I had a bit in my show that I loved.
It was a two-minute segment between my second and third effects where I talked about the relationship between perception and reality. It was well-written. It was intellectually stimulating. It connected to the broader theme of my keynote. It had taken me the better part of a weekend to construct, sitting in my flat in Austria, polishing the language until each sentence had the rhythm I wanted.
I performed it for six months. Every time, it felt good to deliver. The words came out smoothly. The pacing was natural. I could feel myself settling into the material the way you settle into a well-worn armchair. Comfortable. Familiar. Mine.
Then I did the Big Three mapping exercise, and the two-minute segment came up entirely white.
No rapt attention. The audience was not leaning in or hanging on the words. They were following along, the way you follow along with a moderately interesting podcast while doing dishes. Present but not invested.
No laughter. There was nothing funny in it. It was not designed to be funny. It was designed to be thought-provoking, which is not one of the three reactions and does not count no matter how much you want it to.
No astonishment. Nothing impossible was happening. Nothing unexpected. No violations of expectation. Just a man on stage delivering his thoughts about perception and reality to an audience that had not asked for his thoughts about perception and reality.
The segment was filler. Two minutes of pure, well-crafted, intellectually satisfying filler. And the Big Three framework has no exceptions for filler that is well-crafted or intellectually satisfying or that the performer personally enjoys.
I cut it. It hurt. I am going to talk about why it hurt, because I think the pain of cutting is the reason most performers never do it.
The Emotional Economics of Filler
Cutting filler is not an intellectual problem. Intellectually, the logic is airtight: if a moment does not target rapt attention, laughter, or astonishment, it is not contributing to the audience’s experience, and therefore it should go. There is nothing complicated about this. A child could understand the principle.
The problem is emotional. We become attached to our material. The two-minute perception segment was not just words on a page. It was a weekend of my life. It was an expression of something I genuinely cared about. It was part of my identity as a performer — the idea that I was not just doing tricks, I was saying something meaningful about how humans experience reality.
Cutting it felt like cutting a piece of myself out of the show. And that feeling is exactly why filler persists in acts that are otherwise thoughtfully constructed. The performer knows, on some level, that the segment is not producing reactions. But the emotional cost of admitting that — of acknowledging that something they invested in and care about is not serving the audience — is higher than the cost of keeping it in.
This is not unique to magic. I have seen the same dynamic in every creative field I have been part of. In consulting, we called them “pet slides” — slides in a client presentation that the consultant loved but that added nothing for the audience. Every senior partner had them. Everyone knew they should be cut. No one wanted to cut their own.
The difference in magic is that the audience’s attention is the scarcest resource in the room, and every second of filler spends that resource without returning anything. In a consulting presentation, a pet slide wastes thirty seconds. In a performance, thirty seconds of filler can break the spell entirely. The audience goes from engaged to waiting, and getting them back from waiting to engaged costs more energy than keeping them engaged in the first place.
How to Identify Filler
The Big Three mapping exercise I described in the previous post is the most reliable method I have found. But there are other diagnostic tools that work, some of them faster and more brutal.
The first is the deletion test. Take any moment in your show and ask: if I deleted this entirely, would the audience miss it? Not would they notice it is gone — they have never seen your show before, so they cannot miss what they do not know was supposed to be there. Would the experience be worse without it? Would they feel less entertained? Would a reaction be lost?
If the answer is no — if you could remove the moment and the audience experience would be unchanged or better — then the moment is filler. It is serving you, not them.
The second diagnostic is the recording test. Watch a recording of your show and focus exclusively on the audience. During the moment in question, what are they doing? Are they leaning in? Laughing? Gasping? Or are they sitting passively, waiting? The camera does not lie. The audience’s body language during a given moment tells you exactly how productive that moment is.
The third diagnostic is the retelling test. If an audience member went home and described your show to their spouse, would they mention this moment? People retell the moments that made them react. They retell the astonishing reveal, the funny situation with the volunteer, the story that had them on the edge of their seat. They do not retell the two-minute philosophical digression about perception and reality, no matter how well-constructed it was.
If a moment would not survive the retelling test, it is filler. The audience will not miss it because they were never going to remember it.
The Taxonomy of Filler
Not all filler is created equal. Through mapping my own material and watching recordings of other performers, I have identified several distinct categories.
The intellectual indulgence. This was my perception segment. Material that the performer finds fascinating but that does not produce any of the Big Three reactions in the audience. It is the performer thinking out loud, and it confuses the performer’s engagement with the audience’s engagement. Just because you are interested in what you are saying does not mean they are riveted by what you are saying.
