There is an old joke in show business, usually attributed to George Burns: “Sincerity — if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” The first time I heard it, I laughed. The second time I heard it, I nodded. The third time, somewhere around the point in my journey when I was doing corporate shows in Vienna and trying to figure out why some nights felt electric and others felt flat, I stopped laughing entirely.
Because the joke contains a paradox that every performer has to wrestle with. Sincerity is the most powerful quality you can project on stage. It is the thing that makes an audience lean in, trust you, feel that what is happening is real and matters. But the moment you start thinking about sincerity as a tool — the moment you ask yourself “how do I appear sincere?” — you have already introduced a layer of calculation that threatens to undermine the very thing you are trying to project.
This is the tightrope. And I have fallen off it more times than I care to count.
The Night I Learned What Sincerity Looks Like
Early in my performing career, maybe a year and a half into doing shows seriously, I was booked for a corporate event in Linz. It was a pharmaceutical company, about seventy people, post-dinner entertainment. Standard setup. I had my material down, my timing was solid, I felt prepared.
There was another performer that evening — not a magician but a motivational speaker who did a short talk before I went on. She was a former nurse who had transitioned into corporate coaching, and she talked for about fifteen minutes about resilience in high-pressure environments. The content was good but not extraordinary. What struck me was how she delivered it.
She spoke as if every sentence was something she had personally discovered and wanted to share because it mattered to her. Not because she was paid to. Not because it was her bit. Because she genuinely believed what she was saying and felt it was important that the people in the room heard it. Her voice had this quality — this weight — that made you feel like you were being told something confidential. Something just for you.
When she finished, the applause was enormous. Not polite corporate applause. Real applause. The kind that happens when people feel they received something genuine.
Then I went on and did my show. It went fine. Good reactions, solid laughs, strong closer. But afterward, standing at the bar, I overheard two people talking about the evening. They talked about the speaker for five minutes. They mentioned my show in one sentence: “The magic guy was good too.”
That stuck with me for weeks. I had fooled them, made them laugh, gave them a thirty-minute experience full of impossibility. She had just talked. But she had been sincere in a way that cut through everything, and sincerity, I was beginning to understand, trumps spectacle.
Weber on Sincerity and Entertainment
Ken Weber makes a point in Maximum Entertainment that reframed how I think about this. He argues that the most successful performers present polished, confident versions of their off-stage selves. The artificiality that many performers adopt — the stage persona that bears no resemblance to who they are in real life — is almost always a liability. Audiences can smell it. Maybe not consciously, maybe not in a way they can articulate, but they feel the gap between the person and the performance, and that gap creates distance.
The performers Weber holds up as models — people like David Copperfield, David Blaine, Tim Conover — all share a quality of seeming genuine. Copperfield tells personal stories amidst his mega-productions, and those stories work because you believe he is sharing something real. Blaine’s laconic, almost deadpan style reads as authentic precisely because he does not seem to be performing at all. Conover, in Weber’s telling, won over a room full of skeptics at a bar mitzvah because his sincerity was palpable.
What none of these performers are doing is “being natural” in the sense of being unrehearsed or unpolished. They are deeply rehearsed. Their timing is precise. Their words are chosen carefully. But the rehearsal serves the sincerity rather than replacing it. They have practiced until the craft becomes invisible, and what remains looks and feels like a genuine human being sharing something real.
This is the distinction that took me the longest to understand: sincerity is not the opposite of preparation. Sincerity is the product of preparation so thorough that the mechanics disappear.
The Fake Sincerity Problem
The reason the George Burns joke is funny is because we have all seen performers who try to manufacture sincerity and fail. The magician who says “This next piece is very special to me” in a tone that makes it clear he says this exact sentence at every show. The mentalist who pretends to be emotionally moved by a prediction reveal that he has done a thousand times. The speaker who opens with “I am so honored to be here tonight” while clearly reading it off notes.
Fake sincerity is worse than no sincerity at all. An audience can handle a performer who is business-like, efficient, and technically impressive without being warm. What they cannot handle is a performer who pretends to feel things he does not feel. It creates a kind of cognitive dissonance — the words say one thing, the delivery says another, and the audience resolves the contradiction by trusting the delivery. They decide, usually unconsciously, that you are a phony. And once that label attaches, nothing you do for the rest of the show will fully land.
I have been guilty of this. In my early shows, I had a line in one of my routines where I would say something like “This is the moment I love most in this whole show.” I said it because I had heard other performers frame their climax moments that way, and it seemed like a good way to heighten the impact. But the truth was, at that point in my performing life, I was so focused on not messing up the technical aspects that I was not actually experiencing the moment at all. I was executing a procedure and narrating it with emotional language I did not feel.
