I performed twice in the same week last autumn. The first was a keynote for a group of small business owners in Linz, a regional chamber of commerce event. The second was a private dinner for a venture capital firm in Vienna, twelve people around a table, all of them analytical thinkers who spent their professional lives evaluating risk, pattern, and probability.
Same performer. Same general approach. Two completely different audiences. And what struck me afterward, sitting in my hotel room reviewing both performances, was how differently each group received exactly the same type of material.
In Linz, my mentalism pieces played beautifully. The audience accepted the premise, went along with the journey, reacted with genuine surprise and delight. They did not interrogate the process. They experienced it. The emotional arc carried them from curiosity to astonishment, and they went willingly.
In Vienna, the same type of material created a different dynamic entirely. The venture capital group was fascinated, but in a different way. They were analyzing. I could see it in their eyes — they were not just experiencing the effect, they were simultaneously trying to deconstruct it. Not adversarially, but reflexively. These were people trained to look for the mechanism behind the outcome. Their enjoyment came not just from the surprise but from the intellectual engagement of trying to figure out how the surprise was engineered.
Both audiences enjoyed the performance. But they enjoyed it for different reasons, through different cognitive pathways, and my effectiveness with each group depended on understanding that difference.
When I first encountered Dariel Fitzkee’s classification of audiences by intelligence level in Showmanship for Magicians, I was uneasy. The terminology sounds elitist. He divides audience members into three classes: immature and uncultured, mature and uncultured, and mature and cultured. But once I got past the vocabulary, I found something remarkably practical underneath.
The Three Classes, Stripped of Judgment
Fitzkee’s framework is not about who is smart and who is not. It is about how different cognitive profiles engage with entertainment, and what that means for your material selection and delivery.
The first class — immature and uncultured, in Fitzkee’s language — represents the majority of most audiences, including many adults. These are not unintelligent people. They are people who engage with entertainment primarily through emotion and sensation. They respond to spectacle, humor, surprise, and personality. They are not interested in analyzing the mechanism. They want to feel something. They respond powerfully to visual effects, comedy, music, color, and physical action. They are, in many ways, the most satisfying audience to perform for because their reactions are immediate and unfiltered.
The second class — mature and uncultured — includes what Fitzkee described as businessmen, skilled workers, and most professionals. These are people with developed analytical capabilities but who have not necessarily cultivated broad intellectual or artistic interests. They appreciate cleverness. They enjoy being outsmarted. They respond well to demonstrations of skill and intelligence. They like to be impressed, and they are willing to engage with material that has some intellectual substance, but they do not require it. This, I would argue, describes the majority of the corporate audiences I perform for in Austria.
The third class — mature and cultured — is the smallest group. These are people with wide interests, developed analytical habits, and a natural tendency toward intellectual engagement. They appreciate subtlety. They notice details. They are the hardest audience to impress because they have seen more, read more, and thought more about the nature of deception. But when you do reach them — when you create a moment that bypasses even their analytical defenses — their reaction is profound, because they understand how difficult what you just did actually was.
Why This Is Not Elitism
I need to address the obvious objection here, because I had it myself when I first read Fitzkee’s framework: this sounds like intellectual snobbery. It sounds like ranking people. It sounds like the kind of thing a performer should never do.
But here is the thing. Every professional communicator already makes these distinctions, they just use different language. When I prepare a strategy presentation for a client, I think about the audience. Are they detail-oriented executives who want to see the data? Are they big-picture thinkers who want the narrative? Are they skeptical analysts who will challenge every assumption? I adjust my presentation accordingly. Not because some audiences are better than others, but because different audiences need different approaches to receive the same message effectively.
Fitzkee was making the same argument about entertainment. He was not saying one class of audience is superior. He was saying that if you perform the same way for every audience, you will be perfectly calibrated for one of them and poorly calibrated for the other two.
What Changes Between the Three
Let me describe, in practical terms, what I adjust when I recognize which type of audience I am facing.
For the first class — emotional, sensation-driven audiences — I lean heavily on visual magic, comedy, audience participation, and personality. I keep the pacing fast. I use music and movement. The effects themselves need to be visually clear and emotionally unambiguous. The moment of magic needs to look impossible from across the room without requiring any explanation of what was supposed to happen versus what did happen. I make the experience fun, surprising, and emotionally resonant. I do not ask them to think; I ask them to feel.
For the second class — the analytical professionals who make up most corporate audiences — I add layers of apparent impossibility. I use mentalism and prediction effects that engage their problem-solving instincts. I give them just enough information to start forming theories, and then I demolish those theories with the reveal. I talk to them like adults, with respect for their intelligence. I use humor that is sharp rather than broad. I let them feel clever for noticing things, and then show them that what they noticed was itself part of the design. These audiences love the feeling of being outsmarted by someone they respect.
