There is a card magician I once watched at a magic gathering in Vienna who did something technically extraordinary. His handling was immaculate. The sequence involved a series of transformations and transpositions that, from a technical standpoint, represented years of dedicated practice. The method was elegant. The construction was ingenious. Anyone who understood what was happening from a technical perspective would have been deeply impressed.
The audience applauded politely.
Later that same evening, a different performer did something far simpler. He built a routine around the premise that something was about to go terribly wrong. The narrative was simple: he was attempting something dangerous with borrowed objects, and it looked like he was going to fail. The tension built. The audience leaned forward. When the resolution came, the room erupted. Gasps. Laughter. Spontaneous applause that was qualitatively different from the polite response the card magician had received.
For months, I puzzled over why the second performance hit so much harder than the first. The technical skill involved was incomparable — the card magician was operating at a level the second performer could not approach. The cleverness of the method was incomparable. By any objective measure of difficulty, the card magic was superior.
And then I read Fitzkee, and the answer was so clear it felt like it had been obvious all along.
The Core Insight
Fitzkee’s most provocative claim in “Showmanship for Magicians” is this: instinctual appeals will always outperform intellectual appeals. Always. Without exception. The strongest audience responses — the gasps, the laughter, the spontaneous applause, the standing ovations — come from appeals to the instincts, not to the mind.
Mind appeals require thought, reflection, and argument. They engage the cognitive system. The audience has to process what they have seen, evaluate it, understand why it is impressive, and then decide to respond. This processing takes time, creates uncertainty (sometimes the argument is lost and the audience decides NOT to be impressed), and produces muted, considered responses.
Instinct appeals bypass the cognitive system entirely. They are subconscious and involuntary. We respond to them because we are constructed that way — because evolution built these responses into our nervous systems over millions of years. Rhythm makes us want to move. Beauty makes us want to look. Danger makes us alert. Comedy makes us laugh. These responses are automatic, immediate, and powerful.
The distinction between these two categories of appeal is, I believe, the single most important insight in Fitzkee’s entire book. And it explains almost everything about why some performers succeed and others fail despite comparable skill.
The Magic Problem
Here is the uncomfortable truth for magicians, stated as directly as Fitzkee would have stated it: most magic acts rely primarily on intellectual appeals at their climax. The big moment — the climax, the point where the audience is supposed to respond with maximum force — is typically a moment of bewilderment. Something impossible just happened. The audience is meant to be amazed.
But bewilderment is a cognitive state. It requires the audience to process what they saw, compare it to what they believe is possible, identify the contradiction, and then experience astonishment. This is a mind appeal. It engages the intellect. And while it can produce a response, the response is often muted compared to what instinct appeals generate.
Think about the difference between a magic show and a rock concert. The rock concert hits rhythm, movement, music, physical energy, spectacle, and communal emotion — all instinct appeals — simultaneously and relentlessly. The audience response is explosive, involuntary, and sustained. People scream. They move. They feel things in their bodies, not just their minds.
Now think about the typical magic show. The climax is a moment of “how did that happen?” The audience is puzzled. They applaud because they know they are supposed to, because the performer is signaling that the trick is finished, because social convention dictates a response. But the response is cognitive, not visceral. They are clapping with their hands, not responding with their entire nervous system.
This is why magic shows, even very good ones, rarely generate the kind of explosive audience response that music, comedy, and theater regularly achieve. The magic relies on bewilderment at the climax. The other art forms rely on instinct at the climax. And instinct wins every time.
The List of Instinct Appeals
Fitzkee identified the instinct appeals that bypass the mind and hit the nervous system directly: rhythm, beauty, skill (when it appears effortless), sex appeal, coordinated effort, physical action, harmony, melody, comedy, movement, youth (energy and vitality), personality, romance, sentiment, nostalgia, surprise, situation (the predicament), character, conflict, and music.
Notice that “puzzlement” and “bewilderment” are not on this list. “Cleverness” is not on this list. “Complexity” is not on this list. “Difficulty” is not on this list. The things that magicians most often optimize for — the cleverness of the method, the complexity of the sequence, the difficulty of the technique — are not instinct appeals. They are intellectual appeals. And they are fighting an uphill battle against the audience’s psychology.
This does not mean clever methods and complex sequences are worthless. It means they are invisible to the audience’s instinctive response system. The audience cannot see the method. They cannot evaluate the complexity. They cannot appreciate the difficulty. All of these things exist in the performer’s world, not in the audience’s experience. And since the audience is the only judge that matters, optimizing for them is optimizing for the wrong variable.
How I Applied This to My Own Work
When I internalized Fitzkee’s instinct-versus-intellect framework, I went through my repertoire and asked a painful question about each effect: at the climax, what is the audience responding to? Is it an instinct appeal or an intellectual appeal?
The honest answers were uncomfortable. Most of my effects climaxed with bewilderment. Something impossible happened. The audience was impressed. But the response was cognitive, not visceral. I was consistently delivering mind appeals at the moment when instinct appeals would have been ten times more powerful.
The changes I made were specific and deliberate.
