I need to be honest about something before we go any further into this topic: I was terrified of humor.
Not in life. In life, I am reasonably funny. My friends laugh at my observations. My colleagues in the consulting world appreciate my dry takes on corporate absurdity. In a conversation, at a dinner, over drinks, I can be funny without trying.
But on stage? On stage, the prospect of trying to be funny felt like standing on a cliff edge. The distance between a joke that lands and a joke that dies is enormous, and the silence after a failed joke is one of the most brutal sounds in performance. I had experienced it. Early in my performing career, at a corporate event in Vienna, I tried a scripted joke during a card routine. Nobody laughed. The silence lasted maybe two seconds, but it felt like a geological age. I could feel the audience’s secondhand embarrassment radiating from the tables like heat.
After that, I avoided humor in my performances for nearly a year. I told myself I was a mentalist, not a comedian. I told myself my style was dramatic and mysterious, not funny. I told myself the audience did not need to laugh — they needed to be astonished.
All of that was fear dressed up as artistic choice.
The turning point came when I read Ken Weber’s distinction between two categories of humor in magic, and realized that my entire understanding of comedy in performance was wrong.
Two Categories of Funny
Weber separates humor into what I think of as organic and imported.
Organic humor arises naturally from the magic situation itself. It is the comedy that exists inside the interaction between performer, audience, and the impossible thing happening. The spectator’s expression when they realize you know their card. The absurdity of asking a serious professional to blow on a deck of cards. The surprise that follows a reveal. The natural comedy of a situation where one person claims to have powers that do not exist.
Imported humor is pre-written comedy brought in from outside the magic situation. These are scripted jokes, rehearsed one-liners, bits of stand-up inserted between or during effects. They are manufactured laughs that exist independently of the magic.
Weber’s argument — and this is the part that changed everything for me — is that organic humor is vastly superior for magicians. Because organic humor arises from the unique situation that only magic creates, it cannot exist anywhere else. A comedian cannot produce the laugh that comes from a spectator’s genuine shock. A talk show host cannot produce the laugh that comes from the absurdity of an impossible event. These moments belong exclusively to the magic performer, and they are gold.
Imported humor, on the other hand, puts the magician in direct competition with professional comedians. And that is a competition most magicians will lose. If the imported jokes are not at least as sharp, as fresh, as well-delivered as what the audience sees from professional comedians on screens every day, the jokes will feel second-rate. And second-rate comedy is worse than no comedy at all, because it signals to the audience that the performer is trying to be something they are not.
When I understood this distinction, the cliff edge disappeared. I did not need to be a comedian. I did not need to write jokes. I needed to notice what was already funny in the magic situation and give it room to land.
The Discovery Process
I started paying attention — really paying attention — to when audiences laughed during my performances. Not when I was trying to be funny. When they laughed spontaneously. When something in the interaction produced a genuine, unforced laugh.
And I was surprised by how often it happened.
People laughed when I asked for a volunteer and three people at a table simultaneously pushed the same person forward. People laughed when a spectator pulled a face of exaggerated suspicion while examining a prop. People laughed when I said something matter-of-fact about an impossible situation — treating the supernatural as ordinary, which is inherently absurd. People laughed during the moment of tension before a reveal, when one person in the group said something like “no way” and the whole table erupted because they were all thinking the same thing.
These were not jokes. They were moments. Natural, organic, unrepeatable in their specifics but repeatable in their structure. And every single one of them was producing the laughter reaction that I had been afraid I could not achieve.
The problem was that I had been blowing past most of these moments without noticing them.
Catching the Laughs
Weber makes a point that stuck with me: if a naturally funny moment happens during your performance and you do not write it down afterward, you will forget it. The ad-lib that killed, the spectator comment that brought the house down, the moment of organic comedy that arose from the specific chemistry of that specific performance — all of it will fade from memory unless you capture it.
I started keeping a performance journal. Not a detailed log of every show, but a quick notation of the moments that got laughs. What happened. What was said. What the context was. Over a few months of consistent note-taking, patterns emerged.
Certain structural situations were reliably funny. The moment when a spectator is asked to make a free choice and agonizes over it as if the fate of the world depends on picking the right card. The moment when I state something impossible with complete sincerity and the audience’s first reaction is laughter at the audacity of the claim. The moment when a spectator realizes, just a beat before everyone else, that something impossible has happened, and their face becomes the funniest thing in the room.
Once I identified these structural situations, I could design for them. Not write jokes for them — design the performance so that the naturally funny moment has space to happen.
Designing for Organic Humor
Here is what I mean by designing rather than writing.
In one of my close-up routines, there is a moment where I ask a spectator to hold out their hand. Early on, I would say, “Hold out your hand, please,” and they would do it. Functional. Clean. No laughs.
Now, I pause before making the request. I look at both of their hands. I look at my own hands. I look back at theirs. Then I say, “Left hand, please.” The pause and the unnecessary deliberation create the impression that the choice of hand matters enormously, which is inherently absurd because it obviously does not. The audience laughs. Not at a joke, but at the comedy of the situation — the gap between the gravity of my consideration and the triviality of the decision.
