I remember the exact moment I realized that not everyone in my audience was having a good time.
It was a corporate event in Vienna, a product launch for a technology company. I was performing close-up mentalism at the cocktail reception, moving between small groups, doing effects that were landing well. Good reactions. Genuine surprise. People pulling out their phones to text friends about what they had just seen.
And then I approached a group where a man — mid-forties, well-dressed, clearly senior in the organization — crossed his arms the moment I introduced myself. He watched the effect with a tight expression. When the reveal happened and everyone around him gasped, he did not gasp. He frowned. And when I moved on to the next group, I heard him say to his colleague, with real irritation in his voice: “I hate that. I hate not knowing how it works.”
At the time, I dismissed him as an outlier. A difficult personality. Someone who could not enjoy anything without controlling it. I filed him away in the mental category of “you cannot please everyone” and moved on.
I should not have dismissed him. Because the research tells me he is not an outlier. He represents roughly one in five people in any given audience. Twenty percent. And the way I handle his experience determines whether I am a thoughtful performer or simply one who has decided that a significant minority of his audience does not matter.
The Data on Disliking Magic
When I read Gustav Kuhn and Alice Pailhes’s research on why people enjoy magic, the flip side of the data was equally illuminating. When audiences are surveyed about what they dislike about magic, approximately 20% of respondents report negative feelings specifically about being deceived. Not about bad performances. Not about boring tricks. About the fundamental experience of being fooled.
The specific complaints are revealing. People in this group report feeling stupid when they cannot figure out how a trick works. They feel manipulated. They feel that the performer is demonstrating superiority at their expense. They experience the deception not as entertainment but as a form of intellectual humiliation.
This is not a trivial number. In a room of one hundred people, twenty of them may be having a fundamentally negative experience during your performance. Not because you are doing anything wrong. Not because your technique is flawed or your presentation is poor. But because the core mechanism of what you do — creating an experience of impossibility through deception — triggers genuine discomfort in them.
Jamy Ian Swiss, who I have studied and admire, articulated this principle bluntly: it is not fun to be fooled. For most people, the fun of magic overrides the discomfort of being fooled. But for a significant minority, the discomfort is dominant. The fooling does not feel like play. It feels like losing.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
In my consulting work, I learned a principle early in my career that has proven true in every domain I have encountered: the unhappy minority has a disproportionate impact on your reputation. One genuinely unhappy customer will tell more people about their experience than ten satisfied customers combined. The negativity bias that governs human memory ensures that bad experiences are encoded more deeply and shared more widely than good ones.
The same principle applies to performance. The eighty percent of your audience that enjoyed the show will remember it fondly but may not talk about it extensively. The twenty percent that felt uncomfortable will remember it vividly and will share their discomfort with others. If you are performing at corporate events, as I often do, that twenty percent may include the person who decides whether to book you again.
This is not a theoretical concern for me. I perform magic as part of keynote speeches for corporate audiences. These are not magic enthusiasts who self-selected into attending a magic show. They are professionals who came for a conference and got magic as part of the package. The percentage who are uncomfortable with deception may be even higher in this context than in a self-selected magic audience.
The Wonder-Humiliation Spectrum
Here is the framework I have developed for thinking about this problem. Every magical effect exists somewhere on what I call the wonder-humiliation spectrum.
At one end is pure wonder. The audience experiences something impossible, and their response is awe, delight, a sense that the world is more mysterious and interesting than they thought. The effect leaves them feeling elevated. They participated in something extraordinary.
At the other end is humiliation. The audience experiences something impossible, and their response is frustration, embarrassment, a sense that they have been made to look foolish. The effect leaves them feeling diminished. They were the butt of a demonstration of intellectual superiority.
The exact same effect can land at different points on this spectrum depending on how it is framed, how the performer relates to the audience, and what contextual cues surround the experience. This means the problem is not in the tricks themselves. It is in the presentation. And that means it is solvable.
The Framing That Creates Humiliation
Certain performance choices push effects toward the humiliation end of the spectrum. Being aware of them allows you to avoid them.
The first is the “I’m smarter than you” frame. This is any presentation that positions the performer as intellectually superior to the audience. “I can do this and you cannot figure out how” is the subtext. For the eighty percent, this frame is tolerable or even enjoyable because the fooling is fun. For the twenty percent, this frame is actively hostile. It confirms their fear that they are being made to look stupid.
The second is the challenge frame. “Try to catch me” or “see if you can figure this out” turns the effect into a competition between the performer and the audience. The audience is set up to fail, and when they inevitably fail, the twenty percent experience that failure as personal. They were challenged, and they lost. This is not entertainment for them. This is defeat.
The third is the focus on the spectator’s failure. Any moment where the performer draws attention to what the audience missed, what they did not notice, what they got wrong, amplifies the humiliation for the vulnerable twenty percent. “You did not see that, did you?” or “Nobody noticed when I…” makes the audience’s perceptual failure the centerpiece of the entertainment.
