I was in a hotel room in Vienna, late at night, doing two things simultaneously that I had never thought of as related: watching a comedy masterclass on my laptop and shuffling a deck of cards. The comedy lesson was Greg Dean’s Step by Step to Stand-Up Comedy, which I had picked up because several magicians I respect had mentioned that studying comedy structure improved their magic. The card shuffling was just habit. I shuffle when I think. My hands need to be busy.
Dean was explaining his core framework — the setup-punch mechanism, the target assumption, the reinterpretation. And somewhere between his third example and his fourth, my hands stopped shuffling and I just sat there, staring at the screen, because I realized he was describing the same architecture that makes magic work.
Not metaphorically. Not approximately. The same architecture. The same cognitive mechanism. The same exploit of the same human tendency.
Jokes and magic tricks are built the same way. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
The Setup Creates the Assumption
Dean’s framework begins with the setup. The setup is the part of the joke that communicates information and, crucially, creates a specific expectation in the audience’s mind. Dean calls this expectation the “target assumption.” The setup does not tell the audience what to think. It presents information that the audience processes through their own associations, experiences, and habits of mind, and from that processing, an assumption emerges.
The assumption is not stated. It is constructed by the audience themselves. And that construction process is involuntary. Human minds are association machines. We hear information and we immediately begin building a narrative around it. We fill in gaps. We predict outcomes. We assume we know where things are going. Dean’s insight is that the comedian’s job is to know exactly what assumption the audience will build, because the comedy depends on that assumption being wrong.
Now think about what happens at the beginning of a magic effect. The performer shows you a situation — a deck of cards, a sealed envelope, a set of cups. The situation is presented clearly, and your mind immediately begins building a narrative. You process the information through your own experience. You assume you understand the conditions. You believe you know what is possible and what is not possible within the framework you have been shown.
This is the target assumption in magic. The audience looks at the situation and constructs a mental model of what is happening. That model is the magician’s raw material, just as the target assumption is the comedian’s raw material. And in both cases, the power of what follows depends entirely on how firmly the audience has committed to their assumption before it is shattered.
The Punch Reveals the Reinterpretation
Dean’s second principle is that the punch does not simply surprise the audience. The punch reveals a second meaning — a “reinterpretation” — that was available in the setup all along but was hidden behind the target assumption. The audience built Story A from the setup. The punch reveals that Story B was the actual meaning. And the comedy comes not from randomness but from the specific relationship between the two stories.
This is the connector concept. There is an element in the setup that the audience interpreted one way, but that can also be interpreted in a completely different way. The punch activates the second interpretation. The audience’s brain has to rapidly shift from one narrative to another, and the jolt of that shift is experienced as laughter.
Now think about the climax of a magic effect. Throughout the routine, the audience has built a mental model of what is possible. They have tracked the cards, watched the moves, noted the conditions. They believe they understand the situation. And then the reveal shows them something that their mental model says is impossible. The card is in a location it should not be. The prediction matches perfectly. The object has changed in a way that contradicts everything they thought they knew.
What has happened? The same thing that happens in a joke. The audience built one story from the available information. The reveal shows them a different story was operating the entire time. The connector — the element that could be interpreted two ways — was present from the beginning, but the audience’s assumption prevented them from seeing the alternative interpretation.
The jolt of the shift from one story to another is experienced differently — as laughter in comedy, as astonishment in magic — but the underlying cognitive mechanism is identical. In both cases, the audience’s own assumptions are used against them. In both cases, the power of the moment depends on how firmly those assumptions were held. And in both cases, the experience is pleasurable specifically because the audience realizes they were wrong.
The First Story / Second Story Framework
Dean formalizes this with his First Story / Second Story concept, and this is where the parallel to magic becomes almost eerie.
The First Story is the narrative the audience builds from the setup. It is the obvious interpretation, the path of least resistance, the story that would be true if the world worked the way it usually works. The audience does not consciously choose to build the First Story. They build it automatically, because human minds are narrative machines that cannot help constructing explanations from available data.
The Second Story is the hidden narrative that was running underneath all along. It uses the same elements as the First Story but arranges them differently. The Second Story only becomes visible when the punch reveals it. And once it is visible, the audience realizes that the Second Story actually explains the setup better than the First Story did. The reinterpretation is not just surprising — it is, in retrospect, the more accurate version.
This is exactly what a well-designed magic effect does. The audience watches the routine and builds a First Story — their understanding of what is happening, what is possible, what they have seen. The climax reveals a Second Story — one that uses the same elements but arranges them in a way the audience did not consider. And the Second Story, the magical version, becomes the more vivid and memorable narrative, even though the audience knows intellectually that it cannot be accurate.