The unnecessary setup. This is procedural language that has metastasized. Instead of saying “think of a card,” the performer says “I’m going to ask you to think of a card in a moment, and it can be any card at all, there’s no wrong answer, whatever card comes to mind first is perfect.” The additional words add nothing. They are anxiety masquerading as thoroughness.
The habitual transition. “So that was the first thing I wanted to show you. Now let’s move on to something a little different.” This sentence contains zero reaction potential. It is a verbal placeholder, the spoken equivalent of clearing your throat. It exists because the performer has not scripted the transition and defaults to filler when moving between effects.
The performance ritual. Little gestures, phrases, or beats that the performer has done so many times they have become unconscious. A specific way of placing a prop down. A particular sentence that opens every effect. A physical reset that takes five seconds longer than it needs to. These are not filler by design — they are filler by accumulation. They crept in and stayed because no one told them to leave.
The defensive explanation. Material that exists because the performer is worried the audience will not understand what is happening. Instead of trusting the audience’s intelligence, the performer over-explains, providing context that the audience neither needs nor wants. The irony is that over-explanation often makes things less clear, not more, because it signals to the audience that something complicated is happening when the goal should be to make everything feel simple and direct.
The Pain of the Cut
Let me be honest about what happened after I identified the filler in my show. I did not cut it all at once. I could not. The emotional resistance was too strong.
I started with the easiest cuts — the habitual transitions and the unnecessary setups. These were low-attachment items. I had not invested creative energy in them. They had just accumulated. Removing them felt like cleaning out a closet. Satisfying, even.
Then I moved to the performance rituals. These were harder because they were comfortable. They were the little moments of familiarity that made me feel safe on stage. Cutting them meant that I would be performing without those tiny anchors, and the prospect felt exposed. But I did it, and within two shows, I did not miss them. The audience had never noticed them in the first place.
Then came the hard cuts. The intellectual indulgences. The segments I had built with care and performed with pleasure. My perception speech. A sixty-second riff on the history of mentalism that I loved delivering but that produced no discernible reaction. A personal anecdote that I thought was charming but that, on video, clearly showed the audience’s energy dipping.
Each of these cuts felt like a small loss. Not a catastrophic one. A small one. The kind of loss where you know intellectually that you are better off, but you still feel the absence.
What Happens After You Cut
The effect of cutting filler was not subtle. It was immediate and dramatic.
My show got shorter. Not by a lot — maybe four or five minutes total. But those four or five minutes had been the weakest minutes, the minutes where the audience was least engaged, and removing them changed the feel of the entire experience. The show went from a sequence of peaks and valleys to a sequence of peaks and slightly-lower-peaks. The baseline energy in the room stayed higher because there were fewer moments where it was allowed to drop.
I also noticed something I had not expected: the material around the cuts got better. Not because I changed it, but because removing the dead space allowed the live moments to breathe differently. A laughter moment that had previously been sandwiched between two stretches of filler now sat between a moment of rapt attention and a moment of astonishment. The audience’s energy flowed from one reaction to the next without the interruption of a dead zone. Each reaction built on the energy of the previous one instead of having to rebuild from a standing start.
The overall effect was a show that felt tighter, faster, and more alive — even though I had not added anything new. I had only removed what was not working. Subtraction as improvement. It is counterintuitive, but it is one of the most reliable principles I have encountered.
The Ongoing Discipline
Cutting filler is not a one-time event. It is a practice. New filler accumulates constantly. Every time you perform, you are at risk of adding a word here, an explanation there, a comfortable phrase that feels good to say but targets no reaction. The natural entropy of performance is toward more filler, not less. Left unchecked, a tight twenty-minute set will become a bloated twenty-five-minute set within a year, and you will not notice the degradation because it happens one sentence at a time.
This is why the mapping exercise needs to be repeated regularly. Every few months, I print the script, pick up the highlighters, and check. Where has white space crept back in? What new filler has accumulated since the last audit? What comfortable phrases have I started saying without noticing?
The discipline is not in making the first cut. The discipline is in making the hundredth cut, months later, when the filler has grown back and the emotional attachment has reformed and the voice in your head is once again saying “but I like this part” as if liking it is the same as it working.
It is not the same. Your enjoyment of a moment and the audience’s reaction to that moment are two entirely different things. The Big Three framework does not care what you enjoy performing. It cares what the audience responds to. And everything else — everything — is filler.
Cut it. It will hurt less each time. And your show will be better every single time you do it.