I need to complicate something I have been arguing for the last few posts.
I have spent several thousand words making the case that likability, presence, and human connection are the foundation of great performance. That the audience’s relationship with you matters more than the tricks you perform. That Denny Haney was right when he said it does not matter what you do, as long as they like you while you are doing it. That Fitzkee was right to say “make them like you better than your magic.” That Weber was right to put personality above technique in the hierarchy of entertainment.
All of that is true. I believe every word.
But there is a version of that argument that, taken to its logical extreme, produces something I have seen more than once and that I find deeply unsatisfying: the charming performer who does not actually fool anyone.
The Charm Trap
I watched a performer at a private event in Salzburg last year who was extraordinarily likable. Funny, warm, self-deprecating, quick on his feet with audience interactions. He worked the room with the ease of someone who had been doing it for years. People genuinely enjoyed his company.
His magic, though, was transparent. Not in a catastrophic way — there were no visible fumbles or exposed methods. But the effects lacked conviction. The audience could sense that something was happening during the moments when something was not supposed to be happening. There was a gap between what the magic was supposed to look like — impossible — and what it actually felt like — clever but explainable.
Afterward, people said things like “he was such a great guy” and “that was really fun.” Nobody said “how did he do that?” Nobody said “that was impossible.” Nobody described a specific moment that had left them speechless. The evening had been pleasant. The magic had been background music to a pleasant personality.
This is the Charm Trap, and it is what happens when you take the likability argument too far. When you hear “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as they like you” and interpret it as permission to stop worrying about whether the magic itself is convincing.
Haney’s quote is correct but incomplete. The full formula, the one that produces extraordinary entertainment, needs a second clause: “It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as they like you while you’re doing it — and you fool them.”
Why the Magic Still Matters
Ken Weber provides the framework that resolves this tension. He describes a hierarchy of mystery entertainment from the spectator’s perspective. At the bottom is the puzzle — the spectator knows it is impossible but assumes that if they knew the secret, they could do it too. In the middle is the trick — a demonstration of perceived skill, more impressive than a puzzle. At the top is the extraordinary moment — an experience that leaves no room for explanation, where the viewer gasps rather than grasps for a method.
And then Weber delivers the critical insight: all magic at its core is a puzzle. It is presentation — and presentation only — that elevates a puzzle to a trick, or a trick to an extraordinary moment.
Presentation includes likability, warmth, connection, all the qualities I have been writing about. But it also includes something else: the ability to make the impossible feel truly impossible. To create a gap between what the audience expected and what they experienced that is so wide, so unbridgeable, that their rational mind cannot close it.
That gap is what “fooling them” means. Not tricking them in a gotcha sense. Not making them feel stupid. Not setting up a puzzle and then smugly withholding the solution. Fooling them in the sense that, for a moment, the world does not work the way they thought it did. The laws of physics have bent. Something has happened that cannot happen.
That experience — the experience of genuine impossibility — is irreplaceable. No amount of charm substitutes for it. A performer who is deeply likable but does not create that experience is doing something valuable — they are entertaining, they are engaging, they are creating a pleasant evening. But they are not doing magic. Or rather, they are not doing what magic can do when it is at its best.
The Weber Warning
Weber says something that I have written on a card and carry in my wallet: “Anything you treat as trivial will receive a trivial response.”
This applies directly to the fooling question. If your handling of the magic is casual — if you rush through the critical moments, if you do not build anticipation before the climax, if you move to the next effect before the audience has fully absorbed what just happened — then the audience will treat the magic as trivial, regardless of how much they like you.
The charming performer in Salzburg was treating his effects casually. Not because he was lazy, but because he had, perhaps unconsciously, decided that the relationship with the audience was the show and the magic was just the vehicle. The magic had become a pretext for being charming, rather than charming being the vessel for delivering magic.
Weber also talks about how magicians make two major mistakes with reactions. First, not allowing the reaction to fully develop — moving too quickly to the next thing. Second, not positioning the reactor where others can see and hear them. Both mistakes are about not giving the magic its due. Not letting the impossible moment breathe. Not treating it as the extraordinary thing it is.
Fitzkee approaches this from a different angle. He writes about punch — the creation of a forceful, striking impression that provokes involuntary favorable reaction. Punch, in Fitzkee’s framework, is not personality. It is not likability. It is an explosion of emotion caused by built-up circumstances. And the built-up circumstances require craft: timing, pointing, escalation, the staircase of rising interest that leads to the climax.
