I have said it. I need to admit that upfront because this post is about a phrase that I have personally used, and I cannot credibly write about its toxicity without first confessing that it once came out of my own mouth.
It was after a performance in Salzburg. A corporate dinner, mid-sized company, pleasant enough crowd. I had performed a mentalism set that I was particularly proud of — a sequence of effects built around the theme of unconscious decision-making, woven together with what I thought was a sophisticated narrative about how we make choices we think are free but may not be. The scripting was tight. The psychology was layered. The structure was elegant. I had rehearsed it extensively in my hotel room the night before, running through the beats until the timing felt effortless.
It died.
Not catastrophically. Nobody booed. Nobody walked out. The audience was polite, attentive in stretches, and appreciative enough to applaud at the right moments. But the set did not connect. The philosophical thread I had woven through the material — the thing I was most proud of — went nowhere. The audience absorbed the effects themselves, the moments of impossibility, but the ideas between the effects, the narrative architecture I had built around them, floated past without landing. The reactions were functional. Not electric.
Afterward, driving back to my hotel, I found myself composing the excuse. They did not get it. The material was too cerebral for that room. My stuff was over their heads.
And then I caught myself.
I caught myself because I had recently read a line in Dariel Fitzkee’s Showmanship for Magicians that had lodged in my brain like a splinter. Fitzkee wrote that the phrase “my stuff is over their heads” is not an indictment of the audience but of the entertainer. When I first read it, I nodded along, agreeing in the abstract. It was easy to agree when it was not my performance under discussion. But sitting in that car after Salzburg, with the sting of a tepid reception still fresh, I felt the full weight of what Fitzkee meant.
The Comforting Lie
“My stuff is over their heads” is the most seductive excuse in performance. It accomplishes three things simultaneously, all of them harmful.
First, it absolves you of responsibility. The performance did not fail because of something you did wrong. It failed because the audience was not good enough for your material. You were casting pearls before swine. The problem was not your craft; it was their capacity.
Second, it flatters your ego. If the material is over their heads, that implies your material is sophisticated, advanced, perhaps even brilliant. You are not a performer who misjudged the room. You are a misunderstood artist whose work demands a more refined audience.
Third, it prevents learning. If the fault lies with the audience, there is nothing to fix. You do not need to revise your material, adjust your delivery, reconsider your scripting, or question your assumptions about what makes a good performance. You simply need a better audience next time.
Every one of those outcomes is poison. And the worst part is that the excuse feels true when you use it. That is what makes it so dangerous.
What Fitzkee Actually Meant
Fitzkee was not being cruel when he redirected the blame to the performer. He was being precise about a professional obligation.
His argument is simple: the performer’s job is to catch and hold the interest of the specific audience in front of them. Not an imaginary ideal audience. Not the audience you wish you had. The real people in the real room with their real cognitive capabilities, cultural references, attention spans, and emotional states.
If your material requires a specific type of audience to work, and you perform it for a different type, that is not the audience’s failure. That is your failure of preparation, or your failure of adaptation, or your failure of material selection. The obligation runs downhill, from the performer to the audience, never the other way around.
This is not a magic-specific principle. It is a universal communication principle. Every time I deliver a strategy presentation to a client, the same rule applies. If my analysis is brilliant but my presentation does not connect with the people in the room, the presentation has failed. My job is not to be brilliant in the abstract. My job is to be effective with the specific humans I am communicating with.
What Actually Went Wrong in Salzburg
So what happened in Salzburg? Not “the audience did not get it.” What actually happened?
I went back to my hotel room, sat with my notes, and forced myself to answer that question honestly. It took some time, because honesty about your own failures requires the kind of discipline that does not come naturally to anyone.
Here is what I found.
The philosophical narrative about unconscious decision-making was interesting to me. It was a topic I had been reading about, thinking about, and talking about with Adam Wilber for weeks while we were working on a Vulpine Creations project. I was saturated in the material. Every reference made sense to me because I had the full context.
The audience did not have that context. They did not care about unconscious decision-making as an intellectual topic. They cared about seeing something impossible happen. They cared about being surprised, being entertained, being given a good experience on a Wednesday evening. The philosophical wrapper I had built around the effects was not adding value for them. It was adding weight. It was slowing down the moments they were actually there for and filling the space between those moments with ideas they had not signed up to engage with.
My material was not over their heads. My material was beside the point. I had built a performance around my interests instead of their experience. The effects were fine. The scaffolding I had erected around them was self-indulgent.
That is a different diagnosis than “they did not get it.” And it leads to completely different treatment.
