better, but because the moment was framed so that the impossibility landed with full force. The audience understood exactly what should have been possible, and then watched the impossible happen anyway.
Astonishment requires clarity. The audience needs to understand the situation completely before the impossible thing happens. If they are confused about what is going on, they cannot be astonished, because astonishment requires a clear violation of a clear expectation. Muddy the expectation, and the most technically brilliant effect in the world lands with a shrug.
The Fourth Category No One Wants to Talk About
Weber acknowledges a fourth category, and it is the one I found most uncomfortable to confront: necessary instructions or explanations. Sometimes you have to tell the audience something procedural. Pick a card. Write something down. Think of a number. These moments are not targeting any of the Big Three. They are logistical necessities.
The honest performer acknowledges that these moments are filler. They are not entertainment. They are the price of admission for certain effects, and the goal is to minimize them as ruthlessly as possible.
When I audited my show with this in mind, I found that I had far more instructional filler than I had realized. Moments where I was explaining what was about to happen, describing the conditions of the experiment, walking the audience through the setup. All necessary, I told myself. All unavoidable.
Except much of it was avoidable. I found I could cut, compress, or reframe many of those instructional moments so they served double duty — delivering the necessary information while also targeting rapt attention or laughter. “I need you to think of a card” is filler. Turning that moment into a story about why this particular experiment matters, or making the selection process itself into a comic moment, transforms filler into performance.
The Lens That Changes Everything
The Big Three framework is not complicated. A child could understand it. But applying it honestly to your own work requires the kind of brutal self-assessment that most people would rather avoid. Because the framework does not care about your intentions. It does not care how hard you worked on a section. It does not care how clever your construction is. It asks one question and one question only: is the audience reacting?
If the answer is yes — if they are rapt, laughing, or astonished — you are doing your job. If the answer is no, you are not doing your job, regardless of how well you are executing the material.
I carry this framework into every performance now. It is the first filter I apply when developing new material and the first diagnostic I run when something is not landing. Three reactions. Three targets. Hit one of them at every moment, or accept that you are wasting the audience’s time.
The simplicity is the point. When you are on stage and things are moving fast and your brain is juggling technique and timing and audience management and a dozen other variables, you need a framework that fits in your pocket. Three reactions. Am I hitting one of them right now? If yes, keep going. If no, something needs to change.
That is the game. The rest of this section is about how to play it.