The first time I mapped my act to the Big Three reactions, I did it in a hotel room in Salzburg at eleven o’clock at night with a printout of my show script and a pack of highlighters I had bought at a stationery shop near the train station.
I had been thinking about Ken Weber’s framework for days by that point. Rapt attention, laughter, astonishment. Three targets. Every moment should hit one. It sounded straightforward in theory. I wanted to see what it looked like applied to my actual material, line by line, moment by moment.
Blue for rapt attention. Yellow for laughter. Red for astonishment.
I started at the top of the script and worked my way through. For each sentence, each action note, each beat, I asked myself: which reaction is this targeting? And if the answer was clear, I highlighted it in the appropriate color. If the answer was not clear — if I could not honestly say that a given moment was designed to produce rapt attention, laughter, or astonishment — I left it unhighlighted.
The process took about two hours. I will not pretend the result was a revelation in the dramatic sense, because by the time I finished, the pattern had been obvious for at least an hour. But seeing it laid out on paper, in color, was something else entirely.
My act was approximately sixty percent highlighted and forty percent white.
Forty percent of my material was not targeting any reaction at all.
The Anatomy of Dead Space
The unhighlighted sections were not random. They clustered in predictable places. Transitions between effects. Setup explanations before mentalism routines. Procedural instructions. Moments where I was resetting or repositioning or simply moving from one thing to the next. And — this was the part that stung — sections of patter that I had written because they sounded good to me but served no clear purpose from the audience’s perspective.
I had a ninety-second stretch in the middle of my show where I talked about the history of a particular type of mentalism effect. It was well-written. It was accurate. I enjoyed delivering it. And it was not targeting any of the Big Three. The audience was not rapt — they were passively receiving information. They were not laughing — there was nothing funny about it. They were not astonished — nothing impossible was happening. They were just listening to me talk about something I found interesting, and I had confused my own interest with their engagement.
That ninety-second stretch was not the worst offender. It was just the most obvious one. The real damage was being done by the dozens of smaller dead spots — five seconds here, ten seconds there — that individually seemed harmless but collectively added up to minutes of unproductive stage time.
The Mapping Process
Let me walk through how I actually do this, because the process itself has become one of the most valuable tools in my preparation.
Step one: get your script on paper. Not on a screen. On paper. I print it double-spaced with wide margins. If you do not have a written script, that is a separate problem we have discussed in earlier posts, but for this exercise, you need something written down. Even rough notes will work if a full script feels too formal.
Step two: read through the entire script once without marking anything. Just read it and let it play in your head as a performance. Do not analyze yet. Just experience it the way an audience would, from beginning to end.
Step three: go back to the beginning with your three highlighters and start marking. For each moment — and I mean each moment, not each effect or each section but each individual beat — ask: which of the Big Three is this targeting?
The key word is “targeting.” Not “might produce” or “could potentially lead to.” Targeting. Is this moment designed, on purpose, to create rapt attention, laughter, or astonishment? If you built this moment with a specific reaction in mind, highlight it. If the moment exists for some other reason — logistics, setup, transition, habit — leave it white.
Step four: when you finish, look at the pattern. Where are the clusters of color? Where are the stretches of white? What does the ratio look like?
Step five — and this is the step that most people skip because it is uncomfortable — ask yourself whether the highlighted sections would actually produce the reactions you think they would. Be honest. Hope is not a strategy. Wishing a moment would get a laugh does not make it funny. Believing a reveal should produce astonishment does not mean it will. If you have performance recordings, watch them alongside the script and check whether your highlighting matches reality.
What I Learned from My First Map
Several things became clear immediately.
First, my show front-loaded reactions and back-loaded dead space. The opening was strong — lots of blue and red, moments designed to grab attention and establish that impossible things were going to happen. But as the show progressed, the ratio shifted. More white space crept in. More explanations. More transitions. More moments where I was working toward something but the audience had nothing to react to in the meantime.
This made sense from a construction standpoint. I had built my show the way I would build a consulting presentation: strong opening, detailed middle section, powerful close. But a consulting presentation can survive a detailed middle section because the audience is there for information. A performance cannot survive a detailed middle section because the audience is there for experience. Dead space in a consulting deck is forgiven. Dead space on stage is not.
Second, my laughter moments were almost accidental. I had very few yellow highlights because I had very few moments that were deliberately designed to produce laughter. The laughs I was getting were happy accidents — moments where something naturally funny happened and the audience responded. I was not engineering laughter. I was hoping for it.
Third, my astonishment moments were bunched at the ends of effects. Red highlights appeared almost exclusively at climax points. Which meant that for the entire buildup to each effect — sometimes two or three minutes of stage time — the audience was not being astonished. Fair enough; you cannot astonish continuously. But those buildup periods needed to be filled with rapt attention or laughter, and many of them were filled with neither.