A friend who saw the show told me afterward: “That line about loving the moment? It didn’t land. You looked like you were concentrating, not enjoying yourself.” He was right. And the fix was not to say the line more convincingly. The fix was to either genuinely reach a point where I could feel that joy in the moment, or to cut the line entirely.
I cut the line. It took another year before I could honestly say I experienced genuine delight during my climax moments, and by that point, the audience could see it on my face without me needing to announce it.
Where Real Sincerity Comes From
So if fake sincerity is deadly and real sincerity is gold, how do you develop the real thing? This is a question I have spent a lot of time thinking about, and the answer I have arrived at is not particularly glamorous.
Real sincerity in performance comes from actually caring about what you are doing.
That sounds tautological, but hear me out. Many performers — and I include myself in this — go through a phase where the magic becomes routine. You have done the show dozens of times, maybe hundreds. The material is locked in. The reactions are predictable. And somewhere in that familiarity, you lose the spark. You stop being amazed by your own effects. You stop finding your own stories interesting. You stop caring about the specific audience in front of you and start seeing them as interchangeable.
When that happens, sincerity evaporates. Not because you are trying to fake it, but because there is nothing genuine to project. You are going through motions, and the audience can feel it.
The antidote is deliberately reconnecting with why you do this. For me, that means reminding myself before every show of what it felt like the first time I saw a card change in someone’s hands. Reminding myself that the people in this audience have never seen my show before, even though I have done it many times. Reminding myself that every person in the room came here hoping for something — a surprise, a laugh, a moment of wonder — and that I have the ability to give them that.
This is not a technique. It is an attitude. But it manifests as sincerity because it is sincere.
The Consulting Parallel
One of the unexpected advantages of coming to magic from strategy consulting is that I have extensive experience with the sincerity problem in a different context. In consulting, you present recommendations to clients. Those recommendations need to be delivered with conviction. If you do not believe in what you are proposing, the client will sense it and your credibility collapses.
But here is the thing: sometimes in consulting, you present recommendations you are not fully sure about. The data supports several possible strategies, and you have chosen one. You need to present it with confidence even though you privately harbor doubts. How do you do that without being dishonest?
The answer I learned in consulting is the same one that applies on stage: you do not fake conviction. You earn it. You do the work until you genuinely believe in what you are presenting. You research deeper, stress-test harder, consider more angles, until you reach a point where your recommendation is not just defensible but something you personally stand behind. The conviction is real because the preparation made it real.
Performance works the same way. If you cannot be sincere about a routine, the problem is not your acting skills. The problem is the routine. Either the material does not resonate with you personally, or you have not connected with it deeply enough to find what makes it meaningful. The solution is not to perform better but to choose better — or to dig deeper into what you already have until you find the genuine emotional connection.
Sincerity as a Selection Criterion
This understanding changed how I choose material. I used to select routines based on how strong the effect was, how clean the method was, how impressive it would look to an audience. Those are valid criteria, but they are incomplete. I now add a question that I consider equally important: Can I present this with genuine sincerity?
If a routine does not give me something real to connect with — a personal story, an emotional throughline, a moment that genuinely delights me even after performing it many times — then no matter how strong the effect, it does not belong in my show. Because a strong effect delivered without sincerity produces a puzzle. The audience is impressed but unmoved. And a moderate effect delivered with genuine sincerity produces something closer to an extraordinary moment, because the audience is not just watching magic. They are watching a real person share something that matters to him.
Darwin Ortiz argues in Strong Magic that showmanship is a body of technique, as learnable as sleight of hand. I agree with that. But I would add that sincerity is the substrate on which all those techniques operate. You can learn perfect timing, flawless scripting, masterful audience management — but without sincerity underneath it all, those techniques produce a performance that is technically excellent and emotionally hollow.
The Paradox Resolved
So can you fake sincerity? The honest answer is: sort of, but not for long, and not well enough. You can adopt the vocal patterns and body language of a sincere person. You can say the right words in the right way. And for a short time, it will work. But sustained performance — a thirty-minute show, a career of shows — requires something deeper than technique.
The resolution of the paradox is that the best performers do not fake sincerity. They create the conditions for real sincerity to exist. They choose material that resonates with them. They connect with their audience as individuals, not as a generic crowd. They remind themselves of why they do this before every show. They build their performances around moments they genuinely care about.
And then they rehearse until the mechanics disappear, so that what the audience sees is not a performance of sincerity but sincerity itself, delivered with the precision and reliability of a well-crafted show.
George Burns was wrong, or at least incomplete. You cannot fake sincerity and get away with it forever. But you can cultivate sincerity until it becomes as reliable and consistent as any other performance skill.
That is what I am working toward. Not faking it. Making it real.