I was performing at a corporate event in Salzburg — a product launch for about a hundred and fifty people — and something went sideways during a mentalism routine. Not the kind of thing the audience would notice, but the kind of thing that threw my internal rhythm off. I stumbled over a line. I paused a beat too long. And in that pause, instead of freezing, I said something self-deprecating about my own confidence, something about how my business presentations are usually smoother than my magic, and the room erupted.
They laughed harder at that throwaway moment than they had at anything in the previous five minutes.
Afterward, sitting in the hotel bar with a notebook, I tried to figure out what had happened. The line was not particularly clever. It was not a polished joke. But it worked, powerfully. And as I turned it over in my mind, I realized it mapped perfectly to a framework I had been reading about in one of the oldest performance theory books in magic: Dariel Fitzkee’s Showmanship for Magicians, first published in 1943.
Fitzkee had cataloged twenty-four comedy situations. Not jokes. Not punchlines. Situations — specific predicaments, dynamics, and circumstances that reliably produce laughter. He did this decades before modern comedy theory existed, before Greg Dean systematized joke structure, before Judy Carter published her comedy bibles, before any of the frameworks I have spent the last several years studying. And what startled me was how accurate his list still is.
The List That Predates Everything
Fitzkee was not a comedian. He was a magician, writer, and producer who spent years studying what made popular entertainment work — not just magic, but film, vaudeville, nightclubs, radio. He reverse-engineered why audiences responded to certain performers and not others, and in his chapter on comedy, he laid out twenty-four situations that he argued would reliably produce laughter regardless of era, culture, or context.
Here they are, in his original categories:
- Physical difficulty bringing distress or inferiority
- Mental difficulty bringing distress or inferiority
- Exaggeration of importance, size, or quality
- Inconsistency in association of persons or things
- Voluntary or involuntary misunderstanding
- Mistake of some kind
- Insult — attempting, avenging, or preventing one
- Imitation of a person or thing
- Repetition of a statement, condition, or saying
- Burden inflicted upon someone
- Loss of control — temper, actions, speech, a machine, or a person
- Failure of a plan, hope, skill, or expectation at the crucial moment
- Expose of a person or thing
- Ejection — struggle to avoid being evicted, or actually being evicted
- Revolt or reversal — the worm turns
- Trouble — threatened misfortune or mishap
- Struggle or assault to achieve an objective
- Meekly humbling oneself to gain something
- Ridicule to disarm, demoralize, or defeat
- Victimizing someone to gain something
- Resemblance between totally different things
- Something absurd that is actually true
- Just reward — punishment of an unsympathetic character
- Destruction of something treasured
When I first read through this list, I did what any consultant would do: I tested it against reality. I went through every comedy moment I could remember from my own performances, from keynotes I had attended, from films, from stand-up specials. And the unsettling thing was that every single one of them mapped to at least one of Fitzkee’s twenty-four situations. Often to more than one.
Why the List Works
The reason this taxonomy has survived for eighty years is that it is not built on the mechanics of joke-telling. It is built on the mechanics of human psychology. Fitzkee was not cataloging comedy techniques. He was cataloging the situations in which human beings reliably find things funny.
Take situation number one: physical difficulty bringing distress or inferiority. Why is this funny? Because watching someone struggle physically — tripping, fumbling, trying to carry too many things — activates something deep in our social wiring. We recognize the difficulty. We feel a flash of empathy. And then, because we are not the ones experiencing the difficulty, our relief expresses itself as laughter. This is the same mechanism that makes physical comedy work across every culture. A person slipping on a banana peel is not funny because the banana peel is clever. It is funny because watching someone lose their physical dignity in a harmless way triggers a hard-wired human response.
Or take situation number four: inconsistency in association. Why is it funny when a tiny person drives an enormous truck, or when a very serious person has a ridiculous ringtone, or when a dignified CEO turns out to be terrified of spiders? Because the gap between what we expect and what we encounter creates a cognitive jolt. Our brains process incongruity as a kind of error signal, and when the error is harmless, we laugh.
Or situation number twelve: failure at the crucial moment. This is the comedy of the missed free throw, the wedding toast that goes wrong, the magician whose trick does not work. The comedy comes from the contrast between the stakes of the moment and the inability to deliver. We have all been in situations where we needed to perform and could not. The spectator subconsciously places themselves in that predicament, and the recognition produces laughter.
Fitzkee understood that these responses are not learned. They are not cultural fashions that come and go. They are built into our neural architecture. That is why his list, written during World War II, still describes every comedy moment you see on Netflix today.
The Magician’s Advantage
What struck me most about Fitzkee’s list was how many of these situations are naturally available to a magician. Not all comedy performers have access to all twenty-four, but a magician has a built-in advantage because the performance context itself creates several of them automatically.
Situation sixteen — trouble, threatened misfortune or mishap — is built into any routine where something appears to go wrong. The audience does not know whether it is real or planned, and that ambiguity is fertile ground for comedy.
Situation twelve — failure at the crucial moment — is every sucker trick ever designed. The magician sets up an impossible promise, appears to fail, and the comedy comes from the gap between the grandeur of the claim and the apparent inability to deliver.
