The first time I saw the concept in action, I did not understand why it worked. I was watching a video of a performer whose routine kept going wrong. Objects appeared in the wrong places. Effects resolved in unexpected and apparently unintended ways. The performer seemed increasingly baffled, frustrated, and slightly panicked. The audience was not confused. They were delighted. They were laughing. They were cheering. And when, at the very end, everything came together in a single moment of apparent triumph — when the performer finally seemed to get it right — the audience erupted in a way I had rarely seen in any magic performance.
I remember thinking: the audience just watched an entire routine where almost nothing worked as intended. Why did they love it?
The answer lives in a concept that Dariel Fitzkee described in Showmanship for Magicians, drawing on work by Charles Waller, who devised what he called “Perverse Magic.” The idea is deceptively simple: design routines where the magic seems to work against the performer rather than for them. Objects do what they please. Effects misfire. The performer struggles. And the audience, rather than being disappointed by the apparent failures, is drawn into a sympathetic relationship with the performer that makes the eventual success far more powerful than it would have been if everything had gone right from the beginning.
It is, I believe, one of the most powerful structural concepts in all of magic performance. And it taught me something about audience psychology that I now apply to performances, keynotes, and storytelling of every kind.
Why Failure Creates Sympathy
There is a deep principle at work in perverse magic, and it has nothing to do with magic specifically. It has to do with how human beings relate to other human beings.
We sympathize with struggle. We identify with people who are trying to accomplish something and encountering obstacles. We root for the underdog. We feel tension when someone we care about is in trouble, and we feel relief when they succeed. This is the fundamental engine of narrative drama — the protagonist faces obstacles, struggles against them, and ultimately prevails (or does not, in which case we feel tragedy rather than triumph).
In a standard magic performance, the performer is in control. They present an effect, it works, the audience is impressed. The performer is the expert, and the audience is the witness. There is nothing wrong with this dynamic, but it creates a specific emotional distance. The performer is above the audience in terms of knowledge and capability. The audience admires but does not identify.
In perverse magic, that dynamic inverts. The performer is not in control. The objects are in control. The magic is doing whatever it wants, and the performer is scrambling to keep up, to make it work, to salvage the situation. The performer is, for the duration of the routine, in the same position as the audience — at the mercy of forces they do not control.
This creates identification. The audience sees themselves in the performer’s struggle. They have all been in situations where things went wrong despite their best efforts. They have all felt the frustration of plans falling apart, of carefully prepared presentations collapsing, of the universe refusing to cooperate with their intentions. The performer on stage, wrestling with perverse objects, is living out a universal human experience. And the audience connects to that experience on a level that a smooth, flawless performance rarely achieves.
The Emotional Architecture of Perverse Magic
The structure of a perverse magic routine follows a specific emotional arc that maps almost exactly to classical story structure.
Act one is the setup: the performer presents what they intend to do. They are confident. They have a plan. The audience understands the intended outcome. Everything is normal.
Act two is the complication: the first attempt fails. Something goes wrong. The performer reacts with surprise, perhaps mild frustration, and tries again. The second attempt also fails, differently. The performer is now visibly struggling. Each subsequent failure escalates the sense of things being out of control. The audience is laughing — not at the performer’s expense, but with the delight of recognition. They know this feeling. They have been here.
The critical element of act two is that each failure must be different and preferably funnier or more absurd than the last. The escalation is what creates the comedy and the sympathy. If the same thing goes wrong the same way twice, the audience loses interest. But if each failure is a new variation — each one more creative, more unexpected, more delightfully wrong — the audience’s engagement deepens because they are wondering: what will go wrong next?
Act three is the resolution: everything comes together. The performer, after multiple failures, somehow pulls off something that makes all the previous failures make sense. The final effect is often revealed to have been the intention all along — the apparent mistakes were actually leading somewhere. Or the final effect is so triumphant that it obliterates the memory of the failures. Either way, the audience’s emotional journey — from confidence to sympathy to relief to triumph — creates a far more powerful response than the effect alone would generate.
My First Experiment with Perverse Structure
I tried incorporating perverse magic structure into my set about a year and a half ago, at a corporate event in Linz. I had been performing a mentalism routine that was reliable but, I felt, emotionally flat. Everything worked. The predictions matched. The audience was impressed. But the reaction was proportional to the effect — nothing more. There was no emotional surplus, no extra energy in the room beyond the basic response to the impossible outcome.
I redesigned the routine with a perverse structure. Instead of everything working smoothly, the first prediction would be wrong. Visibly, clearly, undeniably wrong. My reaction would be genuine surprise (rehearsed, of course, but designed to look genuine). I would adjust, try a different approach, and the second prediction would also be wrong — in a different and slightly more embarrassing way. The audience would see me struggling. They would laugh. They would feel for me.
And then, in the final phase, everything would come together in a way that made the previous “failures” look like they were part of the design all along. The payoff would be bigger than the original routine because the audience had been taken on an emotional journey — from expectation to sympathy to surprise — rather than simply shown an impressive outcome.
The result in Linz was dramatically different from the original version. The audience was more engaged during the “failure” phases than they had ever been during the smooth version. They were leaning forward, laughing, nudging each other. When the final reveal landed, the applause was louder and longer than I had ever received for that type of effect. Several people mentioned the routine specifically in their feedback afterward. Not the prediction. The struggle.
