I bombed in Graz. Not completely — the audience did not walk out, and the event organizer was polite afterward. But I could feel it during the performance. A mentalism piece I was performing had a phase in the middle where the audience was supposed to be building anticipation, leaning forward, wondering what was going to happen next. Instead, I could see their faces. They were confused. Not intrigued. Not engaged. Just confused.
I went back to my hotel room that night feeling like I had made a fundamental error in the construction of the effect. The confusion was a problem. It was a failure. It needed to be eliminated.
I was wrong. Not about the execution that night — that was genuinely flawed in ways I needed to fix. But about the underlying assumption. I was wrong that confusion was the enemy.
The research says something counterintuitive and, once you sit with it, transformative: negative emotions like confusion, frustration, and even mild anxiety are not bugs in the magical experience. They are features. They do not weaken the impact of magic. They amplify it.
The Distancing-Embracing Theory
When I read Gustav Kuhn and Alice Pailhes’s explanation of why people enjoy magic, I expected the answer to be straightforward. People enjoy magic because it is fun. Because it creates wonder. Because surprise is pleasurable.
All of that is true. But it is incomplete. The more interesting finding is that magic reliably elicits negative emotions — confusion, anxiety, frustration, the unsettling feeling of not understanding what just happened — and that these negative emotions actually contribute to, rather than detract from, the overall enjoyment.
The researchers draw on something called the Distancing-Embracing Theory from the psychology of aesthetics. The idea is elegant. When we experience something within the frame of a performance — when we know, on some level, that we are watching a show, that this is entertainment, that we are safe — a psychological distancing mechanism kicks in. This distance creates a buffer between us and the negative emotions. We can feel confused without feeling threatened. We can feel anxious without feeling endangered. We can feel fooled without feeling humiliated.
And once that distance is established, something remarkable happens. The negative emotions do not just become tolerable. They become pleasurable. They intensify the experience. They make it more vivid, more engaging, more memorable.
This is the same mechanism that explains why people enjoy horror films, why roller coasters are thrilling rather than traumatizing, why tragic plays move us rather than devastate us. The frame of performance transforms negative emotions from threats into features.
The Amplification Effect
Here is where the finding gets genuinely useful for performers. The research suggests that negative emotions do not just coexist with positive emotions in the magical experience. They amplify the positive emotions. The confusion before the revelation makes the revelation more powerful. The anxiety before the climax makes the climax more relieving. The frustration of not understanding makes the eventual wonder more profound.
Think of it as emotional contrast. A surprise that arrives after a period of calm contentment is pleasant. A surprise that arrives after a period of confusion and tension is explosive. The negative emotion creates a lower baseline from which the positive emotion launches, resulting in a greater emotional distance traveled and therefore a greater subjective impact.
This is not just theory. I have experienced it in my own performances, once I started paying attention. The effects in my repertoire that get the strongest reactions are not the ones that are smooth and pleasant from start to finish. They are the ones that take the audience through a period of genuine uncertainty — moments where they do not know what is happening, where the outcome is unclear, where they feel slightly uncomfortable — before delivering a payoff that resolves all of that discomfort in an instant.
The Night in Graz, Revisited
Let me go back to that Graz performance. The problem was not that the audience experienced confusion. The problem was that the confusion was unstructured. It was accidental. It was not part of the design. It was not leading anywhere that the audience could feel, even subconsciously, would resolve into something meaningful.
There is a world of difference between confusion that feels like a journey and confusion that feels like getting lost. In a well-designed effect, the confusion has a trajectory. The audience senses, even if they cannot articulate it, that the confusion is building toward something. There is a narrative tension to it. Something is going to happen that will make this all make sense, even if “making sense” means experiencing something impossible.
In my Graz performance, the confusion had no trajectory. The audience was lost, not journeying. They did not sense a resolution coming. They just felt confused. And confusion without trajectory is not a feature. It is, in fact, a bug.
The distinction matters enormously. When I restructured that effect, I did not eliminate the confusion. I channeled it. I made sure the audience could feel the structure even when they did not understand the content. I gave them anchors — visual cues, verbal signposts, moments of partial clarity — that told them “you are supposed to be confused right now, and something is going to happen that will reward your patience.”
The restructured version works beautifully. The confusion in the middle is now one of the strongest parts of the effect, because it creates the emotional basement from which the climax launches.
Designing for Productive Discomfort
Once you accept that negative emotions amplify positive ones, you can start designing for them deliberately. This is not about making your audience miserable. It is about strategically incorporating moments of productive discomfort that serve the overall emotional arc.
In my keynote performances, I have started building what I think of as “confusion windows” into my effects. These are deliberate moments where the audience does not quite understand what is happening. Where the pieces do not yet fit together. Where the mental model they are building is incomplete and slightly frustrating.
