The first time I heard the Denny Haney quote, I thought it was wrong.
“It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as they like you while you’re doing it.”
I was deep into my study of performance craft at the time, obsessing over effect selection and show structure and scripting and pacing. I was reading Ken Weber and Darwin Ortiz and Fitzkee, absorbing frameworks for how to choose the right material, present it with maximum impact, and build shows that escalated properly to their climax. And here was a quote suggesting that none of that mattered — that likability was the whole game, and everything else was secondary.
It sounded like an excuse for lazy performers. The kind of thing someone says when they cannot be bothered to put in the work on their material. Sure, it doesn’t matter what you do. Just be charming. That seemed like a recipe for mediocrity.
I was wrong. Not about the work. The work matters. But I was wrong about what the quote means, and it took a very specific experience to show me.
The Performer Who Broke Every Rule
I was at a corporate event in Vienna — a holiday party for a mid-sized technology firm, maybe a hundred and fifty people. Two performers had been hired for the evening. The first was a polished close-up magician who worked the tables during dinner. His effects were clean, his patter was smooth, and his technique was clearly the product of years of practice. The audience enjoyed him. The reactions were solid. Professional work from a professional performer.
The second performer came on after dinner for a twenty-minute stage set. And from the perspective of everything I had been studying, he did almost everything wrong.
His opening was rambling. He talked about trying to find parking, made a joke about his GPS sending him to the wrong address, and spent what felt like two full minutes just chatting with the front row. He had no clear hook, no structured opening that targeted one of Weber’s Big Three reactions. It was just… talking.
His effects were simple. Not elegantly simple in the David Blaine sense. Just simple. Straightforward, unadorned tricks that any competent amateur could perform. There was no building to a climax, no escalation of impossibility, no carefully structured emotional arc.
His transitions were nonexistent. Between effects, he would put down one prop, pick up another, and fill the gap with conversation — stories about his day, observations about the room, questions to the audience that had nothing to do with the magic.
And the audience loved him.
Not politely. Not respectfully. They loved him. They were laughing constantly — not at punchlines, because there were few deliberate jokes, but at him. At the way he said things, the way he reacted to their comments, the way he seemed to be genuinely enjoying himself. They were leaning forward. They were calling out to him. They were engaged in a way that transcended the effects entirely.
When he finished, the applause was thunderous. People stood up. Not everyone, but enough. And during the rest of the evening, he was mobbed. Not by people wanting to know how the tricks worked, but by people who wanted to talk to him. To be near him. To continue the experience of being in his presence.
I stood there watching this happen and felt two things simultaneously. First, genuine admiration. What I had just witnessed was real entertainment. Second, genuine confusion. Because by every analytical framework I had studied, the show should not have worked as well as it did.
What Haney Actually Meant
That night, in my hotel room, I went back to the Haney quote and read it again with different eyes.
“It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as they like you while you’re doing it.”
Haney was not saying material does not matter. He was not saying technique is irrelevant, or that you should abandon craft in favor of charm. He was making a claim about hierarchy. He was saying that the audience’s relationship with you, the performer, is the foundation on which everything else sits. If that foundation is solid — if they genuinely like you — then even imperfect material and rough technique will be forgiven, enjoyed, and celebrated. If that foundation is missing — if they feel no connection to you as a person — then even perfect material and flawless technique will leave them cold.
Weber says essentially the same thing, just in different words. “Performance trumps trick every time.” A weak trick can be elevated by strong performance. Never the other way around. The performer’s personality is the message, not the props.
And Fitzkee, writing eighty years ago, was even more direct: “Make them like you better than your magic. Make them like you so much they would pay to see you regardless of what you do.” Push the man doing the tricks, not the tricks.
Three different sources, three different eras, the same fundamental claim. Likability is not one variable among many. It is the variable. The one that determines whether the audience’s experience is transactional or transformational.
The Mary Ann Smith Principle
Weber tells a story that I think about every time I consider Haney’s quote. At an investment conference, a professional close-up magician in costume performed a weak routine and was largely ignored by the audience. The next morning, a government regulator — a woman named Mary Ann Smith, no performing background, no props, no tricks — took the stage and captivated several hundred high-powered business executives so completely that the speaker who followed her, former President George H.W. Bush, opened with “Wow, that’s a tough act to follow.”
What did Mary Ann Smith have? Voice. Sincerity. A fervent desire to communicate. Timing, enthusiasm, humor, emotion, surprise. She had every entertainment cylinder firing — not because she was a trained performer, but because she was a person the audience genuinely liked and genuinely wanted to listen to.