Fitzkee’s Insight into the Helpless Magician
Fitzkee made an observation that I think about constantly: there is no more helpless, hopeless, or totally demoralized performer in the theater than a magician whose tricks have gone wrong. And nothing delights an audience more than seeing a “wise guy” magician get into a jam.
This is psychologically precise. In a standard magic performance, the performer occupies a position of superiority. They know something the audience does not. They can do something the audience cannot. This creates admiration but also, subtly, a power imbalance. The audience is in the lesser position — they are being shown something they cannot understand.
When the magic goes wrong — or appears to go wrong — the power dynamic shifts. The performer is suddenly vulnerable. They are not the wise guy with all the answers. They are a person whose plans have fallen apart, whose confidence has been shaken, whose control over the situation has been lost. The audience, who has been in the lesser position, is now in the superior position. They can see that the performer is in trouble. They have information the performer appears to lack.
This shift produces two simultaneous emotional responses. First, the comedy of seeing someone who was in control lose control — one of the most basic and universal sources of humor. Second, sympathy for the person in trouble — because the audience’s natural empathy kicks in when they see someone struggling.
These two responses coexist beautifully. The audience is laughing and caring at the same time. And when the performer ultimately succeeds, both responses resolve simultaneously: the comedy pays off (the underdog wins) and the sympathy pays off (the person we were rooting for triumphs). The double resolution produces a reaction that is far more intense and emotionally complex than simple astonishment.
The Consultant’s Parallel
I have seen this same dynamic play out in my professional life in ways that have nothing to do with magic. The most memorable keynote speakers I have watched are not the ones who presented a flawless narrative of success. They are the ones who talked about their failures, their struggles, the moments when everything went wrong before it eventually went right.
There is a reason the “failure story” is a staple of business keynotes and TED talks. It is the narrative equivalent of perverse magic. The speaker sets up an expectation of competence, introduces complications that threaten that competence, and ultimately resolves the complications in a way that demonstrates something meaningful. The audience connects not to the success but to the struggle. The success is the payoff. The struggle is the relationship.
When I give keynotes that incorporate magic, I increasingly lean into this structure. I do not present myself as someone who has mastered anything. I present myself as someone who is learning, who has made mistakes, who has struggled to figure things out. The magic serves the story of the struggle — it demonstrates principles I discovered through failure, not through effortless competence.
This is not false modesty. It is accurate. I am not a lifetime performer who has mastered every aspect of the craft. I am an adult learner who came to magic from a completely different field, who has made every mistake in the book, and who is still learning. That positioning — honest and vulnerable rather than authoritative and polished — creates the same sympathy dynamic that perverse magic creates. The audience roots for me because they see themselves in my struggle.
The Design Principles
If you want to incorporate perverse magic structure into your own work, there are several design principles I have found essential.
The failures must be convincing. The audience needs to genuinely believe, at least in the moment, that something has gone wrong. If the failures look staged — if the performer winks at the audience or seems too comfortable with the “mistake” — the sympathy evaporates. The performer must commit to the fiction of being in trouble.
The failures must escalate. Each failure should be more surprising, more absurd, or more disastrous than the last. Escalation creates the sense that things are spiraling out of control, which deepens both the comedy and the sympathy.
The failures must be different from each other. Three identical failures is monotonous. Three failures that each go wrong in a unique and unexpected way is engaging because the audience cannot predict what will happen next.
The resolution must be proportional to the struggle. If the audience has watched you fail three times, the final success needs to be impressive enough to justify the journey. A small payoff after a big struggle feels anticlimactic. The resolution should ideally be more impressive than what you originally promised, because the “failures” have raised the stakes.
And perhaps most importantly: the performer must remain likable throughout. The failures create sympathy only if the audience likes the performer. If the performer is arrogant or unlikable, the audience does not sympathize with the failures — they enjoy them, which is a completely different and much less powerful dynamic. The performer in a perverse magic routine should be earnest, trying hard, and genuinely frustrated by the failures. Not a buffoon. A person doing their best in a situation that is working against them.
The Deeper Lesson
Perverse magic is not just a performance structure. It is a philosophy of how to relate to an audience.
The standard magic performance says: I am impressive. Watch what I can do. The perverse magic performance says: I am human. Watch what happens when the universe does not cooperate.
The first creates admiration. The second creates connection. Both are valid. But in my experience, connection produces a more powerful and lasting response than admiration. People forget what impressed them. They remember what moved them. And being moved requires vulnerability, which requires the willingness to appear imperfect, to struggle, to fail — even if the failure is carefully designed.
Fitzkee understood this. Waller understood this. Ballantine built an entire career on this — the comedy magician whose tricks never worked until the glorious final moment when everything came together. The principle is old. The psychology is older. Humans have always loved the story of the underdog. Of the person who struggles and fails and struggles again and finally, against all odds, succeeds.
Perverse magic gives the performer a vehicle for telling that story in real time, in front of a live audience, with the added element of impossibility that only magic can provide. When the tricks work against you and you triumph anyway, the audience does not just see a magic trick. They see a story they recognize. A story about the human condition. A story about perseverance and resilience and the stubborn refusal to give up.
That story, told through the medium of magic, is more powerful than any flawless demonstration of skill. Because skill impresses. But struggle inspires.