There is a razor-thin line between humor that makes an audience lean toward you and humor that makes them wonder why you were booked. I spent the first year of my performing life on the wrong side of that line, and it took a single sentence in John Graham’s Stage by Stage to make me understand what I was doing wrong.
The sentence was this: “Do not confuse self-deprecating lines with self-put-down lines.”
When I read that, I stopped. I went back and read it again. And then I sat in my hotel room in Graz, staring at the wall, replaying the last dozen performances in my head, and realizing that almost every attempt I had made at humor on stage fell into the wrong category.
The Distinction That Changes Everything
Self-deprecating humor says: I am confident enough to laugh at myself. I see my own absurdity. I am comfortable in my own skin, and I trust you enough to let you in on the joke.
Self-put-down humor says: I am not good enough to be here. I know you are wondering why they hired me. I am as surprised as you are that anyone is paying me for this.
The difference sounds subtle on paper. It is not subtle in performance. It is the difference between an audience that relaxes and leans in, thinking, “I like this person,” and an audience that tightens up and leans back, thinking, “Should we feel sorry for this person?”
Graham gives a perfect example. You have just done something impressive, and a spectator reacts with amazement. The classic magician line is: “If I could do that, I wouldn’t be working here.” That gets a laugh. But it is a laugh at the expense of the venue, the client, and ultimately yourself. You have just told the audience that you are performing beneath your potential in a place that does not deserve your talent. Nobody wins.
The self-deprecating version: “If I could do that, there’d be a lot more people here tonight.” Same structure. Same timing. Same rhythm. But now the joke is gently, warmly on you. You are acknowledging, with a smile, that your audience is modest in size. You are not insulting the venue. You are not insulting the people who hired you. You are making yourself the target, but in a way that actually increases your likability, because the audience can see that you are secure enough to make this observation without anxiety.
That is the critical distinction. Self-deprecation radiates security. Self-put-down radiates insecurity. And audiences can feel the difference in their bones, even when they cannot articulate it.
My Early Mistakes
I came to performing from the consulting world. In consulting, self-deprecation is a survival skill. When you are standing in front of a CEO presenting a strategy recommendation, a well-timed joke about yourself signals that you are not threatened, that you can handle pressure, that you have perspective. I was good at this in the boardroom.
But when I started performing magic at corporate events, something shifted. The stakes felt different. In consulting, I was the expert. In magic, I was the newcomer. And the insecurity I felt about being a newcomer leaked into my humor.
At a corporate event in Vienna, early in my performing days, I opened with a line that was supposed to be charming. Something along the lines of: “I should warn you, I only started doing this a few years ago, so we will see how this goes.” I meant it as a disarming, relatable opener. What the audience heard was: “The person you are about to watch is not qualified to be here.”
The energy in the room dropped immediately. Not dramatically. Not catastrophically. But perceptibly. There was an almost imperceptible shift in how the front rows were looking at me. A moment ago, they were open and curious. Now there was a hint of something else. Concern, maybe. Or mild embarrassment on my behalf.
I pushed through and performed well. The effects landed. By the end, the audience was engaged and responsive. But I had made my own job harder by undermining myself in the first thirty seconds.
I did this repeatedly, in various forms, over the next several months. “Bear with me while I figure this out.” “This usually works better.” “I promise I am better at my day job.” Each time, I thought I was being endearing. Each time, I was eroding the audience’s confidence in me before I had a chance to earn it.
Why Self-Put-Downs Feel So Natural
Here is the trap. Self-put-down humor feels natural to new performers because it is honest. When you are genuinely uncertain about your abilities, making jokes about your uncertainty feels authentic. You are sharing your real emotional state with the audience, and authenticity is supposed to be good, right?
The problem is that audiences do not attend a show to participate in your therapy. They came to be entertained. They want to feel that they are in capable hands. They want to relax into the experience, knowing that the person on stage has this under control.
When you put yourself down, you rob the audience of that relaxation. Now they are worrying about you instead of enjoying the show. They are monitoring your competence instead of surrendering to the experience. They are doing emotional labor on your behalf, and emotional labor is the opposite of entertainment.
This is especially true in the corporate context where I perform most often. These are busy professionals who have spent a long day in meetings. They have been given an evening of entertainment. They want to laugh, be amazed, and forget about the quarterly numbers for an hour. When the performer walks out and signals, even subtly, that this might not go well, their internal response is not sympathy. It is disappointment. They were promised a good time, and now they are not sure they are going to get one.
The Confidence Paradox
The paradox of self-deprecating humor is that it only works when you do not need it. You can only laugh at yourself from a position of strength. The audience has to believe, on some level, that you are excellent at what you do before your self-deprecation becomes charming rather than alarming.
