I was bombing, and I could not understand why.
The material was good. I had tested the jokes. I had practiced the timing. I had watched the videos of performers who killed with similar lines, and I had studied what they did and how they did it. I had rehearsed in my hotel room mirror until I could deliver the punchlines in my sleep. On paper, in practice, in my head — the comedy worked.
On stage, in front of a real audience at a corporate event in Vienna, it died. Not all of it. But enough of it. Jokes that should have gotten laughs got polite smiles. Bits that should have brought the energy up fell flat. I was working hard — harder than I had ever worked on stage — and the audience was giving me less.
After the show, I sat in my car in the parking garage and did what I always do when something goes wrong: I analyzed. I replayed every moment. I compared what I had done on stage to what I had practiced. I looked for technical errors, timing mistakes, dropped words.
And then I realized the problem was not technical at all. The problem was that I was performing as someone else. I was delivering the jokes in a voice that was not mine, with an energy that was not mine, in a style that belonged to the performers I was emulating rather than to the person I actually am.
I was not them. And trying to be them was the worst thing I could have done.
The High-Energy Trap
When you start performing magic and incorporating comedy, you inevitably watch the people who are succeeding. You study the performers who get the biggest laughs, the most enthusiastic responses, the wildest audience reactions. And many of those performers — perhaps most of them, especially in the world of comedy magic — are high-energy. They are loud, fast, physically expressive, relentlessly upbeat. They attack the stage. They command the room through sheer force of personality and volume.
I watched these performers and I thought, “That is what works. That is what audiences want. If I want to be funny on stage, I need to be like that.”
So I tried. I cranked up my energy. I spoke faster. I moved more. I amplified my gestures. I worked harder to generate excitement, to project enthusiasm, to fill the room with the kind of kinetic energy that I saw in the performers I admired.
And it was terrible.
Not objectively terrible. Not catastrophically terrible. But terrible in the way that matters most: it was inauthentic. The audience could not have articulated what was wrong, but they could feel it. There was a disconnect between the person standing in front of them and the energy that person was projecting. Something did not match. Something rang false.
What rang false was me. I was a forty-something Austrian strategy consultant pretending to be a high-energy entertainment personality. I was wearing someone else’s performance style the way you might wear someone else’s suit — the color was fine, the fabric was fine, but the fit was all wrong. Everything was slightly off. The shoulders were too wide, the sleeves too long, the whole thing hung on me like it was designed for a different body.
The One Undeniable Reason
I found the words for my experience in John Graham’s Stage By Stage. Graham describes his own journey through this exact trap, and he summarizes it with a sentence that I now consider one of the most important things I have ever read about performing.
He writes about being deeply influenced by high-energy performers early in his career, about thinking “they really get it,” about admiring how they kept the show moving and the audience interested. And then he writes: “I tried to emulate them, but it wasn’t meant to be, for one undeniable reason. I was not them.”
Seven words: “I was not them.” That is the whole lesson. Everything else is commentary.
Graham found that his natural style of delivery was deadpan — not as a character choice, not as a deliberate creative decision, but as the inevitable result of allowing himself to be himself on stage. Once he stopped trying to be someone else and let his natural personality emerge, he discovered that his dry, understated delivery was not a weakness to be overcome. It was a strength to be embraced.
Reading that passage was like reading a description of my own experience, written by someone who had been through it twenty years before me.
Who I Actually Am
Let me describe who I am when I am not trying to be someone else.
I am a strategy consultant. I have spent my professional life in boardrooms, conference centers, and executive meetings. My communication style is measured, analytical, and precise. I think before I speak. I favor understatement over overstatement. When I make a point, I make it quietly and let the logic do the work. I do not raise my voice to be heard. I lower it, and people lean in.
I am dry. I am observational. When something is absurd, I do not point at it and shout. I describe it calmly, as if it were perfectly normal, and let the contrast between my calm tone and the absurd content create the humor. I am the person at the dinner table who says something devastating with a straight face and waits three seconds for the table to realize what just happened.
This is who I am. This is how I communicate in every context of my life except, for an embarrassing period of time, on stage. On stage, I was trying to be someone high-energy, fast-paced, loud, and relentlessly upbeat. On stage, I was wearing someone else’s suit.
No wonder it did not fit.
The Transition to Authenticity
Stopping the emulation was harder than starting it. You would think that being yourself would be the easiest thing in the world, but it is not. Being yourself on stage requires you to trust that who you are is enough. That your natural energy, your natural rhythm, your natural personality can hold a room. And when you have spent months watching high-energy performers kill it while you struggled, that trust is hard to come by.
I made the transition gradually. I started by simply… slowing down. Instead of rushing through my patter the way I had been doing, trying to maintain an artificial pace, I let myself take pauses. I let sentences breathe. I delivered lines at the speed I would naturally speak in a business meeting rather than the speed I had been forcing on stage.
The first show where I tried this — a small corporate event in Graz, maybe sixty people — felt terrifying. I was convinced that the slower pace would lose the audience. That the lower energy would make the room feel dead. That without the constant high-energy bombardment, people would check out.
They did not check out. They leaned in.
The slower pace gave the comedy room to work. Instead of rushing past the punchlines, I let them land. Instead of filling every silence with more words, I let the silence do the work. A joke followed by a pause is infinitely funnier than a joke followed immediately by the next joke. The pause is where the audience processes, where they get it, where the laugh builds. I had been trampling my own material with my frantic pacing.