The Performer’s Ego Is a Terrible Diagnostician
I have noticed, in myself and in other performers I have watched, a reliable pattern. The more intellectually proud you are of a piece of material, the more likely you are to reach for “over their heads” when it does not work.
We do not say “my stuff is over their heads” about our simplest, most visual, most broadly appealing material. We say it about the material we are most personally attached to — the clever bits, the sophisticated bits, the pieces that demonstrate not just our skill as performers but our intelligence as thinkers. The material we want people to admire us for, not just enjoy.
That attachment is the problem. When you care more about being admired for your intelligence than about giving the audience a great experience, you have reversed the polarity of performance. You are no longer serving them. You are asking them to serve your ego. And when they decline that service — because they came for an evening of entertainment, not to affirm your intellectual credentials — you blame them.
Fitzkee saw this in the 1940s. I saw it in myself in Salzburg seventy-something years later. The specifics change. The psychology does not.
The Test I Now Apply
After Salzburg, I developed a test that I apply to every piece of material before it goes into a set. I ask: who is this for?
If the honest answer is “for me” — because I find the concept interesting, because it makes me feel smart, because it demonstrates something I want people to know about my reading habits or intellectual curiosity — then I either rewrite it or remove it.
If the honest answer is “for the audience” — because it creates an experience they will enjoy, because it builds toward a moment that will surprise them, because it gives them something they will remember and talk about afterward — then it earns its place.
This test is harder than it sounds. Because the ego is a skilled advocate. It will argue persuasively that the audience would love this material if only they understood the context, if only they were paying closer attention, if only they had read the same books you have read. The ego will never admit that the material is self-serving. It will always find a way to frame self-indulgence as audience benefit.
The only reliable check is honesty. And honesty, when applied to your own creative work, is a brutal discipline.
When Intellectual Material Actually Works
I want to be clear that this is not an argument against intelligent material. Some of my best-received performances have included genuinely intellectual content — ideas about perception, memory, the nature of certainty. The difference between intellectual material that connects and intellectual material that flies over heads is not the sophistication of the ideas. It is the accessibility of the presentation.
When I present an idea about perception, I do not lecture. I demonstrate. I create an experience that illustrates the idea so directly that the audience feels the truth of it in their own reaction, not because I explained it to them but because they just lived it. The idea does not need to be simplified. The delivery needs to be experiential rather than conceptual.
There is an enormous difference between saying “your memory is unreliable” and creating a moment where the audience experiences their own memory failing in real time. The first is a statement. The second is a revelation. The first requires the audience to take your word for it. The second requires nothing — they just felt it happen.
The best intellectual material works because it meets the audience on the ground floor and takes the elevator up together. The worst intellectual material works like a lecture delivered from a balcony.
The Bridge to Any Room You Will Ever Perform In
This principle extends far beyond magic. Every person who communicates for a living — consultants, teachers, leaders, salespeople, speakers — faces the same temptation. When the message does not land, it is always more comfortable to blame the receiver than to examine the transmission.
In my consulting work, I have sat in debriefs after presentations where the strategy team congratulated themselves on the quality of the analysis while acknowledging that the client “just did not understand the sophistication of the approach.” The language was different but the dynamic was identical. The obligation was reversed. The communicator was absolved. No learning occurred.
Fitzkee’s line should be painted on the wall of every rehearsal room, every conference room, every classroom, and every stage: it is not an indictment of the audience. It is an indictment of the performer.
What I Did With the Salzburg Material
I did not throw it away. I rebuilt it. I kept the effects, which had worked fine. I stripped out the philosophical narrative, which had not. In its place, I built a simpler connective thread — still about choices, but presented through personal stories and direct audience interaction rather than abstract ideas.
The next time I performed the revised set, at a corporate event in Innsbruck, it worked. The same effects. A completely different experience. The audience was engaged, surprised, emotionally connected. Not because they were smarter or more cultured than the Salzburg audience. Because my material was better suited to what an audience actually needs.
I did not think, afterward, that my stuff had been at exactly the right level for their heads. I thought: I did my job. I met them where they were. I created an experience calibrated to the humans in the room rather than to the performer on the stage.
That is the only standard that matters. Not how clever your material is. Not how sophisticated your ideas are. Not how impressed your fellow magicians would be if they could see your scripting. The only standard is whether the people in the room had the experience you set out to create for them.
If they did not, the problem is never the audience. The problem is always, without exception, you.
Fitzkee said it better than I ever could. And the fact that he said it in the 1940s, that magicians have been reaching for “over their heads” as an excuse for at least eighty years, tells you everything you need to know about how persistent and how seductive this particular lie really is.