There is a joke about horses that John Graham tells in Stage by Stage. A baby horse asks her mother how she comes up with names for the baby horses. The mother says, “Well, when you were born, a rose petal happened to land on your head ever so gently, so we named you Rose.” A second baby horse asks how she got her name. “When you were born, a daisy petal landed on your head, so we named you Daisy.” Then another horse starts talking a bunch of gibberish and nonsense, and the mother says, “Take it easy, Cinderblock.”
It is a charming little joke. A kid’s joke, really. It gets a smile. Maybe a small laugh if the timing is right. On its own, it is pleasant but unremarkable. It is not the kind of joke that headlines a comedy special. It is not the kind of line that makes people grab their friends and say, “You have to hear what this guy said.”
But the horse joke does not exist for the reaction it gets when you tell it. The horse joke exists for one reason and one reason only: the callback sixty minutes later.
The Anatomy of a Callback
At some point later in the show — the later, the better — a spectator does something mildly outrageous. Maybe they lie about their card. Maybe they heckle playfully. Maybe they say something nonsensical. And in that moment, you turn to them and say, casually, “Okay, take it easy, Cinderblock.”
The room explodes. Not because the line itself is funny. It is barely a line. It is two words and a name. The room explodes because the audience suddenly connects two moments that seemed unrelated. The joke from forty-five minutes ago comes flooding back, and the recognition that the performer just tied the beginning of the show to this moment — this specific, seemingly spontaneous moment — creates a laugh that is exponentially larger than anything the original joke produced.
This is the callback. And once I understood how it works, it changed the way I think about show construction entirely.
Why Callbacks Hit So Hard
The psychology behind the callback is worth understanding, because it explains why the laugh is so disproportionately large.
When you tell the original joke, the audience processes it as a standalone moment. They hear it, they react, and they move on. The joke goes into their short-term memory and begins to fade as new information takes its place. Over the next forty-five minutes, they watch more effects, hear more lines, experience more moments. The horse joke recedes further and further into the background of their consciousness. They are not thinking about it. They have probably forgotten the specifics.
But the joke has not disappeared. It is still there, stored somewhere in working memory, waiting. And when the callback arrives — when that single word, “Cinderblock,” lands — it triggers an instant retrieval. The entire original joke rushes back into conscious awareness. The audience experiences both the original humor and the recognition of the connection simultaneously. The laugh you get is not just a response to the current moment. It is a response to the entire arc — the setup forty-five minutes ago, the journey in between, and the landing right now.
There is something else at work, too. The callback makes the audience feel like insiders. They are in on the joke. They get the reference. There is a sense of shared history between the performer and the audience that has been building all evening, and the callback crystallizes it into a single moment of collective recognition. The audience is not just laughing at the joke. They are celebrating their membership in a temporary community that understands a private reference.
Scott Alexander describes this phenomenon when he talks about finding your “Fig Newton” — the running element in your show that keeps resurfacing, creating a through-line that ties the whole performance together. He points to Mac King as a master of this technique. King uses callbacks so artfully that the audience feels like they are watching a show that was constructed specifically for them, on this specific night, in response to what happened in the room. The callbacks create an illusion of spontaneity even though the architecture is carefully planned.
The Timing Principle
Graham makes a specific point about timing that I initially underestimated and have since come to regard as essential: the callback is best used as late as possible after the original joke.
This seems counterintuitive. You might think that the longer you wait, the more likely the audience is to forget the original reference, and therefore the weaker the callback becomes. But the opposite is true. The longer the gap, the more surprised the audience is by the connection. The further the original joke has receded from conscious awareness, the more powerful the moment of retrieval. The callback does not need the audience to be actively thinking about the original joke. It needs the audience to have stopped thinking about it. The surprise of retrieval is the mechanism that produces the laugh.
There is an upper limit, of course. If the gap is so long that the audience has genuinely and completely forgotten the original material, the callback will not land. But in a performance that runs forty-five minutes to an hour — which is my typical keynote length — I have never found that to be a problem. If the original joke got any reaction at all, even a smile, the callback will work even at the very end of the show.
In fact, the ideal placement for a callback is during or just before the closer. The audience is already in a heightened emotional state because the show is building to its conclusion. Their defenses are down. Their sense of connection with the performer is at its peak. And then you drop a callback to the opening minutes of the show, and it feels like you have tied a bow around the entire evening. The audience experiences the show as a complete, unified experience rather than a series of disconnected moments. And that sense of completeness produces an emotional response that transcends the humor of the individual joke.