Redesigning Around Reactions
The map told me where the problems were. The question was what to do about them.
The simplest fix was cutting. Some of the white space was simply unnecessary. Words I was saying out of habit. Explanations that did not need to be that long. Transitions that could be compressed. I went through the unhighlighted sections and asked: can this be cut entirely? If I deleted this moment from the show, would the audience lose anything? In many cases, the answer was no. The moment existed for my comfort, not for their experience.
The second fix was converting. Some white-space moments could not be cut because they served a logistical purpose — I needed the audience to do something, or I needed to introduce a prop, or I needed to set up the conditions for the next effect. These moments could not be eliminated, but they could be transformed. An instruction delivered flatly is dead space. An instruction delivered with humor becomes a laughter moment. A setup explained dryly is dead space. A setup framed as a story with stakes becomes rapt attention.
I took my ninety-second history digression and rebuilt it. Instead of lecturing about the origins of a mentalism technique — which targeted no reaction — I turned it into a personal story about discovering this history during a late-night reading session in a hotel room and being so startled by what I found that I spilled coffee on the bedsheets. Same information, roughly. But now it was a story with a character (me), a setting (the hotel room), and a punchline (the coffee). The audience went from passively receiving information to being engaged in a narrative. Blue highlight. Rapt attention achieved.
The third fix was resequencing. Some of my dead space existed because I had ordered my material logically rather than emotionally. The logical sequence was: introduce concept, explain context, perform effect, reveal climax. The emotional sequence might be different: hook attention with a provocative opening, perform the effect while the attention is rapt, then provide the context as a story that sets up the next peak.
The Rolling Audit
I do not just map my act once. I map it every time I make a change, and I do a fresh map at least every few months even when nothing has changed. Because material drifts. Moments that once produced rapt attention can lose their edge as you become too comfortable with them and your delivery flattens. Laughter moments can stop being funny if you telegraph them too early. Astonishment moments can lose their impact if your framing becomes routine.
The map is not a one-time diagnosis. It is a monitoring system. Each time I print out the script and pick up the highlighters, I am checking the vital signs of my show. Where is the energy? Where are the dead spots? Has something shifted since the last time I checked?
I also started keeping a fourth color — green — for moments that I intended to target one reaction but that were actually producing a different one. This happens more than you might think. I had a moment in my show that I had designed as an astonishment beat — a reveal that I expected to produce gasps — that was consistently producing laughter instead. The audience found the reveal funny rather than stunning, and for a while I considered that a failure. Then I looked at it through the Big Three lens and realized: laughter is one of the three. It is a valid reaction. The moment was working. It was just working differently than I had planned. Instead of trying to force it back into the astonishment category, I leaned into the humor and made it a deliberate laughter beat. The moment got even funnier.
What a Healthy Map Looks Like
After several rounds of mapping, cutting, converting, and resequencing, my show script looked very different. The ratio had shifted from sixty-forty to something closer to eighty-five-fifteen. Eighty-five percent of my stage time was now deliberately targeting one of the Big Three. The remaining fifteen percent was necessary logistics that I had compressed as much as possible and, where feasible, had converted to serve double duty.
The color distribution also changed. I went from a show that was mostly blue (rapt attention) with occasional red (astonishment) to a show that wove all three colors throughout. Blue into yellow into red into blue into yellow into red. The texture improved because the audience was experiencing variety in their reactions, not just one sustained state punctuated by climaxes.
A healthy map, I have found, has no long stretches of any single color and very few stretches of white. It looks like a braid — three strands woven together, with each strand appearing regularly and no strand dominating for too long. The audience experiences this as a show that is consistently engaging while constantly shifting the kind of engagement. They are never doing the same thing for too long. They are being intrigued, then amused, then astonished, then intrigued again in a new way.
Why This Works
The reason the mapping process works is that it externalizes something that is almost impossible to evaluate internally. When you are performing, you cannot objectively assess whether the audience is reacting. You are too busy. When you are writing material, you cannot objectively assess whether it will produce a reaction. You are too close.
But when you sit in a hotel room with a printout and three highlighters and force yourself to classify each moment, you create distance. You see the show the way the audience will experience it — as a sequence of moments, each of which either gives them something to react to or does not.
The highlighters do not lie. The white space is the white space. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Which is exactly the point.
Every show I have performed since I started this practice has been better than the one before it. Not because I became more technically skilled, though that helps. But because I became more honest about which moments were working and which were just taking up space. The Big Three map made me accountable to the only metric that matters: is the audience reacting, or are they waiting for the next time they will react?
The highlighters are cheap. The honesty is expensive. Both are worth every cent.