For the third class — the intellectually engaged, widely curious few — I bring my most sophisticated material. Effects where the method is so distant from the effect that analysis leads nowhere. Presentations that have philosophical depth, that raise genuine questions about perception and certainty. I am more conversational, more personal, more willing to slow down and let a moment breathe. These audiences do not need spectacle. They need authenticity and craft. They can tell the difference between a performer who is executing a routine and a performer who genuinely understands what they are doing and why.
The Mixed Audience Problem
Here is the complication that makes all of this interesting rather than simple: most audiences are mixed. A corporate event in Salzburg might have the CEO and two board members who are deeply cultured, a middle management group of sharp professionals, and a large contingent of staff who are there primarily to enjoy an evening out. All three of Fitzkee’s classes in one room.
This is where the real skill lives. Because you cannot perform three different shows simultaneously. What you can do is layer your performance so that each class finds something to connect with.
I think of it like a well-made film. A Pixar movie works on one level for children — bright colors, funny characters, physical comedy, clear emotional stakes. It works on another level for parents — sophisticated humor, cultural references, genuine emotional depth. And it works on yet another level for film enthusiasts — elegant storytelling structure, innovative technique, thematic resonance. Same movie. Multiple layers. Each audience member takes from it what they are equipped to receive.
When I build a set for a mixed corporate audience, I try to achieve something similar. The visual effects and comedy provide the broad entertainment layer. The mentalism and apparent skill demonstrations provide the intellectual layer. And the scripting — the specific words I use, the ideas I explore, the questions I raise about perception and certainty — provides the philosophical layer for anyone listening closely enough to notice.
Not everyone will catch every layer. That is the point. Each person receives the performance through their own cognitive lens and finds satisfaction at their own level of engagement.
A Lesson from Klagenfurt
I performed at a corporate retreat in Klagenfurt where the audience turned out to be almost entirely the second class — sharp professionals, mostly in their forties and fifties, with strong analytical habits and a competitive streak. They were the kind of audience that wants to catch you. Not maliciously, but as a matter of pride. They wanted to be the one at the table who figured it out.
I had prepared a set that included some of my more emotionally driven material — pieces that rely on atmosphere and storytelling rather than intellectual challenge. They landed, but softly. The audience was polite, appreciative, but not ignited.
Then I shifted to a prediction effect. Something that involved multiple apparently free choices, all of which converged on a single impossible outcome. The room changed. I could feel them lean in. I could see their analytical engines engage. They were tracking every decision, looking for the mechanism, testing hypotheses in real time. And when the reveal happened — when every prediction matched, when the impossibility was laid bare with no possible explanation — the reaction was explosive. Not because it was a bigger effect than the emotional pieces. But because it was the right effect for that specific audience.
After the show, several of them came up to me, not to ask how I did it, but to tell me which theories they had tested and discarded. They were delighted by their own failure to explain what they had seen. That delight was the reaction I should have been targeting from the beginning with that group.
The Obligation Runs Downhill
Fitzkee made a point about this that I think about constantly. The obligation is not on the audience to appreciate what you are offering. The obligation is on the performer to offer something the audience can appreciate.
This is the key insight that redeems his framework from any charge of elitism. He is not saying some audiences are better. He is saying all audiences are different, and the performer who refuses to adapt to those differences is the one who fails, not the audience.
In my consulting work, I have seen this same dynamic play out in boardrooms and conference halls a hundred times. A brilliant strategist presents a masterpiece of analysis to an audience that wanted a clear recommendation and an action plan. The strategy was excellent. The communication was a failure. The obligation was on the presenter to read the room and deliver accordingly.
Building Flexibility Into Your Practice
Back in the hotel room, this has practical implications for how I prepare. I do not just rehearse one version of each effect. I rehearse multiple delivery modes. The same mentalism piece can be performed with dramatic gravitas for an audience that responds to atmosphere, or with quick wit and intellectual challenge for an audience that responds to cleverness, or with personal vulnerability and philosophical questioning for an audience that responds to depth.
The effect stays the same. The presentation shifts. And the ability to make that shift in real time, reading the audience and adjusting on the fly, is what separates a performer who connects from a performer who merely performs.
Fitzkee’s three classes gave me a vocabulary for something I was already sensing intuitively. Now, instead of walking into every room with the same set and hoping for the best, I walk in with a framework for understanding who I am talking to and what they are likely to respond to. It does not always work perfectly. But it works far better than the alternative, which is pretending that all audiences are the same and blaming them when they are not.
The framework sounds old-fashioned. The language sounds dated. But the principle underneath is timeless. Know your audience. Meet them where they are. Give them what they can receive. And never, ever blame the room when your material does not land. The room is just telling you something about itself. Your job is to listen.