I did not write that laugh. I designed the space for it. The pause, the deliberation, the specificity of the request — these are structural choices that invite the audience to find the moment funny. The humor arises from the situation, not from a punchline.
Another example. During a mentalism piece, there is a moment where I appear to be concentrating intensely on reading someone’s thoughts. I furrow my brow. I close my eyes. I take a deep breath. Then I open my eyes and say, with complete sincerity, “You’re thinking of something.” The audience laughs because the statement is comically obvious — of course they are thinking of something; everyone is always thinking of something. The humor comes from the contrast between the intense buildup and the anticlimactic observation. And the laugh gives me a beat of connection with the audience before I move into the real reveal.
This is not a joke. It is a designed comic beat built into the structure of the routine. The audience is not laughing at a punchline. They are laughing at the situation. And that laugh is more powerful and more authentic than any scripted one-liner I could insert.
Economy of Words
One of the most practical lessons I absorbed about humor in performance has to do with word count. Fewer words are almost always funnier than more words.
Weber gives an example I think about often. Five words — brief, sharp, unexpected — can produce a bigger laugh than a twelve-word setup that makes the same observation. The extra words dilute the surprise. They give the audience too much time to see the punchline coming. They soften the impact.
I have applied this ruthlessly to every comic moment in my performance. When I identify a moment that gets a laugh, I immediately start cutting words. Can I say this in six words instead of ten? Can I say it in three? Can the look on my face communicate what two of those three words were doing, leaving only one word to do the work?
The trimming process is mechanical, but the results are not. The tighter the comedic beat, the sharper the laugh. Every unnecessary word I remove makes the funny moment funnier. It is one of the few areas of performance where less is reliably, measurably more.
The Talk-Through Technique
There is a practical technique I learned that bridges the gap between landing the laugh and maintaining momentum. When a comic moment lands, you need to let the laugh develop. Cutting it off by rushing into the next sentence kills the reaction and signals to the audience that their laughter was not important to you. But standing in dead silence waiting for the laugh to end can feel awkward, especially if the laugh is smaller than expected.
The solution is to tack a few low-stakes words onto the end of the comic moment — not the next thought, not new content, just a gentle verbal exhale that lets you keep moving while the audience finishes laughing. Something like repeating the key phrase quietly, or adding an aside that does not require the audience’s full attention. It bridges the laugh into the next beat without either stepping on the reaction or creating an uncomfortable pause.
I noticed this technique in talk show hosts before I understood what it was. The host gets a laugh, then mutters something half under their breath while the audience is still reacting, and by the time the laughter subsides, the host is already into the next thought. It looks effortless. It is not. It is a conscious technique that manages the transition between a comic peak and whatever comes next.
What I Do Not Do
I want to be clear about what this approach does not include.
I do not tell jokes. Not scripted, standalone jokes with setups and punchlines that exist independently of the magic. I tried it. The Vienna disaster taught me that this is not my strength and, more importantly, not what my audiences need from me. They are getting humor from the situation, from the interaction, from the organic comedy of impossible things happening to real people. That is enough. More than enough.
I do not use running gags or catchphrases. These work brilliantly for some performers, especially those with a strong comedic character. They do not work for me. My performance style is conversational and in-the-moment, and repeated bits feel rehearsed in a way that undermines the naturalism I am working to create.
I do not mock spectators. This is a firm line. The audience should be laughing with their colleague who is on stage, never at them. The spectator is doing me a favor by participating. Making them the butt of a joke destroys the trust that I need for the rest of the performance. The audience judges me by how I treat the person who volunteered, and if they sense cruelty or condescension, the entire emotional foundation of the show collapses.
The Shift in My Relationship with Humor
Looking back, my fear of humor in performance was based on a misunderstanding. I thought humor meant being a comedian. I thought the laughter target required writing material that was funny independent of the magic. I thought I needed to compete with professionals who had spent their entire careers learning to make people laugh.
I did not. I needed to notice what was already funny. I needed to design moments where organic humor could arise. I needed to trim unnecessary words. I needed to let the laughs breathe. And I needed to stop trying to be something I was not.
The laughter in my performances now is not louder than it was when I was trying to tell jokes. But it is more frequent, more natural, and more connected to the overall experience. The audience is not laughing at my comedy. They are laughing at the delightful absurdity of the impossible thing happening right in front of them. They are laughing because the situation is funny, because the human moment is funny, because life is funny when you are standing two feet from something that should not be possible and the person responsible is treating it as if it is the most normal thing in the world.
That kind of laughter does not require being a comedian. It requires being present, being aware, and being willing to let the moment be funny without forcing it.
The laughter target is real. It matters. It is one of the Big Three for a reason. But hitting it does not mean becoming someone you are not. It means becoming more attentive to what is already there.