And the deadpan delivery — the straight face, the calm tone, the appearance of being completely serious while saying something absurd — turned out to be devastating. Not in the way that a high-energy performer is devastating, with big laughs and explosive reactions. In a quieter way. People would chuckle, then look at each other, then laugh harder as the absurdity sank in. The laughs were delayed but deeper. They built rather than exploded.
The Consultant’s Advantage
Here is the thing I did not expect: my professional background turned out to be an asset, not a liability.
I had been treating my day job as something to overcome when I performed. As if the consultant needed to be set aside so that the performer could emerge. As if the analytical, measured, serious professional was incompatible with being entertaining on stage.
The opposite was true. The consultant’s communication style — precise, understated, confident without being loud — was a perfect fit for a particular kind of comedy that I had never considered because I was too busy trying to emulate a different kind.
Think about it. A strategy consultant who performs magic and mentalism. Who stands on stage in front of corporate audiences — people he understands, people he speaks the same language as — and delivers impossible moments with the same calm authority he would bring to a strategy presentation. The contrast between the professional demeanor and the impossible events is inherently funny. It creates a cognitive dissonance that the audience finds delightful. “This guy looks like he should be presenting quarterly figures, and instead he just read my mind.”
That contrast — the gap between expectation and reality — is the engine of comedy. And I had it built in. I did not need to manufacture energy or perform enthusiasm. I just needed to be who I am and let the magic create the contrast.
What Deadpan Actually Means
Graham describes deadpan delivery as “showing no emotion in your facial expression while delivering something ridiculous or absurd.” That definition clicked for me because it described exactly what I do naturally in social situations. I have always been the person who keeps a straight face. It is not an affectation. It is just how my face works.
On stage, deadpan means letting the material do the work instead of helping it along with mugging, exaggerated reactions, or obvious signals that say “this is the funny part.” You deliver the line as if you are completely serious. You do not wink at the audience. You do not break character. You maintain the straight face and the measured tone, and you trust that the audience is smart enough to find the humor without being shown where it is.
This requires trust. Trust in your material. Trust in your audience. And trust in yourself — trust that your natural delivery, without amplification or decoration, is compelling enough to hold attention.
It also requires patience. Deadpan comedy has a slower rhythm than high-energy comedy. The laughs come a beat later. The audience needs a moment to process, to realize that what you just said was absurd despite the serious delivery. That moment of delay can feel like an eternity when you are on stage. You have to resist the urge to fill it, to explain, to signal. You have to stand in the silence and trust that the laugh is coming.
Learning to stand in that silence was one of the hardest things I have done as a performer. And one of the most rewarding.
Self-Deprecation as a Natural Fit
One of the comedy styles that emerged naturally once I stopped trying to be high-energy was self-deprecation. As a strategy consultant performing magic — an outsider in the magic world, a late starter, a professional who came to this art form through a deck of cards purchased on ellusionist.com — I have an endless supply of self-deprecating material.
I can make jokes about being the least likely magician in the room. About starting magic in my thirties instead of my childhood. About being the kind of person who reads books about magic theory the way other people read novels. About being so analytical that I probably study the psychology of a card trick more than I practice the card trick itself.
This material works because it is true. Every word of it. I am not manufacturing a persona. I am accurately describing myself, with a slight comedic tilt, and letting the audience enjoy the contrast between the serious professional and the slightly obsessive hobbyist who bought one too many magic books.
Self-deprecation also builds trust. An audience that watches a performer make fun of himself knows that they are not going to be the target. They relax. They feel safe. And a relaxed, safe audience laughs more freely and more generously than a tense one.
The Permission to Be Yourself
Graham’s sentence — “I was not them” — gave me something I did not know I needed: permission to stop trying.
Permission to be the quiet guy on a stage full of loud performers. Permission to be measured when everyone else was frantic. Permission to be dry when the conventional wisdom said you needed to be wet and wild. Permission to trust that my natural personality, unadorned and unamplified, was interesting enough to hold a room.
This was not just a performance lesson. It was a life lesson. How much energy do we spend, in all areas of our lives, trying to be versions of ourselves that we think other people want? How much do we twist our natural instincts to fit templates that were designed for someone else?
I wasted months trying to be a high-energy comedy performer. Those months were not entirely wasted — I learned important things about timing, about audience dynamics, about the mechanics of comedy. But the actual comedy, the stuff that makes people laugh when I perform it, came from the exact opposite direction. It came from relaxing. From slowing down. From being the person I am in every other room and letting that person walk on stage.
What Works for Me
Here is what works for me, for what it is worth.
Measured pace. Deliberate pauses. A straight face. Lines delivered as if they are completely serious observations about the world. Occasional self-deprecation that acknowledges the absurdity of a strategy consultant performing mentalism at a corporate gala. Understatement rather than overstatement. Quiet confidence rather than loud enthusiasm.
This is not a prescription. This is a description of one person’s natural style, discovered only after that person stopped trying to emulate someone else’s style. Your natural style may be high-energy. Your natural style may be warm and gregarious. Your natural style may be something that does not have a name yet. Whatever it is, it is almost certainly better than any style you try to borrow from someone you admire.
The best comedy comes from authenticity, and authenticity is the one thing you cannot learn from watching someone else’s performance. You can only learn it by getting on stage, letting go of the template, and discovering what happens when you stop trying to be anyone but yourself.
I was not them. That was the undeniable reason my comedy was failing. And the undeniable solution was even simpler: be me.
It just took me an embarrassingly long time to figure that out.