You cannot generate punch through charm alone. Charm creates goodwill. Punch creates astonishment. And the complete performer creates both.
My Own Correction
I went through a phase — embarrassing to admit, but instructive to describe — where I overcorrected toward likability at the expense of impact.
After reading Weber and Fitzkee and absorbing the arguments about personality and connection, I made a deliberate effort to be warmer on stage. More conversational. More open. More generous with my attention and my humor. And it worked. The post-show interactions improved dramatically. People approached me, talked to me, told me they felt connected. Everything I described in the previous posts about the Connection Test — I was passing it.
But something was missing. The shows were pleasant. They were warm. They were connective. They were not, however, extraordinary. I was creating lovely evenings but not creating moments that people remembered a week later. The magic was landing softly instead of hitting hard.
Adam Wilber, my partner at Vulpine Creations, was the one who diagnosed it. He watched a recording of a show I did in Vienna and said, “You’re being so nice up there that you’re forgetting to blow their minds.”
He was right. In my effort to be warm and connective, I had softened everything — including the moments that were supposed to be devastating. I was smoothing out the peaks to maintain a consistent level of warmth and approachability. The result was a pleasant plateau instead of a roller coaster.
The fix was not to become less warm. It was to become more intentional about the moments of impact. To maintain the warmth and connection throughout the show, but to punctuate it with moments where I stopped being the friendly guy and became the person who could do something impossible. Moments where the warmth served as the runway for an experience that warmth alone could never produce.
Weber calls this the Superman principle. You are Clark Kent and Superman. You are the relatable, likable human being who also has extraordinary abilities. Both identities are necessary. Clark Kent without Superman is just a nice guy. Superman without Clark Kent is an alien. The magic is in the combination.
The Complete Formula
Here is how I think about it now, after several years of oscillating between the two extremes.
Likability gets the audience to care. It gets them invested in you. It lowers their defenses. It creates a willingness to go on a journey with you. It turns skeptics into participants and critics into fans. Without likability, the audience watches your magic from a distance, analyzing rather than experiencing. With likability, they are inside the experience, rooting for you, open to being amazed.
But being amazed requires being fooled. Not in a hostile way. Not in a competitive way. In the way that a great novel fools you — it makes you believe in something you know is not real, and the experience of that belief is the art.
The fooling must be complete. Not partial, not approximate, not “pretty good if you don’t think about it too hard.” The audience must have no explanation for what they just witnessed. The gap between what happened and what is possible must be absolute. That is what creates the extraordinary moment that Weber puts at the top of his hierarchy. That is what Fitzkee means by punch. That is what separates a lovely evening from an unforgettable one.
Likability without fooling produces: “What a great guy. I had a wonderful time. I cannot remember any specific moment.”
Fooling without likability produces: “That was amazing. I have no idea how he did any of it. I did not like him.”
Likability plus fooling produces: “That was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life, and the person who created it was someone I genuinely connected with.”
The third option is the one I am pursuing. It is also the hardest, because it requires excellence in two completely different domains — the human domain of warmth, connection, and authenticity, and the craft domain of technique, method, and deception. Most performers are naturally stronger in one than the other, and the temptation is to lean into your strength and neglect your weakness.
I am naturally stronger in the analytical, craft-oriented domain. My consulting brain loves structure, method, and optimization. The likability, warmth, and connection side is what I have had to build deliberately, and it has required the kind of cross-training and self-examination I have been writing about in this series.
But the lesson of Salzburg — the charming performer who did not fool anyone — reminded me that building one side cannot come at the expense of the other. Both pillars must stand. Both must be strong. And the show must deliver both: the human experience of connecting with someone you like, and the impossible experience of witnessing something that cannot be explained.
Denny Haney was right that it does not matter what you do, as long as they like you while you are doing it. But the implicit assumption in that quote is that you are, in fact, doing something worth watching. Something that only you can do. Something impossible.
The complete version of the quote, the one I keep in my head now, is: “It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as they like you while you’re doing it — and what you’re doing leaves them speechless.”
Be the person they want to know. Then be the person who can do what no one else can do.
That is the formula. Both halves. No shortcuts on either side.