There is a moment I return to whenever I think about why people laugh. It happened during one of my earliest corporate performances, at a company retreat near Graz. I was performing a card routine, and I dropped a card. Not deliberately. Not as part of a planned moment. I just dropped it. It fell off the table, spun on the floor, and came to rest face-up next to the shoe of a woman in the front row.
The room laughed. Not politely. Not nervously. They laughed with genuine delight.
I picked up the card, said something about how my strategy consulting skills clearly transfer better than my dexterity, and continued. But afterward, I kept thinking about that laugh. It was bigger than any planned joke I had delivered that evening. It was warmer, more connected, more real. And I could not figure out why.
Then I found the answer in Dariel Fitzkee’s Showmanship for Magicians, in a passage where he identifies the core mechanism behind all laughter. Fitzkee wrote: “We find comedy in the difficulties, shortcomings, and inconsistencies of OTHER PEOPLE, creatures, and things.”
Three triggers. Difficulties. Shortcomings. Inconsistencies. Everything that makes us laugh, Fitzkee argued, can be traced back to one or more of these three.
The First Trigger: Difficulties
When someone struggles with something — physically, mentally, practically — we laugh. Not out of cruelty, but out of recognition. We have all struggled. We have all fumbled with a jammed umbrella, fought with a parking meter, or tried to open a package that refused to cooperate. When we see someone else in that position, something in us responds.
The key word in Fitzkee’s formulation is “other.” We find comedy in the difficulties of OTHER people. We never laugh at ourselves in the moment of struggle — only later, when enough time has passed that we can view ourselves as someone else. In the moment, difficulty is frustrating, humiliating, sometimes painful. But viewed from the outside, from a safe distance, difficulty is comedy.
This is why physical comedy is universal. A person trying to carry too many groceries. A person whose chair keeps rolling away. A person wrestling with a fitted sheet. The comedy does not come from cleverness or wordplay. It comes from the audience watching a human being encounter a difficulty that they themselves have encountered, and recognizing the shared experience from a position of safety.
For a magician, this is enormously useful. Any moment in a routine where you appear to struggle — genuinely or performatively — activates this trigger. The key word is “appear.” Fitzkee is not advocating that you actually lose control. He is pointing out that the appearance of difficulty, managed carefully, is one of the most reliable comedy tools available.
I think about my dropped card in Graz. The audience laughed because they saw a person — me, the supposed expert — encounter a difficulty. The gap between “this person is supposed to be skilled” and “this person just dropped a card” triggered the response. And because the difficulty was harmless and brief, the response was warm rather than uncomfortable.
The Second Trigger: Shortcomings
Shortcomings are subtly different from difficulties. A difficulty is a situation — something external that causes struggle. A shortcoming is internal — a flaw, a weakness, a gap in ability or knowledge that the person cannot help.
When we perceive shortcomings in others, we laugh because of the recognition. Every human being has shortcomings. We are all slightly ridiculous in one way or another. When a performer reveals a shortcoming — being forgetful, being easily distracted, being overly confident about something they are clearly not good at — the audience responds because they see themselves. Not literally, but emotionally. The laughter says, “I know that feeling. I have that same flaw.”
This is why self-deprecating humor is so reliable. When a performer acknowledges their own shortcoming, they are giving the audience permission to find it funny. They are saying, “I know this about myself, and I am okay with you laughing at it.” That permission is crucial. Without it, laughing at someone’s shortcoming feels mean. With it, the laughter becomes connection.
In my keynote work, I have learned to use this deliberately. I am a strategy consultant who does magic. That combination is inherently full of shortcomings to play with. I can admit that my sleight-of-hand practice started in hotel rooms because I could not bring a guitar on business trips — which reveals a shortcoming (my lack of musical portability) in a way that makes people smile. I can talk about my early attempts at performing where I was so focused on the moves that I forgot to actually talk to the audience — a shortcoming that every presenter in the room recognizes.
The shortcoming does not diminish me. It humanizes me. And that humanization is the gateway to laughter.
The Third Trigger: Inconsistencies
Inconsistency is perhaps the most intellectually interesting of the three triggers. An inconsistency is a gap between two things that should match but do not. Between what someone says and what they do. Between how someone looks and how they behave. Between what is expected and what actually happens.
Fitzkee understood that inconsistency produces comedy because our brains are pattern-matching machines. We are constantly comparing inputs against expectations, and when the comparison produces a mismatch, we experience a cognitive jolt. If the mismatch is threatening, we feel fear. If it is confusing, we feel puzzlement. But if it is harmless and recognizable, we feel amusement.
A very large person speaking in a very high voice. A very serious person doing something very silly. A formal dinner disrupted by an informal event. A child giving adult advice. An expert failing at something simple. All of these are inconsistencies, and all of them produce laughter.
