There is a hierarchy to the Big Three Reactions, and it took me longer than it should have to understand it.
When I first encountered the framework in Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment — the idea that every moment on stage should target rapt attention, laughter, or astonishment — I immediately fixated on the two that seemed most exciting. Laughter. Astonishment. Those are the reactions that feel like victories. When someone gasps, you know you have landed the magic. When someone laughs, you know you have connected emotionally. Both are unmistakable, audible, visible confirmations that you are doing something right.
Rapt attention, by contrast, seemed like the quiet cousin. The background noise of a competent performance. The thing that just sort of happens if you are not actively boring people. I dismissed it as the default state rather than an achievement in its own right.
I was wrong. Rapt attention is not the default. It is not automatic. And it is, I have come to believe, the most important of the three reactions — because it is the foundation on which the other two are built.
What Rapt Attention Actually Looks Like
Before I understood rapt attention as a target, I misidentified it constantly. I thought a quiet audience was an attentive audience. This is not true. A quiet audience can be bored, confused, uncomfortable, politely enduring, or simply too inhibited to react. Silence is not the same as engagement.
Rapt attention looks different. It looks like a room full of people whose eyes are on you and whose bodies are slightly forward in their seats. It looks like the absence of phone-checking, sidebar conversations, and restless shifting. It looks like a group of people who have temporarily suspended their own thoughts, their own concerns, their to-do lists and dinner plans and parking worries, and are fully present with whatever you are saying or doing.
This is a remarkable state. If you think about it from the audience’s perspective, truly giving someone your undivided attention is one of the most generous things you can do. It means you are choosing, moment by moment, to prioritize this experience over every other thought competing for your mental bandwidth. That is not a passive act. It is an active choice, and it requires the performer to be offering something worth choosing.
When I realized that rapt attention is the audience choosing to stay present with me, rather than an automatic consequence of being on stage, it changed how I prepared every single moment of my performance.
The Broadest Target
Here is why rapt attention occupies a unique position among the three: it can be achieved through an almost unlimited range of approaches.
Astonishment requires impossibility. You need a moment where reality appears to bend, where the audience’s understanding of what is possible is violated. This is powerful but structurally limited — you cannot sustain continuous impossibility across an entire performance. The moments of astonishment are peaks, and peaks need valleys between them.
Laughter requires humor. You need something that strikes the audience as funny — a line, a moment, an observation, a situation. This is wonderful when it works, but comedy is notoriously difficult to engineer reliably. What is funny to one group falls flat with another. Cultural context, timing, energy level, and a dozen other variables determine whether a comedic moment lands or dies.
Rapt attention, though, can be achieved through drama. Through charm. Through warmth. Through fascination. Through curiosity. Through suspense. Through intimacy. Through novelty. Through storytelling. Through vulnerability. Through confidence. Through sheer force of personality.
The range of tools available for creating rapt attention is vastly wider than the range available for creating laughter or astonishment. Which means that in any moment of your performance where you are not going for a laugh and not going for a gasp, you should be going for attention. And the number of ways to achieve it is limited only by your imagination and your willingness to be genuinely interesting.
What “Genuinely Interesting” Means
I struggled with this concept for a while because it felt circular. Be interesting to create attention. What does it mean to be interesting? How do you measure it? How do you engineer it?
The breakthrough came when I stopped thinking about it from my perspective and started thinking about it from the audience’s. What makes me lean forward when I am in the audience? What makes me put my phone away and actually care?
The answer, I found, is almost always the same: something that creates a question in my mind that I want answered.
When a performer tells the beginning of a story and I do not know the ending, I am rapt. When a performer shows me a situation and I do not know how it will resolve, I am rapt. When a performer says something that contradicts what I expected, I am rapt. When a performer reveals something personal and I want to know where they are going with it, I am rapt.
The common thread is an open loop. An unanswered question. A gap between what I know and what I want to know. As long as that gap exists and I believe the performer is going to close it, my attention is theirs.
This is a principle I recognized from my consulting career, years before I applied it to performance. In strategy presentations, the most effective way to hold a room of executives is not to present conclusions first but to present the problem first. Let the room sit with the question. Let them feel the tension of not knowing the answer. Then deliver the answer. The gap creates the attention. The resolution creates the satisfaction.
The same principle applies on stage, with cards or without.
How I Apply This in Practice
Let me walk through a specific example without revealing any methods.
There is a moment in one of my mentalism pieces where I ask a spectator to think of something. Not to say it out loud. Just to think of it. Then I step back and there is a stretch of about thirty seconds where I appear to be concentrating, working through something internally, before I reveal what they are thinking.