My First Deliberate Callback
I performed for months before I attempted a planned callback, and the early attempts were clumsy. The problem was that I was thinking about it backward. I was looking for funny things to say in the moment and then trying to figure out how to reference them later. This is the wrong approach, because it requires you to track and remember ad-libs across the length of a performance, which is cognitively expensive when you are also managing effects, audience interaction, and all the other demands of a live show.
Graham’s approach is the reverse: you plan the callback first, then construct the setup to feed it. You know, before the show begins, what your callback is going to be. You plant the setup early and deliberately. Then you wait for the natural moment in the show where the callback will fit.
My first successful planned callback happened at a corporate event in Linz. In my opening minutes, while establishing rapport with the audience, I told a brief story about a recent experience at a hotel where the front desk clerk, upon learning I was a magician, asked me to “do something.” I described my response: I stood there, stared at her very seriously, and said, “I just did.” The audience chuckled. It was a warm moment, nothing more.
Forty minutes later, during a mentalism piece near the close of the show, I successfully revealed information that should have been impossible for me to know. The audience reacted with genuine astonishment. People were shaking their heads. And in the brief silence after the reveal, before the applause started, I looked at the audience and said, very quietly, “I just did.”
The laugh was enormous. Not because the line was inherently hilarious. But because the audience suddenly remembered the hotel story from the opening, connected it to this moment of real astonishment, and experienced the collision of the two moments simultaneously. The callback transformed a nice anecdote into a through-line for the entire show. It made the evening feel like one continuous, connected experience rather than a collection of separate moments.
And here is the part that still amazes me: several people mentioned that specific moment when they spoke to me afterward. Not the mentalism reveal, which was objectively more impressive. The callback. The moment of connection. The feeling that the show had been constructed as a unified whole. That was what they remembered.
The Organic Engineering
Graham uses a phrase I love: “organically engineered material.” It sounds like a contradiction, but it perfectly describes how callbacks work in practice. You engineer the setup and the callback in advance. You know the raw materials you are working with. But the moment when the callback actually deploys is organic — it responds to what happens in the room, to the energy of the specific audience, to the behavior of a specific spectator.
This is what makes callbacks feel spontaneous even when they are planned. The audience sees a performer reacting to something that just happened and connecting it to something from earlier. It looks like quick wit. It looks like improvisation. It looks like this performer is so sharp, so present, so tuned into the room that they can make connections in real time that the audience did not see coming.
In reality, you laid the groundwork before the show started. But the audience does not know that, and the illusion of spontaneity is itself a form of magic.
Planting Seeds in the Opener
Once I understood callbacks, I restructured my opening five minutes completely. Previously, my opener was designed to do one thing: establish credibility and get the audience on my side. Now it is designed to do two things: establish credibility and plant at least two or three seeds that I can harvest later.
Every story I tell in the opening minutes, every throwaway line, every humorous observation, is evaluated not just for its immediate effect but for its callback potential. Can I use a word or phrase from this story later? Can I reference this moment in a way that will surprise the audience? Does this anecdote contain an element that could recur in a different context?
Not everything works. Many planted seeds never get used, because the right moment for the callback does not present itself. That is fine. The seeds need to be funny or interesting enough on their own to justify their inclusion. A joke that exists only for a future callback and gets zero reaction in the moment is a dead spot in your show. The audience should never feel that they are watching setup material. Every planted seed must earn its place independently.
But when the right moment arrives — when a spectator says something that creates a natural opening, or when the emotional arc of the show reaches a point where the callback fits perfectly — the payoff is unlike anything else in comedy. It is the laugh that makes the audience feel like the whole evening was building to this one moment. Even though it was not. Even though the callback was a contingency, one of several planned options that you were holding in reserve, waiting for the right moment to deploy.
The Cumulative Effect
One callback is powerful. Two callbacks in a single show is transformative. When the audience catches the second callback, they experience a meta-moment: “This performer does this. This is part of what makes this show special. Every moment might come back.” That awareness changes how they watch the rest of the show. They start paying closer attention. They start listening for references. They become more invested, more engaged, more present.
This is the real gift of the callback. It does not just produce laughs. It teaches the audience how to watch your show. It trains them to be attentive, because attentiveness is rewarded. And an attentive audience is a responsive audience, which makes every other moment in the show work better.
I am still learning this craft. My callbacks are sometimes forced, sometimes mistimed, sometimes too obvious. But the principle is now embedded in how I construct every performance. Every show is an arc. Every opening minute contains a seed. And somewhere in the closing minutes, if the moment is right, that seed blooms into the biggest laugh of the night.
A baby horse named Cinderblock taught me that.