There was a moment in a corporate keynote I delivered in Salzburg where I said something genuinely heartfelt. It was near the end of a mentalism piece, one that involves a personal revelation, and I had written a line about how the most valuable thing we can give another person is our attention. Not our money, not our advice, not our solutions — just the simple act of noticing someone.
It was a good line. I believed it. The audience felt it. There was a pause, a shift in the room’s energy, and I could see people leaning forward, nodding slightly, the way they do when something lands in that soft spot between the ribcage and the spine.
And then I held that beat for about two seconds too long.
The room started to feel like a therapy session. The warmth curdled into discomfort. A few people shifted in their seats. Someone in the third row looked at the floor. The sincerity, which had been genuine and connecting, began to feel like I was asking for something — asking the audience to feel a certain way, to validate the depth of what I had just said. The moment went from moving to awkward in the space of a breath.
I did not know, at that time, how to get out of a sincere moment cleanly. I knew how to build one. I did not know how to land one without it overstaying its welcome.
The Problem with Earnestness
I am, by nature, an earnest person. This is probably obvious from the fact that I am a strategy consultant who discovered magic as an adult and then decided to study twenty-five books about performance craft with the seriousness of someone pursuing a second graduate degree. I do not do things halfway. When I commit to something, I commit with intensity.
This trait serves me well in many contexts. In business, earnestness reads as conviction. In personal relationships, it reads as sincerity. In the early stages of learning magic, it drove me to practice with discipline and study with focus.
On stage, unchecked earnestness is a liability.
The problem is not that sincerity is bad. The problem is that modern audiences have a finely calibrated detector for sentiment that goes on too long. We live in an era of irony, of self-awareness, of media literacy. Audiences know when they are being manipulated emotionally. They know when a moment is being milked. And the moment they feel that a performer is trying to extract an emotional response rather than genuinely sharing one, the connection breaks.
This does not mean you cannot be sincere on stage. It means you must be sincere efficiently. You must deliver the genuine moment, let it land, and then — before the audience starts to feel uncomfortable with the vulnerability — give them an exit. A pressure release valve. A way to acknowledge what just happened without being trapped in it.
The Pattern I Discovered in Graham’s Work
John Graham, in Stage By Stage, demonstrates a technique that I have come to think of as the Afterschool Special pattern. In his show, there is a moment where he delivers a genuinely moving message — a line about generosity, about giving and receiving, about what matters in life beyond the tricks. The audience feels it. They begin to applaud.
And then Graham starts snapping his fingers, the way people do at poetry readings in coffee shops. “Finger snaps. Finger snaps only.” He leads the audience into snapping along. And then, with perfect timing: “Man, that was deep. It’s like an Afterschool Special. You didn’t know there was going to be a message.”
The audience laughs. The sincerity is not destroyed — it has already landed, already been felt, already done its work. The laugh does not erase the emotion. It releases the pressure. It tells the audience: I know that was a lot. I am aware of what just happened. I am not going to hold you hostage in this feeling. We can move on.
This pattern — genuine sentiment followed by self-aware humor — is one of the most useful performance tools I have encountered. And it solved a problem I had been wrestling with for over a year.
My Earnestness Problem, Diagnosed
Looking back at my early corporate keynotes with the benefit of this framework, I can identify the exact pattern that was causing problems.
I would build a sincere moment. I would deliver it well — my voice would drop, my pacing would slow, I would make deliberate eye contact with individuals in the room. The audience would respond. They would lean in, nod, grow quiet. The emotional connection was real.
And then I would stay there. I would follow one sincere line with another sincere line. I would deepen the sentiment, add another layer, try to make the moment even more powerful. I treated emotional moments the way I treated business presentations — if the audience is engaged, keep going. Push deeper. Deliver more value.
But emotional engagement does not work like intellectual engagement. Intellectual engagement can sustain itself for long periods — a well-structured argument can hold attention for twenty minutes. Emotional engagement is intense but fragile. It operates in bursts. The audience opens up, feels something genuine, and then needs to close again before they feel exposed. If you do not give them that opportunity to close, they will take it themselves, and the way they take it is by disengaging. Checking their phones. Looking away. Crossing their arms. Protecting themselves from a performer who does not seem to know when to stop.
I was that performer. I was the person who did not know when to stop. And every time I pushed a sincere moment past its natural duration, I lost the audience more thoroughly than if I had never built the moment at all.
The Mechanics of the Pattern
The Afterschool Special technique has a precise structure, and each element matters.
