I was booked for two performances on the same Saturday in Vienna. The first was an afternoon family event at a cultural center — parents, grandparents, children of all ages, a few teenagers glued to their phones. The second was an evening corporate event for a financial services firm — forty partners and senior associates, sharp suits, expensive watches, the kind of people who analyze everything for a living.
Same city. Same performer. Same day. Completely different shows.
Not just different material — different energy, different pacing, different language, different relationship with the audience. What worked brilliantly at the family event would have bombed at the corporate event, and vice versa. A colorful, energetic effect with visual comedy that made the children shriek with laughter would have felt juvenile to the financial partners. A subtle mentalism piece that held the corporate audience in rapt silence would have lost the children in about eight seconds.
I knew this intuitively, but when I read Fitzkee’s Showmanship for Magicians and found his taxonomy of eleven audience types, I realized he had formalized something most performers only understand through painful trial and error. He had identified eleven distinct categories of audience, each with its own psychology, its own preferences, and its own requirements. And he had done it with a specificity that I found immediately useful.
The Eleven Types
Here is Fitzkee’s taxonomy, as I understand it and as I have experienced it through my own performances.
Type One: The Single Individual. One person. No crowd energy. No social dynamics. Just you and them, face to face. Fitzkee prescribes: natural, friendly, intimate. Nothing theatrical. The performance should feel like a conversation, not a show. This is the hardest audience situation (I will write about this separately) because every reaction has to be genuine — there is no crowd to hide in and no social pressure to applaud.
Type Two: The Small Informal Group. A handful of people at a cocktail party, a dinner table, a casual gathering. Fitzkee’s advice: appear spontaneous, even though you are carefully rehearsed. This group does not want to feel like they are watching a performance. They want to feel like magic is happening naturally, arising from the social situation itself. The most dangerous condition for a magician, Fitzkee warns, because the informality makes the gap between performance and conversation very narrow.
Type Three: The Family Audience. A mix of adults and children, typically in a relaxed setting. Fitzkee prescribes: relaxed pace, comedy effects, classic visual magic. Avoid mental effects, which bore children. The challenge is entertaining adults without losing children and entertaining children without condescending to adults. I have found that the sweet spot is effects with visual spectacle and physical comedy — things the children respond to viscerally and the adults appreciate for their craft.
Type Four: Mixed Adults of Average Intelligence. This is the broadest category and, for most performers, the most common audience. Corporate events, community gatherings, charity functions. Fitzkee advises: faster routine, smarter approach, original angles. Mental effects are effective here because the audience is engaged enough to follow the premise and invested enough to care about the outcome.
Type Five: Mixed Adults of Exceptional Intelligence. Academics, senior executives, specialized professionals. Fitzkee notes that mental effects and themes of the supernatural or psychological are “sensational” with this group. The challenge is breaking through their initial reserve. These audiences are slow to react openly but, once engaged, are deeply responsive. They will not laugh politely at weak material, but they will give you their complete attention if your material respects their intelligence.
Type Six: The Drinking Audience. Fitzkee prescribes: fast delivery, smart lines, broad effects, loud talk. Many performers working this crowd work silently with musical accompaniment. This is the audience type that I have the least natural affinity for, and I have learned to manage it through energy and pacing rather than subtlety. Quick effects with visual punchlines. Clear, unambiguous moments. No long buildups. No complex premises. The attention span is short and the tolerance for anything that requires concentration is low.
Type Seven: Men at Banquets. Sober groups in this category are amiable and tolerant, Fitzkee notes. The atmosphere is convivial. The audience wants to be entertained but does not demand brilliance. Effects with everyday objects work well. Manipulative routines that showcase visible skill are appreciated. This is a forgiving audience, but that forgiveness can be a trap — it is easy to get comfortable and deliver a B-minus performance because the audience does not punish you for it.
Type Eight: Women-Only Audiences. Fitzkee had specific advice for this audience type, some of which has aged well and some of which has not. I will address this separately in a later post, because the conversation about what is dated and what is timeless requires more space than a subsection.
Type Nine: Young People — Teenagers. Critical, alert, competitive. Similar to mixed adult audiences but with a sharper edge. Fitzkee notes that teenagers are the most likely to try to catch you, the most vocal about it when they think they have, and the most responsive when you genuinely surprise them. I have found that authenticity matters enormously with this group. They can detect performance falseness instantly. Being real with them earns their respect faster than being impressive.
Type Ten: Children — Six to Twelve. Fitzkee makes a striking observation: misdirection does not work on children. Their attention is not directed by the same social conventions that adults follow. They look where they look, not where you tell them to look. Their paramount interest is in discovering the method. This makes performing for children a completely different discipline than performing for adults. The effects that work best are ones where the method is not the point — production effects, transformation effects, things that are visually magical regardless of whether the child is trying to figure out how they work.