The key is that these windows must be bounded. They must have clear entry points and clear exit points. The audience must enter the confusion knowing, at some level, that they are in capable hands. And they must exit the confusion with a payoff that is proportional to the discomfort they experienced.
A brief confusion window — five or ten seconds of “wait, what?” — can be resolved with a moderate payoff. A longer confusion window — thirty seconds or a full minute of building uncertainty — requires a correspondingly larger payoff. The ratio matters. If the discomfort exceeds the resolution, the audience feels cheated. If the resolution exceeds the discomfort, the effect is powerful but could have been more powerful with a longer buildup.
The sweet spot is when the discomfort and the resolution are perfectly calibrated. When the audience thinks “I had no idea what was happening, and then THAT happened, and it was worth every second of not knowing.”
The Memory Advantage
There is another dimension to this finding that matters for anyone who cares about being remembered. The research on memory and magic shows that emotionally intense experiences are encoded more deeply in long-term memory. And negative emotions, counterintuitively, are more emotionally intense than positive emotions of comparable magnitude.
This means that an effect which includes a period of confusion or anxiety is more likely to be remembered than an effect which is pleasant throughout. The negative emotion creates a spike in emotional intensity that helps the entire experience get encoded more deeply.
I have tested this informally in my own work. When I ask people, weeks or months after a performance, which effects they remember, they consistently recall the effects that included moments of discomfort. The effect where they were confused and then amazed. The effect where they felt slightly anxious and then relieved. The smooth, elegant effects — the ones that were pleasant from start to finish — tend to blur together in memory or fade entirely.
This has profound implications for set construction. If your goal is not just to entertain in the moment but to create lasting memories — and for a keynote speaker, lasting memories are the entire point — you should be designing for emotional intensity, not emotional comfort. And emotional intensity, according to the research, requires both positive and negative emotions working together.
The Ethical Dimension
There is an important caveat here. The Distancing-Embracing Theory only works when the distancing mechanism is intact. The audience must feel safe enough to embrace the negative emotions as part of the entertainment experience. If the distancing mechanism breaks — if the audience genuinely feels threatened, humiliated, or attacked — the negative emotions are no longer features. They are genuine distress.
This is why the performer’s relationship with the audience is so critical. If the audience trusts you, they will tolerate and even enjoy moments of confusion and uncertainty. If they do not trust you, those same moments will feel hostile and unpleasant.
Building trust is the prerequisite for productive discomfort. You cannot lead someone into confusion if they do not trust you to lead them out of it. Every moment of warmth, humor, and connection you establish at the beginning of your performance is an investment in the trust bank that allows you to make withdrawals later when you introduce confusion, tension, or uncertainty.
The Practical Framework
Here is the framework I now use when designing effects that incorporate productive discomfort.
Start with clarity. The opening of the effect must be crystal clear. The audience must understand the premise, the setup, and the stakes. This clarity is the foundation of trust. It tells the audience “I know what I am doing, and you can follow along.”
Then introduce confusion gradually. Do not plunge the audience into confusion all at once. Let it build. Let them notice, incrementally, that things are not quite adding up. Let the confusion creep in rather than crash in.
Provide lifelines. Even at the peak of confusion, give the audience something to hold onto. A recurring phrase. A visual anchor. A sense that the performer is in control even if the situation is not. These lifelines maintain the distancing mechanism and prevent the confusion from tipping into genuine distress.
Resolve completely. The payoff must resolve all of the accumulated confusion in a single moment. Not gradually. Not partially. Completely. The resolution should be so clean and so powerful that it retroactively transforms all of the confusion into setup. The audience should feel, in the moment of resolution, that every confusing element was deliberately placed to make this moment possible.
This is not easy to execute. It requires careful scripting, precise timing, and a deep understanding of your audience’s tolerance for discomfort. But when it works, it creates moments that are orders of magnitude more powerful than anything achieved through pure pleasantness.
The Lesson I Almost Missed
I almost learned the wrong lesson in Graz. I almost concluded that confusion was the enemy and that I should design it out of my effects. If I had done that, I would have made my performances smoother, more comfortable, more pleasant — and significantly less powerful.
The research saved me from that mistake. It taught me that the discomfort I saw on those faces in Graz was not the problem. The lack of structure around that discomfort was the problem. The confusion itself was raw material. It just needed to be refined.
Negative emotions are not the opposite of entertainment. They are the depth charges that make entertainment resonate. The confusion before the clarity. The tension before the release. The frustration before the revelation. These are not obstacles to overcome. They are tools to deploy.
Use them deliberately. Use them ethically. Use them with respect for your audience’s trust. And watch what happens when the payoff arrives after a genuine moment of “I have no idea what is going on.” That is when magic stops being impressive and starts being unforgettable.