The difference is that in comedy, the audience accepts the Second Story as the truth and laughs. In magic, the audience cannot accept the Second Story as the truth and experiences wonder instead. But the architecture is the same.
What This Means for Construction
Once I understood this parallel, it changed how I approach building both comedy moments and magic routines. The principle is the same: control the First Story, and the Second Story takes care of itself.
If the First Story is weak — if the audience’s assumptions are vague, uncommitted, or easily revised — then the reveal has no power. This is true in both domains. A joke with a weak setup produces a weak laugh because the target assumption was never firmly established. A magic effect with a weak premise produces a weak reaction because the audience never fully committed to their understanding of what was possible.
Conversely, if the First Story is strong — if the audience is deeply committed to their assumption, if they feel certain they understand the situation — then the reveal is devastating. A joke where the setup is so natural and convincing that the audience is completely locked into the target assumption produces explosive laughter when the reinterpretation arrives. A magic effect where the conditions seem absolutely fair and the audience feels certain they have tracked everything produces genuine astonishment when the impossible happens.
This gives you a clear construction principle: spend your energy on the setup, not the reveal. The reveal is just the moment where the Second Story becomes visible. The real work is in making the First Story irresistible.
The Connector Is Everything
Dean identifies the connector as the pivot point between the two stories — the element that can be interpreted in at least two ways. In comedy, the connector is usually a word or phrase with a double meaning. In magic, the connector is the element of the method that exists in plain sight but is interpreted by the audience as something innocent.
I find this concept endlessly useful because it provides a diagnostic tool for both comedy and magic. When something is not working — when a joke is flat or an effect is not getting the reaction it should — the problem is almost always the connector. Either the connector is too obvious (the audience sees the Second Story too early), or the connector is too obscure (the audience cannot link the reveal back to the setup), or the connector does not have a genuine dual interpretation (the reinterpretation feels random rather than inevitable).
The best connectors — in both comedy and magic — produce a specific audience response: the retrospective “of course.” After the reveal, the audience looks back at the setup and realizes that the Second Story was hiding in plain sight the entire time. “Of course that is what that meant.” “Of course that is where it was going.” The “of course” is the hallmark of a well-constructed piece, whether it is a joke or a trick.
Practical Crossover
Understanding this parallel has made me better at both comedy and magic construction, and here is the specific way it has changed my process.
When I am building a comedy moment for a keynote, I now think like a magician. I ask: what is the First Story the audience will build? How firmly will they commit to it? And what is the Second Story I am hiding behind that assumption? If the First Story is not clear and convincing, I work on the setup before I work on the punchline. Just as I would work on the premise and conditions of a magic effect before worrying about the climax.
When I am building a magic routine, I now think like a comedian. I ask: what is the target assumption? What does the audience think is happening? And how can I make the reveal feel not just surprising but specifically like a reinterpretation of something they already saw? The best magic effects, like the best jokes, do not feel random. They feel like the same information arranged in a way the audience did not anticipate.
There is a mentalism piece I do in keynotes where I make a prediction that seems to go wrong and then turns out to be correct in a way the audience did not expect. The comedy comes from the apparent failure — the First Story the audience builds is that I have messed up. The astonishment comes from the reveal — the Second Story is that the apparent failure was itself part of the design. The structure is identical to a joke: setup creates target assumption, punch reveals reinterpretation. But the emotional journey goes from comedy to astonishment rather than from setup to laughter.
The Deeper Lesson
What I find most profound about this parallel is what it reveals about how human minds work. We are creatures who cannot help building narratives from available data. We see information and we construct explanations. We watch a situation unfold and we project outcomes. We hear a setup and we assume we know the punchline. We watch a magician show us a card and we assume we know where it is going.
Both comedy and magic exploit this same tendency. Both rely on the audience’s narrative-building instinct. Both use the audience’s own assumptions as the raw material for surprise. And both produce pleasure specifically because the surprise reveals that our assumptions were wrong in a satisfying way.
This is why the best comedians and the best magicians have more in common with each other than they do with other performers in their respective fields. They are both working with the same psychological mechanism. They are both constructing experiences that exploit the gap between what the audience assumes and what turns out to be true. They are both, at the most fundamental level, in the business of controlled reinterpretation.
Dean wrote his comedy framework in the language of jokes. Fitzkee wrote his in the language of magic. But they were describing the same territory. Mapped from different directions, but the landscape is identical.
Setup, assumption, reinterpretation. Whether it produces a laugh or a gasp depends on the performer. But the architecture is always, always the same.