Type Eleven: Very Young Children. Under six. Simply interested. Less adversarial than the six-to-twelve group. Their attention span is short, but their wonder is genuine and unfiltered. Simple, colorful, visual effects. Keep everything short. The emotional response from a very young child — the wide eyes, the open mouth, the delighted shriek — is one of the most rewarding experiences in all of magic, even if the performance itself is the simplest thing you do.
The Principle Behind the Taxonomy
What makes Fitzkee’s list more than just a catalog is the principle that underlies it. He states it bluntly: “The obligation is NOT with the audience to pay attention. It is the duty of the performer to catch and hold their interest within THEIR world and experience.”
This is worth pausing on because it overturns a common performer’s complaint. “The audience was not into it.” “They were not paying attention.” “They were a tough crowd.” Fitzkee’s response to all of these would be the same: that is your problem, not theirs. You are the one who is supposed to adapt. You are the one who is supposed to know what works for this type of audience. You are the one who is supposed to reach them in their world, not demand that they come to yours.
This principle changed how I prepare for events. I used to prepare my set and then perform it, adjusting slightly based on the room’s energy. Now I research the audience first and build the set around what I learn. Who are they? What is their context? What do they care about? What is their energy likely to be? What type are they in Fitzkee’s taxonomy? And then I select and sequence my material accordingly.
My Own Experience Across the Types
Because I perform primarily in corporate and keynote settings, most of my audiences fall into Type Four (mixed adults of average intelligence) or Type Five (mixed adults of exceptional intelligence). These are my comfort zone. I know the pacing, I know the material selection, I know the level of intellectual engagement these audiences expect.
But I have learned the most from performing for types outside my comfort zone.
The family audience in Vienna I mentioned at the start taught me about visual clarity and pace. Children do not process the way adults do. They need bigger gestures, clearer moments, simpler stories. Performing for them forced me to strip my material down to its visual essentials, and I discovered that what remained was actually stronger than the more complex version. The clarity I developed for children improved my adult performances too.
The drinking audience at a corporate holiday party in Linz taught me about energy management. This was early in my performing life, and I made the classic mistake of trying to perform intimate mentalism for a group of people who had been drinking for three hours. The material was excellent for a sober, attentive audience. For this audience, it was invisible. They were not rude. They simply were not capable of the sustained attention that mentalism requires. I learned to have a parallel set of material — visual, fast, punchy — for high-energy, low-attention environments.
The teenagers at a youth leadership workshop in Klagenfurt taught me about authenticity. I opened with my usual professional polish, and I could feel them checking out. They did not want to be impressed. They wanted to connect. So I dropped the polish, talked to them like people, admitted I was nervous about performing for a younger audience, and asked what they thought magic was about. The conversation that followed was one of the most engaging experiences I have had as a performer. They taught me more about audience management in that one session than months of corporate performances had.
The Adaptation Strategy
Here is the practical framework I have developed, informed by Fitzkee’s taxonomy.
Before any performance, I ask three questions. First: which of the eleven types am I performing for? Second: what are the defining characteristics of this type — attention span, energy level, skepticism, social dynamics? Third: which elements of my repertoire match those characteristics?
Then I build the set. Not from my favorite material. Not from my strongest material. From the material that is most appropriate for this specific audience type. Sometimes my favorite pieces are also the most appropriate. Often they are not.
I also identify one or two contingency shifts. If the audience turns out to be different from what I expected — if the “mixed adults of average intelligence” turn out to be “drinking audience” because the open bar started two hours before my slot — I need to be able to pivot without panic. The contingency shifts are pre-planned changes in material and energy that I can deploy if my initial read of the audience was wrong.
The Meta-Lesson
What I value most about Fitzkee’s taxonomy is not the specific advice for each type — some of which is dated, all of which requires adaptation to modern contexts. What I value is the underlying message: audiences are not homogeneous. They are not a single entity called “the audience” that responds uniformly to uniform stimulus. They are specific collections of specific people with specific characteristics, and the performer who treats them as a generic mass will consistently underperform the performer who identifies what type of collection they are dealing with and adapts accordingly.
This is, I recognize, strategy consulting applied to performance. Segment your market. Understand each segment. Tailor your offering. It is the same principle, just applied to entertainment rather than business. And the fact that Fitzkee articulated it in 1943, before modern marketing strategy existed, is a testament to how fundamental the insight is.
The eleven types are not the final word. They are a starting point. A framework for thinking about the audience as a specific entity rather than a general one. And that shift — from “I am performing for an audience” to “I am performing for this specific type of audience” — is the difference between hoping a show goes well and having a strategy for making it go well.
I performed twice that Saturday in Vienna. Two different types. Two different shows. Two different relationships with two different rooms. The material overlapped by perhaps fifteen percent. Everything else was adapted, adjusted, calibrated to the specific humans sitting in the specific seats.
That is not a sign of inconsistency. That is the definition of professionalism.