For a magician, inconsistency is perhaps the richest comedy territory of all. The entire premise of magic performance contains an inconsistency: here is a person who appears to do impossible things, but who is otherwise completely ordinary. The gap between “magical powers” and “regular person” is inherently funny if you play it right. When I set up a grand prediction and then admit I had to check my notes three times before the show, the inconsistency between the grandiosity of the claim and the ordinariness of the preparation produces a laugh.
How the Three Triggers Interact
The real power of Fitzkee’s framework is not in any single trigger but in the way they combine. The strongest comedy moments usually involve two or all three triggers simultaneously.
Consider the classic magic comedy situation: the trick that appears to go wrong. The magician promises something amazing. The effect apparently fails. The magician scrambles. This moment activates all three triggers at once. Difficulty — the magician is visibly struggling. Shortcoming — the magician’s skill has apparently failed them. Inconsistency — the person who claimed to have extraordinary abilities is now unable to deliver the most basic result.
When all three fire at once, the laughter is explosive. And when the magician then resolves the situation — revealing that the apparent failure was the setup for something even better — the audience experiences relief, surprise, and admiration simultaneously. The comedy gives way to astonishment, and the overall experience is far more powerful than either comedy or astonishment alone.
This is why Fitzkee wrote that “there is no more helpless performer than a magician whose tricks have gone wrong. And nothing delights an audience more than seeing a wise guy magician get into a jam.” He was describing the intersection of all three triggers.
The Important Qualification
There is a critical qualification that Fitzkee makes and that I think is easily overlooked: we laugh at the difficulties, shortcomings, and inconsistencies of OTHERS. Not ourselves. Not in the moment.
This distinction matters for performance because it tells you something about the audience’s perspective. When you are on stage and something goes wrong, you are experiencing difficulty. You are not laughing. The audience is laughing because they are observing your difficulty from a position of safety. The comedy is in the distance between their experience and yours.
This means that the performer who gets flustered, who becomes visibly upset, who breaks character and shows genuine distress — that performer is not creating comedy. They are creating discomfort. The audience’s laughter depends on the sense that the difficulty is manageable, that the shortcoming is harmless, that the inconsistency is playful rather than threatening.
The best comedy performers — and Fitzkee uses Jack Benny as his exemplar — maintain a composed relationship with their own difficulties. Benny’s genius was that he could acknowledge the joke was on him without ever appearing truly wounded. He made himself the target, but he was always in on it. The audience knew he was okay, and that knowledge gave them permission to laugh freely.
Applying This to My Own Work
When I started thinking about my performances through the lens of difficulties, shortcomings, and inconsistencies, two things changed.
First, I stopped trying to be funny and started trying to create comedy situations. Those are very different activities. Trying to be funny puts pressure on individual lines and individual moments. Creating comedy situations means arranging circumstances so that the comedy emerges naturally from the dynamic. Instead of writing a joke, I design a moment where I am in a difficulty, or where a shortcoming is revealed, or where an inconsistency becomes visible. The laughter comes from the situation, not from the cleverness of my words.
Second, I started noticing how many natural comedy opportunities I was throwing away. Every performance has moments of genuine difficulty — a prop that is slow to set up, a volunteer who does something unexpected, a moment where the technology hiccups. In the past, I would power through these moments, trying to get back to my planned material as quickly as possible. Now I recognize them as gifts. A genuine difficulty is the most authentic comedy trigger available, because the audience can tell it is real. And real triggers produce bigger laughs than manufactured ones.
There was a show in Linz where the wireless connection for a presentation screen dropped out during a mentalism piece. The screen went dark. I was mid-routine. Instead of panicking, I looked at the screen, looked at the audience, and said, “Well, apparently even technology can read minds — it knew I was about to embarrass someone and decided to protect them.” The room laughed. Then I continued the effect without the screen, making it work as a purely live interaction. The technical failure — a genuine difficulty — produced a comedy moment that I could never have scripted, and the recovery made the overall experience more memorable than the planned version.
Why This Framework Survives
Fitzkee’s three triggers have survived because they are not about style, fashion, or cultural context. They are about the structure of human perception and social cognition. We laugh at difficulties because we are wired to recognize struggle. We laugh at shortcomings because we are wired to detect flaws. We laugh at inconsistencies because we are wired to notice when patterns break.
These are not comedy techniques. They are human universals. And any performer who understands them — truly understands them, not as abstract theory but as practical tools — has a significant advantage. You stop hoping to be funny and start engineering situations where laughter is the natural, inevitable, almost unavoidable response.
I dropped a card in Graz, and a room full of strangers laughed with warmth and delight. That laughter was not random. It was not luck. It was the predictable result of a difficulty becoming visible to an audience from a position of safety. Fitzkee could have told me exactly why it worked. He wrote the explanation eight decades ago.
The triggers have not changed. They never will. Difficulties, shortcomings, and inconsistencies. Three words. A lifetime of comedy material.