There is a category of spoken material in a magic show that most performers never think about systematically. It is the line that does not belong to any specific trick. The observation that works in multiple contexts. The humor that can be deployed at various points in the show without losing its impact. The responsive comment that appears spontaneous but has been prepared in advance.
Max Maven, in his interview with Pete McCabe in Scripting Magic, calls these “floaters.” Lines that can literally float around within the show. They are not tied to a specific routine, a specific moment, or a specific structural position. They are interchangeable, mobile, and flexible. They stay loose while the core script is frozen.
When I first read Maven’s description of floaters, I was in a hotel room in Klagenfurt, traveling for a consulting engagement, and I had the immediate and uncomfortable recognition that I had no floaters. Zero. Every line in my show was anchored to a specific moment. Every piece of dialogue was part of a specific script for a specific routine. There was no surplus. No flexibility. No reserve of material that could be deployed when the moment called for it.
This, I realized, was why my performances sometimes felt rigid. The scripts were good, but they left no room for the show to breathe. Every word was accounted for. Every pause was assigned. There was no slack in the system, which meant there was no room for the spontaneous moments that make a live performance feel alive.
What Floaters Actually Are
Floaters are lines that meet three criteria. First, they are not dependent on a specific context. They work whether you are in the middle of a card routine, a mentalism piece, or a transitional moment. Second, they are audience-responsive. They can be triggered by something the audience does or says, which makes them feel spontaneous even when they are prepared. Third, they are character-consistent. They sound like something you would naturally say, not like a joke from someone else’s repertoire.
Maven described having more floaters than he would use in any single show. This surplus is important. It means he can select from his collection in real time, choosing the floater that best fits the specific moment, the specific audience, the specific energy of the room. Different audiences get different combinations of floaters, which means every show feels slightly different, even though the core material is the same.
This is the structural principle: the core script is fixed. The floaters are variable. The combination of fixed and variable creates the illusion of a performance that is completely fresh each time, even though the major beats are identical.
Building My First Collection
I started building my floater collection the same way I start most projects: by paying attention to what worked and writing it down.
Over the course of about three months, I kept a small notebook — actually, I used the notes app on my phone, because I always have my phone and I do not always have a notebook — and every time I said something in a performance that got a good reaction and was not part of a specific script, I wrote it down.
Some of these were genuine improvisations. A spontaneous response to something a volunteer said. An observation about the room or the event. A comment about my own nervousness or excitement. These improvisations, when they worked, became candidates for my floater collection.
Others were adaptations of things I had heard or read. A comedian’s observational style applied to a magic context. A line from a business presentation repurposed for a lighter moment on stage. A self-deprecating comment that I had first used in conversation with a colleague and then realized would work in performance.
The collection grew slowly. After three months, I had about twenty lines. Not all of them were good. Some had worked once because of a specific audience dynamic that would not be replicated. Some were too dependent on a particular venue or event. Some were just not funny enough or interesting enough to earn their place.
I pruned the collection to twelve. Twelve lines that I could deploy in any show, at any point, in response to a variety of audience behaviors. Twelve lines that sounded like me, that fit my character as a performer, that were consistent with the tone of a corporate keynote enhanced with magic and mentalism.
Categories of Floaters
As my collection grew and I studied how other performers used this kind of material, I identified several categories.
The first category is audience response lines. These are triggered by something the audience does. Someone laughs at the wrong moment. Someone gasps loudly. Someone whispers to their neighbor. For each of these common audience behaviors, I have a prepared response that acknowledges what happened, usually with humor, and redirects attention back to the performance.
These are the most valuable floaters because they create the strongest impression of spontaneity. The audience sees a performer reacting in real time to something that just happened. They cannot possibly believe the response was scripted, because the triggering event was unpredictable. But the response is scripted — or at least, prepared. I have rehearsed it. I know how to deliver it. The only variable is when I deploy it.
The second category is self-referential comments. These are observations about myself, my performance, or the act of performing. A comment about my own nervousness. A joke about the absurdity of what I am doing for a living. A self-deprecating remark about my technical abilities. These lines work anywhere because they are about the performer, not about the trick, and the performer is constant throughout the show.
I find that corporate audiences in Austria respond particularly well to self-referential humor. They appreciate a performer who does not take himself too seriously, who acknowledges the slightly absurd nature of standing in front of a room full of professionals and attempting to read their minds. A well-placed self-referential floater humanizes the performer and creates connection.
