There is a hotel bar in Vienna, near the Ringstrasse, where I have spent more evenings than I can count. It is the kind of place where the television above the bar is always on but nobody watches it. The images flicker. The sound is low. People glance up occasionally when something moves on screen, then return to their conversations. The television is not there to be watched. It is there to fill silence. It is there so the empty moments between drinks feel less empty.
That television is amusement. It occupies attention without engaging it. It fills time without creating meaning. When you leave the bar, you could not tell me what was on the screen. It made no impression. It asked nothing of you and gave nothing in return except the low-level comfort of not being alone with silence.
I think about that television a lot when I prepare to perform. Because the gap between what that television does and what a performance should do is the gap between amusement and entertainment. And it is a gap that, for years, I did not fully understand.
Dariel Fitzkee drew this distinction in Showmanship for Magicians, and when I first encountered it, the words landed differently than most of what I had read about performance theory. He argued that amusement is passive — it is something that happens to you, that washes over you, that occupies your sensory channels without engaging your mind or emotions in any meaningful way. Entertainment, by contrast, is active. It awakens understanding. It creates an experience that changes something, however small, in the person who receives it. Entertainment leaves a mark. Amusement leaves nothing.
The Difference You Can Feel But Rarely Name
You have felt this difference, even if you have never articulated it. Think about the last live performance that genuinely moved you — a concert, a play, a speaker, a performer of any kind who left you feeling different afterward than you felt before. Now think about the last time you scrolled through your phone for thirty minutes and could not remember what you had seen.
The first was entertainment. The second was amusement. Both occupied time. Only one created experience.
The distinction matters for performers because it reveals an uncomfortable truth about much of what passes for magic performance. A tremendous amount of magic is amusement. It fills a slot. It occupies attention. It produces a momentary flicker of curiosity or surprise. And then it evaporates, leaving nothing behind except a vague sense that some tricks were done and they were pretty good.
I do not say this from a position of superiority. I say it from the position of someone who has delivered that exact kind of performance many times and only gradually come to understand the difference between filling time and creating experience.
When I Was the Television
Early in my performing life, when I was still assembling my first thirty-minute show because Adam and I had co-founded Vulpine Creations and I needed to be able to perform, I built my set the way most beginners do. I collected effects that I could execute reliably. I arranged them in an order that seemed reasonable. I wrote transitions that connected one trick to the next. And I performed the set as a sequence of items, each one designed to produce a moment of surprise before moving on to the next moment of surprise.
It was a string of tricks. Well-executed tricks, increasingly, as my rehearsal hours accumulated. But a string nonetheless. There was no thread of meaning running through it. There was no question being asked or answered. There was no emotional journey. There was no reason for the audience to care about anything beyond the momentary puzzle of each individual effect.
I was the television above the bar. I was occupying attention. I was producing enough stimulus to prevent boredom. And when my set was over, the audience applauded, not because they had been moved but because the social contract says you applaud when the performer finishes.
I could tell the difference between that applause and the real thing. The real thing has heat in it. The real thing comes from an audience that has been taken somewhere and does not want to leave. The polite applause comes from an audience that recognizes the performance is over and responds appropriately. There is a world of difference between those two sounds, and every performer knows it even if they pretend not to.
What Makes Entertainment Active
The shift from amusement to entertainment is not about adding more impressive tricks. It is not about better technique. It is not about more elaborate staging or higher production values. All of those things can elevate amusement into better amusement without ever crossing the threshold into entertainment.
The shift happens when the performance engages the audience’s mind and emotions in a way that produces understanding — of themselves, of the performer, of some aspect of human experience that they recognize as true.
This sounds abstract. Let me make it concrete.
When I perform a mentalism effect where I apparently predict a decision the audience member will make, there are two ways to present it. In the first way, I say something like “Think of a number” and then reveal the number. The audience is surprised. They wonder how I did it. The moment passes. Amusement.
In the second way, I build a context. I talk about the illusion of free choice. I ask the audience member to think carefully, to really choose, to feel certain about their decision. I let them sit in the conviction that their choice was free and unpredictable. And then, when the reveal comes, the surprise is not just about the trick. It is about something the audience member feels in their own experience — the vertigo of realizing that the choice they were certain was free might not have been. That realization is entertainment. It awakens understanding. The audience member walks away not just puzzled but unsettled in a productive way, thinking about perception and choice and certainty in a way they were not thinking about them an hour ago.
Same effect. Same method. Radically different experience. The difference is not in the trick. It is in the meaning the presentation creates around the trick.
The Three Conditions for Awakening Understanding
Over time, working through this distinction in my own performances, I have identified three conditions that seem necessary for a performance to cross from amusement into entertainment.