Early in my performance career, those thirty seconds were dead time. I stood there looking intense, and the audience waited. Some of them were engaged, but many were simply waiting for the next thing to happen. The energy in the room dropped during those thirty seconds. It was a valley without purpose.
Now, those thirty seconds are scripted for rapt attention. Not with jokes. Not with another impossible moment. With words.
I talk. I describe what I am experiencing. I frame the process as something the audience can follow, something they can participate in mentally. I might say something about what it is like to try to read the signals of another person, about the difficulty of separating what you want to perceive from what is actually there. I might share a brief personal observation about the first time I attempted something like this and how completely wrong I was. I might ask the spectator a question — not a procedural question but a human one — that reveals something about the moment we are sharing.
These words are not filler. Every sentence is designed to create or sustain a question in the audience’s mind: Is he actually going to get this right? How is he doing this? What does it feel like to be the person up there with him? Each sentence deepens the gap between what they know and what they want to know. Each sentence is a small act of attention creation.
The result is that when I finally make the reveal, the audience has not been waiting passively. They have been actively engaged for thirty seconds, their attention building rather than depleting. The reveal lands harder because the attention was sustained. The astonishment sits on top of rapt attention rather than on top of boredom.
The Fill-Every-Moment Discipline
This is the discipline I have been developing since I started taking the reactions framework seriously: the habit of filling every single moment with at least rapt attention, even when — especially when — I am not going for laughter or astonishment.
Transitions between effects used to be my dead zones. The moment between one piece ending and the next one starting was a logistics exercise — put these props down, pick those props up, reset my position, launch into the next introduction. Now, every transition contains a story beat, a question, or a piece of engagement that maintains the audience’s investment.
Setup phases within effects used to be procedural. “I need you to pick a card.” “Shuffle the deck.” “Hold this for a moment.” Instructions delivered flat, with the expectation that the audience would comply and wait for the payoff. Now, every setup is framed as part of the narrative. The setup itself is interesting. The audience is not waiting for the magic to start — they are engaged from the moment I open my mouth.
Even the moments where I am physically handling props without speaking used to be attention gaps. I would perform a sequence of moves in silence, assuming the visual interest of watching someone handle cards or coins would sustain attention. It does not. Not reliably. Not for more than a few seconds. Now, if I need a moment of silence for technical reasons, I frame that silence dramatically. I slow down. I make eye contact. I create the feeling that the silence itself is significant. That something is about to happen.
Why Rapt Attention Is the Foundation
The deeper insight, the one that took me the longest to internalize, is that rapt attention is not just one of three equal targets. It is the foundation for the other two.
Laughter cannot happen without attention. A joke delivered to a distracted audience does not register as a joke. It registers as noise. The audience needs to be present and engaged for the comedic moment to land. Rapt attention creates the conditions for laughter.
Astonishment cannot happen without attention. An impossible reveal performed for an audience that has mentally checked out does not produce astonishment. It produces a vague awareness that something happened while they were thinking about something else. The audience needs to be leaning in, invested, caring about the outcome, for the impossible moment to hit with full force.
This means that every moment of rapt attention you build is an investment in the impact of whatever comes next. The comedy hits harder because the audience is present. The magic hits harder because the audience cares. Rapt attention is not the consolation prize when you cannot get a laugh or a gasp. It is the platform from which laughs and gasps are launched.
The Hardest Lesson
The hardest part of learning to prioritize rapt attention was accepting that it requires more effort, not less. When I dismissed it as the default state, I assumed it took care of itself. I focused my energy on designing funny moments and powerful reveals, and I assumed that the stretches between them would be fine. Just… fine. Adequate. Not terrible.
But adequate is the beginning of boredom. Adequate attention is the audience choosing to stay only because leaving would be awkward. Adequate attention is the phone staying in the pocket but the eyes going glassy. Adequate attention is the body in the seat but the mind already somewhere else.
Rapt attention — the kind where the audience genuinely does not want to be anywhere else, where the performer’s words and actions are more compelling than any other option available to the audience in that moment — takes work. It takes scripting. It takes rehearsal. It takes the willingness to evaluate every moment of your performance and ask, honestly: would I pay attention to this if I were sitting in that seat?
I ask myself that question constantly now. Before every show, during every video review after. And the honest answer is not always yes. Sometimes I find moments that I, as an audience member, would drift through. Those moments get reworked.
Because the audience’s attention is not free. It is not guaranteed. It is not the default. It is a gift they give you, moment by moment, for as long as you earn it. And the moment you stop earning it, it goes somewhere else — quietly, invisibly, irrevocably.
Rapt attention is the broadest of the three targets because it can be achieved in a thousand ways. It is the most achievable because it does not require being funny or performing the impossible. It requires only being worth paying attention to.
And that, it turns out, is work enough for a lifetime.