The professional magician had the technical tools and lacked the human connection. The regulator had the human connection and lacked the technical tools. The regulator won by a landslide.
This is what Haney’s quote actually describes. Not a permission slip to be sloppy. A statement of priority. If you have to choose between perfecting your technique and building the audience’s affection for you, build the affection first. Everything else works better when the audience is on your side.
Why This Is Hard for Analytical People
I resisted this principle for a long time, and I think the resistance came from my consulting background. Consultants are trained to optimize systems. We identify variables, measure their impact, and allocate resources to the highest-leverage interventions. And when I applied that thinking to magic performance, I naturally gravitated toward the variables that were easiest to measure and control: technique, method, scripting, show structure.
Likability felt unmeasurable. It felt like the soft, fuzzy variable that you invoke when you do not have real data. I wanted concrete feedback. I wanted to know whether my false shuffle was clean, whether my timing on the reveal was optimal, whether the scripted line in the third segment was landing. I did not want to hear that the whole thing hinged on whether people liked me, because I could not put “be more likable” on a practice checklist.
But the data was clear. The performer in Vienna with the rambling opening and the simple effects and the nonexistent transitions was getting results that I was not. And the only explanation was the one I had been resisting: the audience liked him. They liked who he was. They liked how he made them feel. And that likability was doing more work than all of his technique and material combined.
What Likability Is and What It Is Not
Here is what I have come to understand about likability in performance, after several years of studying it and trying to build it in myself.
Likability is not people-pleasing. It is not desperation for approval. It is not the nervous smile that says “please like me.” That is anti-likability. The audience can smell neediness, and it repels them.
Likability is not being nice. Nice is neutral. Nice is forgettable. The performer in Vienna was not particularly nice. He was slightly irreverent, occasionally teasing, and made fun of himself more than anyone else. He was warm, but warmth and niceness are different things.
Likability is, as near as I can tell, the combination of three qualities: warmth, authenticity, and generosity.
Warmth means the audience feels welcomed rather than observed. You are glad they are there. You are not performing at them; you are performing for them, and the distinction is audible and visible.
Authenticity means the person on stage is recognizably a real person, not a character or a mask. Weber talks about the “be yourself” principle — the most successful performers present polished, confident versions of their off-stage selves. Artificiality in front of an audience rarely pays off. He observed that performers are often better during their lectures, when they are being themselves, than during their acts, when they are being artificial.
Generosity means the performer is giving the audience something beyond the effects. Attention, humor, presence, the experience of feeling seen and included. Fitzkee describes this as the performer’s duty: the obligation is not with the audience to pay attention, but with the performer to catch and hold their interest within their world and experience. That framing — it is your job to meet them where they are — is inherently generous.
Integrating the Insight
Haney’s quote did not make me stop working on my material. It did not make me abandon technique or scripting or show structure. What it did was reorder my priorities.
Before, my preparation hierarchy was: method, then scripting, then rehearsal, then presence. I would get the trick working, write the script, rehearse the whole thing, and then hope that my stage presence would show up on the night.
Now my hierarchy is reversed. Presence first. Am I going to walk out there as a person the audience wants to spend time with? Is my energy warm, authentic, and generous? Am I going to be in the room with them, or am I going to be inside my own head, running the program?
Then scripting. Then rehearsal. Then technique.
The technique has not gotten worse. If anything, it has gotten better, because I worry about it less. When the foundation is solid — when the audience likes you and wants you to succeed — the pressure on every individual moment of technique decreases. A slightly imperfect handling gets forgiven. An effect that does not land as hard as planned gets carried by the goodwill in the room. The cushion of likability absorbs the shocks that would otherwise expose weaknesses.
Haney was not wrong. It genuinely does not matter as much what you do, as long as they like you while you are doing it. That is not an excuse for laziness. It is an insight about what audiences actually respond to.
They respond to people. They respond to warmth. They respond to the feeling that the person on stage is someone they would want to sit down with, talk to, and know better. And if you give them that feeling, they will follow you anywhere — through simple effects, through rough transitions, through imperfect technique, through everything that would normally be a problem.
Because the show is not the point. You are the point. Haney knew it. Weber knew it. Fitzkee knew it. And the performer in Vienna, rambling about his parking difficulties while a hundred and fifty people grinned at him, knew it better than anyone.