The third category is observational lines. These are comments about the room, the event, the audience, or the general situation. They require the most adaptation because they need to feel specific to the moment. A generic observation about “what a great crowd” is not a floater — it is a cliche. A specific observation about the room’s acoustics, the event’s theme, or the energy in the front row is a floater, because it sounds like it was formulated in this specific moment for this specific audience.
I have a set of observational floaters that I adapt slightly for each performance. The core line stays the same, but I swap out a detail to make it specific. This is a technique I learned from stand-up comedy: write the template, then customize the variable.
Where Floaters Live
The physical reality of floaters in performance is that they live in the transitions. The space between routines. The moments when one effect has ended and another has not yet begun. The brief windows when the audience is applauding, when you are resetting a prop, when a volunteer is returning to their seat.
These transitional moments are where most performances go dead. The performer is focused on the mechanics of the next routine — setting up, resetting, preparing. The patter stops. The energy drops. The audience disconnects momentarily, checks their phone, whispers to their neighbor.
Floaters fill these dead moments. A well-placed floater during a transition keeps the audience engaged, maintains the energy, and creates the impression that the performer is always “on” — always present, always communicating, always performing. The audience never gets a chance to disconnect because there is never a gap long enough for disconnection to occur.
I also deploy floaters during routines, at moments where the audience needs a beat to process what just happened. After a surprising reveal, for example, there is a natural pause while the audience reacts. In that pause, rather than standing in silence waiting for the reaction to subside, I might drop a floater — a light comment that acknowledges the reaction and eases the transition to the next phase of the routine.
The Surplus Principle
Maven’s point about having more floaters than you need is critical. The surplus is what makes the technique work. If you have exactly the right number of floaters for a show, you are locked in. You must use all of them, at specific points, and you lose the flexibility that is the entire purpose of having floaters in the first place.
With surplus, you can choose. This audience is quiet and analytical? Deploy the intellectual floaters. This audience is rowdy and enthusiastic? Deploy the energetic ones. This audience has a volunteer who is getting great reactions? Deploy the audience-response floaters more frequently.
The surplus also means that you can retire tired floaters and introduce new ones without disrupting the structure of your show. A line that has been in your collection for a year might start to feel stale — not to the audience, who has never heard it, but to you, the performer. Staleness in the performer’s delivery is contagious. If you are bored by a line, the audience will sense it.
With surplus, you simply stop using the stale floater and start deploying a fresh one from your collection. The show structure is unchanged. The core scripts are unchanged. But the connective tissue — the lines that create the impression of spontaneity — has been refreshed.
My Current Collection
I now have about thirty floaters in active rotation. They live in a note on my phone, organized by category and tagged with a rough indicator of when they work best — early in the show, late in the show, after a strong reaction, after a quiet moment, during audience interaction, during solo performance.
Before each show, I review the list and mentally flag four or five that I think will work well for this specific audience and event. I do not plan when to use them. I simply keep them loaded, ready to deploy if and when the right moment presents itself.
Sometimes I use all five. Sometimes I use two. Sometimes I use one I had not planned on because the moment was too perfect to pass up. The point is flexibility. The floaters are tools in a toolkit, and the craftsman chooses the right tool for the job at hand, not in advance.
What Floaters Do for Your Character
The deepest benefit of building a floater collection is what it does for your on-stage identity. Floaters, by definition, are not about magic. They are about you. Your voice. Your observations. Your humor. Your way of seeing the world.
A performer who has a rich collection of floaters is a performer who has spent time thinking about who they are on stage, what they find funny, what they notice, how they relate to audiences. The floaters are a concentrated expression of character, distilled into portable, deployable lines that can be inserted anywhere.
When the audience hears a floater, they are not hearing a trick patter. They are hearing the performer as a person. And this is what creates the feeling that a show is a conversation, not a recital. The magic is the content. The floaters are the personality. And personality is what makes the audience want to spend time with you.
Maven understood this decades ago. He described having floaters that could move early, late, between routines, in the middle of routines — a collection of character expressions that gave his performances their distinctive texture.
I am still building mine. Still testing new lines, discarding old ones, refining the delivery, expanding the categories. The collection will never be finished, because I am never finished evolving as a performer. But the foundation is there: a set of lines that sound like me, that work in any context, and that make every show feel like it is happening for the first time.
Even though the core script has not changed in months.
That is the magic of floaters. Not the magic of impossibility. The magic of appearing to be fully, spontaneously, irrepressibly yourself on stage — while following a plan that nobody can see.