The first is emotional engagement. The audience must feel something beyond mild curiosity. Fear, wonder, delight, recognition, vulnerability, triumph — any genuine emotion will do. But the emotional channel must be open. This is why personality matters so much. Why story matters. Why the human connection between performer and audience matters. Emotions are the gateway. Without them, the performance stays in the head, and the head alone does not produce the kind of deep engagement that entertainment requires.
The second is personal relevance. The audience must see themselves in what is happening. Not literally — they do not need to be on stage. But the themes, the situations, the emotional experiences portrayed in the performance must connect to something in their own lives. When I talk about the illusion of free choice, it connects because every person in the room has made choices they later questioned. When I talk about memory and how it deceives us, it connects because everyone has argued about a shared memory and discovered they remembered it differently. Personal relevance turns a demonstration into a mirror.
The third is surprise that produces insight. Not just surprise for its own sake — not just “I did not see that coming.” But surprise that reframes something the audience thought they understood. The best magic does this naturally. It takes something the audience was certain about — the card is in the middle of the deck, the prediction could not match, the choice was free — and reveals that their certainty was misplaced. When that surprise is contextualized properly, it does not just startle. It illuminates. The audience does not just think “how did he do that?” They think “what else am I wrong about?”
The Consulting Parallel
In my strategy work, I see this exact same distinction every day. A mediocre strategy presentation gives the client information. A great strategy presentation gives the client understanding. Information is data, analysis, charts, and recommendations. Understanding is the moment when the client sees their own business differently — when the framework you have provided reorganizes their perception of their own situation in a way that makes new actions possible.
I have sat in rooms where brilliant analysis produced nothing but nods. And I have sat in rooms where a single well-framed insight produced a visible shift — you could see it in people’s faces, the moment when understanding arrived and everything rearranged itself. The difference was never the quality of the analysis. It was the quality of the communication. Was the audience engaged emotionally? Did they see personal relevance? Did the insight produce genuine surprise that reframed their thinking?
Same three conditions. Same distinction between amusement and entertainment, translated to a business context.
Practical Implications for Building a Set
This distinction has practical consequences for how I build and revise my performance material.
When I evaluate an effect, I no longer ask only “does this fool them?” or “does this get a reaction?” I ask: “what does this leave behind?” After the surprise fades, after the applause dies down, after the audience goes back to their drinks and conversations, what remains? If the answer is nothing — just a vague memory of something surprising — then the effect is amusement. It might be good amusement. It might be impressive amusement. But it is filling time, not creating experience.
If the answer is something — a question they cannot stop thinking about, a feeling they did not expect, a shift in how they think about a familiar topic — then the effect has crossed into entertainment. It has awakened understanding.
I also evaluate the spaces between effects differently now. In an amusement-oriented set, the transitions are just bridges — they get you from one trick to the next without dead time. In an entertainment-oriented set, the transitions are where a lot of the meaning lives. The stories you tell between effects, the ideas you explore, the personal moments you share — these are not filler. They are the connective tissue that transforms a series of tricks into a coherent experience.
The Hotel Room Test
Late at night, in whatever hotel room I am staying in, I sometimes run through my set without props. Just the words. Just the stories. Just the ideas. If the set works as a spoken piece — if someone could listen to the words alone, without any magic, and still find it engaging, still find themselves thinking about something differently afterward — then I know the set has entertainment value that exists independently of the tricks.
If the words alone are boring, if without the tricks there is nothing worth listening to, then I know that the tricks are doing all the work. And tricks alone produce amusement. Moments of surprise connected by nothing, leading nowhere, leaving nothing behind.
The set does not need to work as a TED talk. It is not a lecture. But the ideas, the stories, the personality woven through it should have their own value. The magic amplifies that value. It does not replace it.
The Standard That Changed Everything
Fitzkee’s distinction between amusement and entertainment gave me a standard I did not have before. It is a higher standard than “did the audience enjoy it?” or “did they applaud?” Because audiences can enjoy amusement. Audiences applaud amusement. The television above the bar is not offensive. It serves its purpose. Nobody complains about it.
But nobody remembers it either. Nobody talks about it the next day. Nobody is changed by it.
I want to be remembered. I want people to walk out of a performance thinking about something they were not thinking about when they walked in. I want the effects I perform to be catalysts for something larger than the surprise itself. Not every time. Not in every moment. But as the overall trajectory of what I do.
Amusement kills time. Entertainment awakens understanding. Fitzkee wrote those words in the 1940s and they are as true today as they were then. The television above the bar in Vienna is still flickering. Nobody is watching. Somewhere in the same city, on the same night, a performer is on stage creating an experience that will stay with the audience for years.
The difference between those two things is the difference that matters. And it is, ultimately, a choice. Every time you step in front of an audience, you choose whether to fill time or create meaning. The audience will accept either. But only one of them is worth the extraordinary effort of becoming a performer in the first place.