I had a conversation with Adam Wilber early in our work together at Vulpine Creations that I still think about regularly. We were reviewing footage of a prototype effect — something we were developing for the magic market — and Adam said something that stopped me cold.
“Stop watching what you’re doing. Watch what they’re seeing.”
He was talking about the video. I had been analyzing my own hand movements, my own timing, my own technique. He wanted me to forget all of that and instead watch the audience’s faces, their body language, the exact moment their expressions changed. He wanted me to experience the effect from their side.
It sounds obvious. It is obvious. And it is also one of the hardest things for any performer to actually do, because your instincts constantly pull you back to your own perspective. What am I doing? Am I doing it right? Is my technique clean? These are the questions that occupy a performer’s mind. But they are the wrong questions. The right questions are: What are they seeing? What are they feeling? What story is their mind constructing right now?
When I later read Dariel Fitzkee’s Showmanship for Magicians, I found this same principle articulated through the lens of one of the greatest entertainers in history: Jack Benny. And Fitzkee’s analysis of Benny’s approach crystallized something that Adam’s comment had started but that I had not fully grasped.
The Benny Principle
Jack Benny was not the funniest comedian of his era. He was not the quickest. He was not the most verbally dexterous. He did not write the sharpest material or deliver the most surprising punchlines. By almost any conventional metric of comedy skill, other performers of his generation outclassed him.
And yet Benny was, by any measure, one of the most successful and beloved entertainers of the twentieth century. His radio show ran for decades. His television show was a cultural institution. He sold out live performances well into his seventies. People did not just laugh at Jack Benny. They loved him. They felt a personal connection to him that transcended entertainment.
Fitzkee identified the reason, and it is disarmingly simple: Benny planned every moment of every show from the spectator’s viewpoint. Not from his own perspective. Not from the writer’s perspective. Not from the perspective of “what would be clever” or “what would showcase my abilities.” From the spectator’s perspective. What will the audience see? What will the audience feel? What will the audience assume? What will the audience want to happen next?
This sounds like common sense. It is not. It is, in practice, extraordinarily rare.
The Default Perspective
Most performers — and I include myself absolutely in this category — default to the performer’s perspective. We build our routines around what we want to do, what we want to show, what we want to demonstrate. We choose effects because we find them interesting. We structure our shows around the logic of our material rather than the logic of the audience’s experience. We practice our technique and evaluate our performance based on how well we executed our plan.
None of this is wrong, exactly. But it misses the fundamental point. The audience does not care about your plan. They do not know your plan. They are having their own experience, constructing their own narrative, feeling their own emotions. And the gap between your plan and their experience is often enormous.
I learned this early in my performing life, at a corporate event in Graz. I had prepared a mentalism routine that I thought was brilliantly structured. The effects built on each other. The techniques were clean. The order was logical. And the audience was politely, quietly, devastatingly bored.
Afterward, I asked a colleague who had been in the audience what went wrong. She said, “I kept waiting for you to talk to us. You were doing things TO us, but you were not doing things WITH us.”
She was describing the performer’s perspective problem. From my side, the routine was building beautifully. From their side, it was a series of demonstrations happening at them. I was executing my plan. They were waiting for an experience.
What Benny Actually Did
Fitzkee describes Benny’s approach in practical terms, and three elements stand out.
First, Benny consistently made himself the object of the comedy rather than the source of it. In most comedy, the performer is the one being clever. In Benny’s comedy, the performer was the one being foolish. The jokes were on him. His character was vain, cheap, a terrible violin player, easily flustered, perpetually the victim of circumstances. The audience was not admiring his cleverness. They were enjoying his predicament.
Why does this represent audience-first thinking? Because from the spectator’s viewpoint, being invited to laugh at someone is more comfortable and more pleasurable than being asked to admire someone. Admiration creates distance. Laughter at a willing target creates intimacy. Benny understood that the audience’s experience was enhanced when they felt superior to the performer rather than inferior to him.
Second, Benny used silence strategically, not as a technique but as a gift to the audience. His famous pauses — the long looks, the slow reactions, the beats where he simply stood and let the audience process — were not displays of timing skill. They were moments where Benny stepped back and let the audience have their experience. In those silences, the audience was not waiting for Benny. They were laughing, or anticipating, or recognizing themselves in the situation. Benny’s pauses were spaces where the audience’s experience could fully develop before being interrupted by the next moment.
From the performer’s perspective, silence is terrifying. It feels like nothing is happening. You want to fill it, to keep the momentum going, to control the moment. But from the spectator’s perspective, silence is where the experience lives. It is where they process what just happened, where they construct meaning, where they form the emotional response that will make the next moment land harder.
Third, Benny maintained perfect consistency of character. His audience always knew who he was. They did not have to figure out his persona or adjust to changes in his approach. He was the same Jack Benny every time — vain, cheap, flustered, lovable. This consistency is not a performer’s consideration. It is a spectator’s consideration. From the performer’s perspective, consistency might feel limiting. From the spectator’s perspective, consistency creates comfort, predictability, and the deepening of relationship that only comes from familiarity.