Situation fifteen — revolt or reversal — is the moment the volunteer outsmarts the performer, or appears to. The worm turns. The audience delights because they identify with the underdog, and in a magic show, the volunteer is always the underdog.
Situation eleven — loss of control — happens every time the performer pretends to lose control of a prop, a situation, or a volunteer. The audience loves watching a confident person scramble.
I started going through my own routines and tagging every moment against the twenty-four situations. It was revealing. The moments that consistently got the biggest laughs mapped to three or four of these situations simultaneously. The moments that felt flat usually mapped to none.
Using the List as a Diagnostic Tool
Here is where this becomes practically useful, not just intellectually interesting. When a routine or a moment is not getting the reaction I want, I now go to the list. I ask: which of these twenty-four situations am I in? And if the answer is none, I know why it is not working.
I had a bit in my keynote where I would set up a prediction effect with a lot of buildup. The moment was supposed to be dramatic, but the buildup always felt heavy. People were attentive but not engaged. When I mapped it against the list, I realized I was in none of the twenty-four comedy situations. I was in a purely intellectual space — anticipation of a puzzle being solved. And puzzles, as Fitzkee repeatedly argues, appeal to the mind, not the instincts. Mind appeals require thought. Instinct appeals provoke involuntary reactions.
So I added a moment of situation number six — a mistake. A small, believable mistake in the middle of the buildup. Something that made me look briefly uncertain. The room immediately changed. People leaned forward. They smiled. And when the prediction turned out to be correct despite the apparent mistake, the reaction was three times bigger than it had been before.
One situation from the list. One moment of vulnerability. The whole dynamic shifted.
The Modern Comedy Theory Connection
What fascinates me is how cleanly Fitzkee’s 1943 taxonomy maps to contemporary comedy theory. Greg Dean’s setup-punch framework, Judy Carter’s HWSS attitude words, Ralphie May’s approach to building comprehensive bits — all of them, when you break them down, are working with the same raw materials Fitzkee cataloged.
Dean’s concept of the target assumption, for instance, is essentially a formalized version of situations four and five — inconsistency and misunderstanding. The audience assumes one meaning, and the punch reveals another. The comedy comes from the gap between expectation and reality.
Carter’s emphasis on authenticity and personal experience maps directly to Fitzkee’s argument that comedy situations must be within the common experience of the audience. Both are saying the same thing: the situation has to be one the audience can recognize, relate to, and imagine themselves in.
Ralphie May’s approach to building the quintessential bit — covering a topic from every possible angle — is essentially the strategy of layering multiple comedy situations on top of each other. His legendary Siegfried & Roy bit worked the audience’s perspective (situation twelve — failure), the tiger’s perspective (situation fifteen — revolt), the performers’ perspective (situation sixteen — trouble), and then tied them together with callbacks. Multiple situations, one topic, comprehensive coverage.
Fitzkee was mapping the same territory eighty years earlier. He just did it without the benefit of a modern comedy vocabulary.
How I Use This in Practice
I keep a simplified version of the twenty-four situations in a note on my phone. When I am developing new material — whether for a magic routine or for a keynote section — I review the list and ask which situations are present. If I can identify at least two, I know the moment has comedy potential. If I can find three or more, I know it will land.
More importantly, when I am watching other performers, I use the list to decode why their comedy moments work. It is like having X-ray vision for humor. You stop seeing funny moments as mysterious or innate talent and start seeing them as the deliberate or instinctive deployment of specific situational dynamics.
Last month I was at a magic convention in Vienna, watching a close-up performer whose act was genuinely hilarious. Every thirty seconds, the audience was laughing. But he was not telling jokes. He was not doing traditional comedy patter. What he was doing, I realized, was cycling through Fitzkee’s situations like a playlist. Situation three (exaggeration). Situation eleven (loss of control). Situation six (mistake). Situation fifteen (reversal). Back to three. Then nine (repetition). He was not consciously thinking about a list from 1943. But he was working with the same fundamental dynamics.
The Limits of the List
I do not want to oversell this. A taxonomy is a diagnostic tool, not a creative engine. Knowing the twenty-four situations will not make you funny any more than knowing the periodic table will make you a chemist. What it will do is give you a language for understanding why certain moments work and others do not. It will give you a framework for troubleshooting flat material. And it will give you a menu of options when you are building new moments into your routines.
The comedy itself still has to come from your personality, your character, your relationship with the audience, and your willingness to be genuinely present in the moment. But having a map of the territory makes it much easier to navigate.
The Eighty-Year Validation
What I keep coming back to is this: Fitzkee wrote his taxonomy in 1943. No university comedy programs existed. No YouTube comedy masterclasses. No podcasts about joke structure. He observed, he analyzed, he categorized. And eighty years later, every comedy class, every stand-up manual, every performer working a room is still working with the same twenty-four situations.
That kind of longevity is not an accident. It is evidence that he found something real. Not a fashion, not a trend, but a map of the actual territory of human laughter.
I think about this every time I stand in front of an audience. The situations that make people laugh have not changed in eighty years. They have not changed in eight hundred. They are built into us. And the performer who understands them — who can recognize them, deploy them, and layer them — has a significant advantage over the performer who is simply hoping to be naturally funny.
Hope is not a strategy. And thanks to a magician writing in the middle of the last century, it does not have to be.