Graham demonstrates this beautifully. One of his lines, used after tepid applause: “Oh, thank you. We’re down to literally one person clapping. I can’t even say ‘Thank you both’ without exaggerating how many people are actually applauding.” This is self-deprecating. It is warm. It is funny. But it works because it comes from a performer who has already demonstrated command of the room. The audience knows he is skilled. The joke about low applause is obviously a playful exaggeration, not a genuine concern. The subtext is: I am so comfortable up here that I can make jokes about things that would terrify a less confident performer.
If I had used that exact same line in my first year of performing, it would have landed as a genuine lament. Because I did not yet have the track record to make it read as humor. The words would have been the same. The meaning would have been completely different.
This taught me something important: you cannot shortcut the process. You cannot deploy advanced self-deprecating humor until you have built the foundation of demonstrated competence that gives the humor its ironic charge. You have to earn the right to laugh at yourself on stage by first showing the audience that there is plenty to take seriously.
Finding the Line in My Own Material
Once I understood the distinction, I went through every humorous line in my repertoire and sorted them into two categories. The exercise was uncomfortable, because most of my prepared humor fell on the wrong side.
Lines I cut:
- Any variation of “I just started doing this” or “This is relatively new for me.”
- “That was supposed to happen… I think.”
- “My partner Adam is much better at this part.”
- “If this doesn’t work, I will just go back to consulting.”
Each of these lines was undermining my authority. Each one was inviting the audience to question whether I belonged on stage. And each one was born from genuine insecurity, dressed up as humor.
Lines I kept or developed:
- “If you are into magic, I encourage you to stick with it. Because if you do, and you practice every day, if you devote your life to it, one day, all this can be yours.” Said while gesturing at a modest conference room. This is self-deprecating — it gently acknowledges that the glamour of the magic world is, shall we say, overstated. But it does not undermine my ability. It is a joke about the profession, not about my place in it.
- After a strong effect gets moderate applause: “Now that the laughter has died down, I can continue.” This acknowledges the reality of the room while demonstrating that I am unbothered by it. It is playful, not plaintive.
- “I performed at a medical conference last month. One of the doctors watched me for about twenty minutes and then asked if I had considered getting my hands insured. I told him they are insured. For liability.” This is technically self-deprecating, but the joke is about the absurdity of the insurance world, not about my competence.
The Corporate Context
This distinction is particularly important for anyone who performs at corporate events, as I do. In the corporate world, the audience is hyper-attuned to confidence signals. These are people who spend their professional lives evaluating competence. They watch presentations. They assess pitches. They hire and fire based on how people carry themselves.
When a performer walks into this environment and puts themselves down, even gently, these audiences do not interpret it the way a casual audience might. They interpret it as a competence signal. And the signal is negative.
On the other hand, confident self-deprecation reads as executive presence. It reads as the kind of humor that the best leaders use — the ability to acknowledge imperfection without being diminished by it. When the CEO makes a joke about her own terrible golf game, nobody thinks she is bad at her job. They think she is secure enough to be human. That is the register you want to hit.
The Gradual Shift
The change did not happen overnight. For months after I understood the distinction intellectually, I would still catch myself slipping into put-down territory under pressure. A trick would not go exactly as planned, and the nervous energy would produce a self-put-down before I could stop it. “Well, that was interesting.” “We are going to pretend that was intentional.” “This is going really well so far.”
Each time, I would feel the room’s energy shift. And each time, I would mentally note it and resolve to do better next time.
The turning point was a keynote performance in Salzburg. Something went slightly sideways during a mentalism piece — the kind of moment that the audience probably would not have noticed if I had simply paused and continued. But my instinct was to acknowledge it, and for the first time, I caught myself before the self-put-down emerged and redirected into genuine self-deprecation instead.
I looked at the audience, paused for a beat longer than felt comfortable, and said, with absolute sincerity, “That is the face of a man who is about to do something either very impressive or very regrettable.” The room laughed. Not a polite chuckle. A real laugh. And then they leaned forward, because I had reframed the uncertain moment as anticipation rather than anxiety. I was still the person in charge. I was still the person they could trust. I had just invited them to enjoy the suspense along with me.
That moment taught me more about the distinction than all my reading had.
The Deeper Lesson
Behind the technical distinction between self-deprecation and self-put-down lies a deeper truth about performance and about life. The humor you default to under pressure reveals what you believe about yourself.
If your instinct is to put yourself down, that is worth examining. Not just as a performance technique to be corrected, but as a signal about your relationship with your own competence. When I was putting myself down on stage, I was not just making a tactical error. I was broadcasting an honest belief that I did not belong there.
The work of becoming a better performer, for me, has been inseparable from the work of genuinely believing that I have something to offer. The self-deprecation that works — the kind that endears rather than destroys — is not a technique you can paste over insecurity. It is the natural expression of someone who has done the work, earned the skill, and can therefore afford to be playful about the whole endeavor.
You do not become that person by learning better lines. You become that person by practicing until you know, in your bones, that you belong on the stage. And then the humor takes care of itself.
The line between endearing and destroying is not about words. It is about what you believe when you say them.