For a mentalism piece that climaxed with a thought revelation, I added music. Not background music — specific, emotionally charged music that swelled at the exact moment of the reveal. The music transformed the climax from a cognitive “how did he know?” to a visceral emotional experience. The impossibility was the same. But the instinct appeal of music combined with the intellectual appeal of bewilderment, and the compound effect was dramatically stronger.
For another piece, I restructured the climax to include a moment of apparent danger. Not real danger — the audience was never at risk. But the perception of danger, the instinctual response to threat, added a layer of visceral engagement that pure bewilderment could not match. The audience gasped not just because something impossible happened, but because something risky happened. Their gasp was instinctive rather than cognitive.
For a third piece, I added comedy at the climax. A laugh line that landed at the exact moment of the magical reveal. The impossibility produced bewilderment. The comedy produced involuntary laughter. And laughter is an instinct response. It happens before you decide to laugh. The combination of bewilderment and involuntary laughter was more powerful than either alone.
The Stacking Principle
The real power of understanding instinct versus intellect is in stacking. When you layer multiple instinct appeals on top of the intellectual appeal of impossibility, the compound effect is explosive.
Imagine a climax that delivers surprise (instinct), beauty (instinct), music (instinct), comedy (instinct), and bewilderment (intellect) simultaneously. Five appeals hitting the audience at the same moment. Four of them bypass the cognitive system entirely and produce involuntary responses. The fifth engages the mind. The result is a response that is part gasp, part laugh, part emotional surge, and part intellectual astonishment — all at once.
This is what the greatest performers in any field achieve at their climactic moments. They do not rely on a single appeal. They stack multiple instinct appeals on top of each other, creating a compound emotional event that overwhelms the audience’s capacity for calm observation and produces an involuntary, visceral, whole-body response.
Think about the greatest magic performances you have ever witnessed. Not the most technically impressive — the most emotionally powerful. The ones that made you feel something in your chest, not just in your head. I would bet that those performances stacked instinct appeals at their climaxes. Music swelled. The visual was beautiful. There was an element of danger or surprise. The performer’s personality was radiating through the moment. And underneath all of that, the impossibility provided the intellectual foundation.
The Puzzle Trap
Fitzkee’s framework also explains why so many magic performances fail to connect emotionally despite being technically excellent. They fall into what I call the puzzle trap.
The puzzle trap is when the audience’s primary experience at the climax is curiosity about the method. “How did they do that?” This is a pure intellectual response. It engages the mind. And while it can be satisfying in a crossword-puzzle sort of way, it does not produce the explosive, involuntary audience responses that define great entertainment.
Puzzlement is not wonder. Puzzlement is cognitive activity — the mind working to solve a problem. Wonder is emotional surrender — the moment when the mind gives up trying to solve the problem and simply experiences the impossibility. And wonder is far closer to an instinct response than puzzlement is.
The performers who avoid the puzzle trap are the ones who make their effects about something bigger than the method. They make them about emotion, about story, about human connection, about beauty, about danger, about laughter. The impossibility is present, but it is not the point. It is the canvas on which the instinct appeals are painted.
I used to think the impossibility was the point. That the audience came to see impossible things, and my job was to deliver impossible things as cleanly and cleverly as possible. Fitzkee disabused me of that notion. The audience comes to be entertained. Impossibility is one tool in the entertainment toolkit. But it is a mind appeal, and mind appeals are the weakest category. If impossibility is all you are offering, you are bringing a knife to a gunfight.
The Practical Test
Here is the test I now apply to every piece in my repertoire: if I removed the magic entirely, would anyone still want to watch this? If the answer is yes — if the comedy is funny, the story is compelling, the music is moving, the personality is engaging, the physical action is dynamic — then the magic is operating in the right context. The instinct appeals are doing the heavy lifting, and the magic is adding an extraordinary dimension to something that is already engaging.
If the answer is no — if without the magic, there is nothing to watch — then the piece is relying entirely on mind appeals. And no matter how clever the method is, no matter how impossible the effect appears, the audience response will be muted. Because you are asking their cognitive system to do all the work, and the cognitive system is slower, weaker, and less reliable than the instinctive one.
This test is humbling. Many of my early effects failed it completely. Without the magic, there was nothing. No personality, no comedy, no emotion, no physical dynamism. Just a guy doing a card trick. And the audience responses reflected exactly that: polite, brief, and forgettable.
The Path Forward
Fitzkee’s instinct-versus-intellect insight is not a condemnation of magic. It is a diagnosis and a prescription. The diagnosis is that most magic performances underperform because they rely too heavily on intellectual appeals. The prescription is to layer instinct appeals — music, comedy, beauty, movement, rhythm, personality, emotion, danger, spectacle — onto the foundation of impossibility.
The impossibility provides the unique selling proposition. No other art form can do what magic does. But the instinct appeals provide the emotional delivery system. They ensure that the impossibility hits the audience in their nervous system, not just in their prefrontal cortex.
When I perform now, the magic is the skeleton. The instinct appeals are the flesh, the skin, the face. The skeleton gives the performance its structure and its unique identity. But the audience does not see the skeleton. They see the face. They respond to the face. They remember the face.
Build your skeleton strong. But never forget that the audience is looking at the face. And the face is made of instinct, not intellect.