First, you build the genuine moment. This must be real. You cannot fake sincerity for the purpose of puncturing it — that is cynicism disguised as vulnerability, and audiences detect it instantly. The emotional beat must come from something you actually believe, something that genuinely matters to you. In my case, the sincere moments in my show are almost always connected to my own journey — the discovery of magic as an adult, the humility of starting from zero, the way learning a new craft changed how I think about everything else.
Second, you let the moment land. This is the pause after the sincere line. It must be long enough for the audience to register the emotion, but short enough that they do not start to feel trapped. In practice, this is about two to three seconds. Enough for a breath. Enough for the room to go quiet. Not enough for anyone to start feeling self-conscious about the silence.
Third, you puncture with self-aware humor. The key word is self-aware. You are not making fun of the audience for feeling something. You are not undercutting your own message. You are acknowledging the sentimental register you just operated in, and you are demonstrating that you know it was a lot. The humor says: I am a real person who is aware of what I just did, and I am not going to pretend that delivering heartfelt messages in the middle of a magic show is a completely normal thing to do.
The self-awareness is what makes this work. It is the difference between a comedian who does not realize their material is maudlin, and a comedian who builds a moving moment and then winks at the audience as if to say, “Yeah, I know.”
Installing It in My Show
The first place I tried this was in a keynote I was preparing for a conference in Vienna. I had a mentalism piece that ends with a personal reflection — a moment where I talk about why the effect matters to me, what it represents about the gap between what we think we know about each other and what is actually true. The sincerity was genuine. The problem was the landing.
I wrote a self-aware puncture line. After the sincere beat and the pause, I would step back slightly, break the intensity of my posture, and say something along the lines of: “Sorry. That got unexpectedly deep for a Tuesday afternoon.” The specificity of the day — Tuesday, or whatever day it happened to be — grounds the humor in the immediate reality. It is not a prepared joke. It is an observation about what just happened, which makes it feel spontaneous even when scripted.
The first time I used it, the relief in the room was palpable. The audience laughed, and the laugh had a particular quality — it was not the laugh of a punchline landing, it was the laugh of tension releasing. People exhaled. Shoulders dropped. And then, crucially, they leaned back in for the next segment with renewed openness. The emotional moment had been preserved, acknowledged, and released, and the audience was ready for more.
The Balance Point
The danger of this technique is overcorrection. Once you discover that self-aware humor can release emotional tension, it becomes tempting to use it after every sincere moment. To puncture everything. To never let a genuine emotion sit unaccompanied.
This is just as much of a problem as the original earnestness. If every heartfelt moment is immediately followed by a joke, the audience learns the pattern and stops investing in the sincerity. They know the punchline is coming, so they hold back. They refuse to be moved because they know you are about to tell them it was silly to be moved.
The technique works best when used sparingly. One, maybe two moments per show where the Afterschool Special pattern is deployed. The rest of the time, you can let sincere moments breathe on their own — because the audience has learned, from the moments where you did puncture, that you are a self-aware person who will not trap them in uncomfortable sincerity. That trust, once established, gives you more room for genuine emotion, not less.
I have found that the ideal placement is after the most emotionally intense moment in the show. The one moment where you go the deepest, where the room gets the quietest, where the connection is the most exposed. That is the moment that needs the pressure release. The smaller emotional beats can stand on their own because the audience trusts you to manage the emotional temperature.
What This Taught Me About Performance
The Afterschool Special technique is not really about humor. It is about awareness. Awareness of the audience’s emotional state. Awareness of the difference between sharing a feeling and imposing one. Awareness that the performer’s job is not to create emotion and then stand back admiringly while the audience experiences it, but to create emotion, hold space for it, and then guide the audience safely back to a comfortable register.
This is, I think, one of the fundamental differences between close-up magic and stage performance. In close-up, the emotional dynamics are managed by the intimacy of the setting. If a moment gets too intense, the spectator can break eye contact, make a joke, reach for their drink. The social dynamics of a one-on-one interaction provide natural pressure releases.
On stage, the performer is the only pressure release available. The audience cannot break the tension themselves — they are sitting in a darkened room facing a lit stage, and the social contract says they must wait for the performer to give them permission to feel something different. If the performer does not provide that permission, the audience is stuck.
Learning to provide that permission — through self-aware humor, through tonal shifts, through the simple acknowledgment that a moment was intense — is one of the skills that separates a performer who can build emotional moments from a performer who can build and land them.
I still consider myself an earnest person. I still believe in the sincere moments in my show. I still feel them when I deliver them. But I have learned that sincerity without awareness is self-indulgence, and self-indulgence on stage is a form of disrespect to the audience. They came to be entertained, not to be held emotionally hostage by a strategy consultant who discovered magic in hotel rooms and now has feelings about it.
The joke is the gift. The sincerity is what you mean. The joke is how you show the audience you care enough about them to let them breathe.