Applying the Benny Principle to Magic
When I started deliberately trying to plan my performances from the spectator’s viewpoint, I discovered that it required a complete rethinking of how I evaluate my own work.
Instead of asking “Was my technique clean?” I started asking “Did they notice my technique at all?” If they did not, the technique was clean enough. If they did, it was not clean enough. But the evaluation was about their experience, not my execution.
Instead of asking “Did the effect work?” I started asking “What did they feel when the effect happened?” An effect can work perfectly and produce no emotional response. The cards can be in the right order, the prediction can match, the object can appear in the impossible location — and the audience can respond with a polite nod rather than a gasp. From the performer’s perspective, the effect worked. From the spectator’s perspective, nothing happened.
Instead of asking “Did I get through my material?” I started asking “Did they want more when I finished?” This reframe is Fitzkee’s golden rule of economy: not too much, but just a bit too little. Leave them wanting more. From the performer’s perspective, finishing all your material feels like success. From the spectator’s perspective, wanting more feels like a great show.
The Two Viewpoints in Real Time
The hardest part of audience-first thinking is that you have to do it in real time, during the performance, while simultaneously executing your material. This is the dual-attention problem that every performer faces, and it is why most performers default to their own perspective — it is simply easier to think about what you are doing than to think about what they are experiencing.
But the performers I admire most seem to do both effortlessly. They are technically executing their material while simultaneously monitoring the audience’s experience and adjusting in real time. They notice when attention drifts and they recapture it. They notice when a moment needs more space and they let it breathe. They notice when the audience is ahead of them and they accelerate. They notice when the audience is behind them and they slow down.
This is what Greg Dean describes as the comedian-audience feedback loop — the African drumming metaphor where neither the dancer nor the drummer is in charge. The comedian follows the audience, and the audience follows the comedian. Nobody leads. They respond to each other in real time.
Benny was reportedly masterful at this. He could feel the audience’s rhythm and adjust his timing to match it. His pauses were not pre-timed. They were responsive. He waited until the audience was ready for the next moment, and then he delivered it. Not a second before. Not a second after. Exactly when the audience needed it.
The Practical Shift
Here is what I do differently now, concretely.
When I am developing new material, I storyboard the audience’s experience, not my own. I write out what the audience will see, think, feel, and assume at each moment. Not what I will do. What they will experience. This forces me to think about pacing from their perspective, about information delivery from their perspective, about emotional beats from their perspective.
When I rehearse, I record video and watch it once for my performance and then watch it again imagining I am seeing it for the first time. The second viewing is harder and more valuable. It reveals moments where I am doing things that make sense to me but mean nothing to the audience. Moments where I am moving through material at a pace that works for someone who knows what is coming but not for someone who does not.
When I perform, I spend at least half of my attention on the audience. Not on what I am doing with my hands or my props. On what they are doing with their faces and their bodies. Are they leaning in? Leaning back? Looking at me? Looking at each other? Laughing? Quiet? Confused? Anticipating? Each of these responses tells me something about their experience, and each response is an invitation to adjust.
The Consultant Parallel
I notice the same principle in my consulting work, and the parallel is instructive. The best presentations I have seen — and the best I have given — are built from the client’s perspective, not the consultant’s. What does the client need to understand? What do they already know? What are they worried about? What will surprise them? What will bore them? The presentation that answers these questions from the client’s viewpoint is always more effective than the presentation that follows the consultant’s own logic.
The mistake is the same in both domains. The consultant who presents their analysis in the order they conducted it is making a performer’s perspective error. The analysis unfolded in a sequence that made sense for the analyst. But the client does not need to relive the analyst’s journey. The client needs to arrive at understanding as efficiently and compellingly as possible. The spectator’s viewpoint demands a different structure than the performer’s process.
Why This Is So Hard
I want to be honest about how difficult this is. Audience-first thinking is not a technique you learn and then possess. It is a discipline you practice and frequently fail at. Every performance, I catch myself slipping back into the performer’s perspective. I notice that I am thinking about my next move rather than their current experience. I notice that I am evaluating my own execution rather than monitoring their response. I notice that I am performing my plan rather than responding to their moment.
The pull of the performer’s perspective is gravitational. It takes constant, deliberate effort to resist it. And even the best performers, I suspect, only partially succeed. The difference between a good performer and a great one is not that the great one always thinks from the audience’s viewpoint. It is that the great one notices more quickly when they have stopped doing so, and corrects course faster.
Benny made it look effortless. But Fitzkee, who studied him carefully, believed it was the result of relentless, deliberate planning and decades of practice. Benny did not stumble into audience-first thinking. He chose it, built his entire approach around it, and refined it over a lifetime.
That is the standard. And even if I never reach it, the attempt — the daily, show-by-show effort to see the performance from their side of the stage — makes everything I do better. Every time I catch myself thinking about what I am doing and redirect my attention to what they are experiencing, the show improves.
It is the simplest principle in all of performance theory. And the hardest one to live by.
Stop watching what you are doing. Watch what they are seeing.