The Framing That Creates Wonder
The antidote is not to stop doing magic. It is to reframe the experience so that the audience is invited into wonder rather than subjected to deception.
The first reframe is the “we’re in this together” frame. Instead of positioning yourself opposite the audience, position yourself alongside them. “Let me show you something incredible” is a fundamentally different frame from “let me fool you.” The first invites the audience to share in the wonder. The second positions them as the target of a deception.
I have adopted this framing in my keynote performances and the difference is palpable. When I say “something amazing is about to happen and I want you to see it,” the audience’s posture changes. They lean in. Even the arms-crossers relax slightly. Because I am not threatening them with deception. I am inviting them to witness something extraordinary.
The second reframe is making the spectator the hero. In any effect that involves audience participation, the participating spectator should emerge looking good, not foolish. Their choices should seem meaningful. Their involvement should seem essential. They should feel, by the end, that they played a crucial role in creating the magical moment — not that they were a prop used to demonstrate the performer’s superiority.
When I do mentalism in a keynote, the person whose thought I reveal is not positioned as someone who “failed to hide their thoughts.” They are positioned as someone who “sent their thought so clearly that something impossible happened.” The same outcome, completely different emotional framing. One makes them feel exposed. The other makes them feel powerful.
The third reframe is emphasizing the impossibility rather than the deception. There is a subtle but critical difference between “I fooled you” and “something impossible just happened.” The first is about the performer’s skill at deception. The second is about the nature of reality. For the twenty percent who hate feeling fooled, the first frame is unbearable and the second is acceptable — even enjoyable. Because they are not being fooled. They are witnessing something impossible. The focus shifts from their failure to perceive to the event’s failure to obey the laws of physics.
Practical Changes I Have Made
Since sitting with this research, I have made several concrete changes to my performance practice.
I have eliminated all competitive language from my scripts. No more “try to catch me.” No more “see if you can spot when it happens.” No more implicit challenges. Instead, I use invitational language. “Watch closely — you’re going to want to see this.” The difference seems subtle on paper but is enormous in practice.
I have restructured my audience interactions so that volunteers always end up looking good. If someone makes a choice, that choice is validated. If someone participates, they are thanked warmly and publicly. If someone’s involvement leads to a magical outcome, they get credit for it. “That could not have happened without you” is a sentence I use in almost every performance now.
I have started watching the arms-crossers specifically. In every audience, I can identify the twenty percent within the first few minutes. They are the ones with guarded body language, skeptical expressions, visible resistance. I do not try to “win them over” — that is just another form of the challenge frame. Instead, I try to make the experience non-threatening enough that they can relax and enjoy it on their own terms.
I have also changed how I respond to the question “How did you do that?” I used to deflect with humor: “Very well, thank you.” This is a funny line, but for the twenty percent, it reinforces the power dynamic. Now I respond with something more generous: “The honest answer is that I practiced for a very long time. But the more interesting question is what it felt like when it happened.” This redirects from the method (which I cannot reveal) to the experience (which belongs to them).
The Business Case for Inclusion
There is a pragmatic argument here as well as an ethical one. If you perform for corporate audiences, the people who decide whether to book you are often in that twenty percent. Decision-makers — executives, event planners, organizational leaders — tend to be analytical, control-oriented, and uncomfortable with not understanding how things work. They are disproportionately represented in the group that dislikes feeling fooled.
Designing your performance to be comfortable for this group is not just ethically right. It is good business. The event planner who felt respected and included during your performance is more likely to recommend you than the one who felt manipulated and embarrassed.
The Deeper Principle
At the deepest level, this finding challenges the assumption that deception is what magic is about. It is not. Magic is about wonder. Deception is the mechanism, not the goal. And when the mechanism becomes the focus — when the audience’s experience is dominated by their awareness of being deceived rather than their experience of wonder — the magic has failed, regardless of how clean the method was.
The twenty percent who hate feeling fooled are not broken audiences. They are not people who “do not get it.” They are people who are responding honestly to an experience of deception, and their response is valid. The question is not how to fix them. The question is how to create experiences that honor their response while still delivering wonder.
The answer, I have found, is simpler than I expected. Stop trying to fool people. Start trying to astonish them. The distinction sounds semantic, but it changes everything about how you construct, present, and frame your work. And it means that the man in Vienna who crossed his arms and frowned — the man I dismissed as an outlier — might actually have been the most important person in the room. Because he was telling me something that the other eighty percent were too polite to say: the experience of being fooled is not inherently enjoyable. Make it about something else.
Make it about wonder. Make it about the impossible. Make it about the moment when reality bends and everyone in the room, even the skeptics, feels something shift.
That is magic worth doing.