The suggestion appears almost as a throwaway line in Fitzkee’s Showmanship for Magicians, but it is one of the most radical things I have ever read about building a magic show. The idea is simple: take a first-class non-magic act — a great comedy routine, a musical performance, a theatrical scene — strip it down to its structural skeleton, and then hang your magic material on that skeleton.
Do not copy the content. Copy the architecture.
When I first read this, I thought it was interesting but impractical. How do you take the structure of a stand-up comedy set and turn it into a magic show? How do you map a musical performance onto a card routine? The idea seemed clever in theory and impossible in execution.
Then I tried it. And it produced the best twenty minutes of material I have ever assembled.
Why Non-Magic Structures Work Better
Here is the problem with building a magic show by studying other magic shows: you end up building a magic show. That sounds circular because it is. When your structural models are all magic acts, you inherit all the structural habits of magic acts — and most of those habits are bad.
Most magic acts follow the same template: opening trick, middle tricks arranged by perceived strength, closing trick. There might be some patter between effects, maybe a comedy moment, maybe a volunteer interaction. But the fundamental structure is “trick, trick, trick, trick, big trick.” It is a list, not a story.
Non-magic entertainment does not work this way. A great comedy set has an arc. A great musical performance has dynamics. A great theatrical scene has conflict, development, and resolution. These structures evolved over centuries to hold human attention and create emotional impact. They are battle-tested against the harshest critic there is: an audience that will walk away if you lose them.
Fitzkee understood this in the 1940s. He looked at the entertainment landscape — movies, vaudeville, nightclubs, radio — and saw that magicians were the only performers who had not adopted the structural principles that made other entertainment forms successful. Magicians were building acts the way magicians had always built acts, while the rest of the entertainment world had moved on.
His solution was not to tell magicians to study other magicians. It was to tell them to study the best entertainers in any field and steal their architecture.
My First Attempt: A Comedy Set Structure
I started with stand-up comedy because I had been studying it for my keynote work. A well-constructed comedy set has a very specific architecture:
It opens with strong material — not the strongest, but strong enough to establish that the comedian is worth listening to. It builds credibility fast.
After the opening, it moves into longer bits that develop themes. Each bit has its own internal arc: setup, development, punchline, tag, tag, tag. The tags are bonus laughs that ride the wave of the initial punchline.
Between major bits, there are short connectors — quick observations, one-liners, callbacks to earlier material — that maintain energy and create the feeling of a unified conversation rather than a series of disconnected jokes.
The set builds toward its strongest material. The closer is not just the funniest bit. It is the bit that has been set up by everything that came before it. Callbacks land harder because the audience has context. Themes that were introduced early pay off at the end.
I took this structure and mapped my magic material onto it.
My opener became a quick, visual piece that established my character — not my biggest effect, but something that told the audience who I was and why they should pay attention. The equivalent of a comedian’s opening few minutes of strong, accessible material.
After the opener, I built longer sequences. Each one had an internal arc: a setup (establishing the premise), a development (building interest and engagement), a climax (the magical moment), and tags (additional moments of surprise that rode the wave of the initial reaction). The tags were something I had never used before in magic. In comedy, a tag is a follow-up joke that gets a laugh from the same setup. In magic, a tag can be a secondary revelation, an unexpected callback, or a moment where you twist the knife after the audience thinks the effect is over.
Between major sequences, I added connectors — short interactions with the audience, quick observations, brief mentalism bits that maintained energy without demanding the full attention of a major piece.
And the closer was not just my best trick. It was a piece that incorporated callbacks to material from earlier in the show. Themes I had introduced in the opener paid off in the finale. The audience felt the connection, even if they could not articulate it. The show felt like a conversation that had arrived somewhere, not a collection that had simply ended.
The Musical Performance Model
Emboldened by how well the comedy structure had worked, I tried a second model: the classical concert.
A symphony orchestra concert typically has a structure: an overture (short, energetic, attention-grabbing), a concerto or featured piece (longer, more complex, with a soloist who represents the emotional center), an intermission (breathing room), and a symphony (the main event, with multiple movements that take the audience on a complete emotional journey).
Mapping this onto a thirty-minute magic show gave me:
The overture: a fast-paced opening sequence, two or three minutes, that established energy and visual interest. Multiple short effects, rapid transitions, the equivalent of a musical overture that previews themes without fully developing them.
The concerto: a longer piece with a volunteer — the equivalent of a soloist. This is where the audience gets emotionally invested in a person, not just a trick. The volunteer’s reactions become the emotional center. The piece has a clear beginning, middle, and end, with moments of tension and release.
The intermission equivalent: not a literal break, but a shift in tone. A quiet moment. A story. Something that lets the audience’s emotional energy reset before the final movement.
The symphony: the closing sequence, with multiple movements. A build through increasingly powerful effects, each connected to the next, arriving at a climax that felt earned because the audience had traveled through the full emotional landscape.
This structure produced something I had never achieved before: a show that felt composed rather than assembled. The audience experienced it as a single unified event, not as a series of individual moments.
What You Are Actually Stealing
I want to be clear about what this exercise involves and what it does not. You are not stealing content. You are not copying someone else’s jokes or reproducing their performance. You are studying structure — the bones underneath the flesh.
Structure is universal. The three-act format works in theatre, in film, in novels, in music, in keynote presentations, and in magic shows. The principle of contrast — following loud with quiet, fast with slow, funny with serious — works everywhere. The idea of callbacks — planting something early that pays off later — works in comedy, in drama, and in magic.
When you study a first-class non-magic act, you are studying how a master craftsperson organized attention over time. How did they open? How did they transition? Where did they place their strongest material? How did they create the feeling of a unified experience? How did they earn their climax?
These are structural questions, and the answers translate directly.
The Keynote Presentation Advantage
I had an advantage that many magicians do not: my professional life as a consultant required me to study and build presentations constantly. I knew how to construct a narrative arc. I knew how to open with a hook, build through evidence, create tension, and resolve with a recommendation.
When Fitzkee suggested studying non-magic entertainment, my first instinct was to study keynote speakers — the great TED talks, the business presentations that go viral, the conference speeches that people remember for years. These are not magic shows. But their structure is highly relevant.
A great keynote opens with a story or a provocative question that creates a gap in the audience’s understanding. It builds through a series of insights, each one adding to the picture. It uses humor strategically, not as decoration but as a tool for emphasis and contrast. And it closes with a synthesis that makes the audience feel they have arrived somewhere new.
I built several of my corporate magic segments using this exact architecture. The magic serves the keynote structure rather than the other way around. Each effect illustrates a point. The effects build on each other conceptually. And the final piece is not just the most impressive trick — it is the one that crystallizes the message of the entire presentation.
The Practical Process
If you want to try this, here is the process I use:
First, find a piece of non-magic entertainment that genuinely moves you. Not something famous. Something that personally affects you — makes you laugh, makes you lean forward, makes you feel something. Your emotional response is your compass.
Second, watch or listen to it multiple times. On the first pass, just experience it. On the second pass, start taking notes on structure. When does it open? Where are the transitions? How does energy change? What are the beats? Where are the climaxes?
Third, abstract the structure. Strip away all the specific content — the jokes, the songs, the dialogue — and write down just the bones. “Opens with high energy, two-minute attention-grabber. Transitions to longer piece with emotional center. Drops energy for contrast. Builds to final sequence through three escalating beats. Closes with callback to opening.”
Fourth, map your material. Take your tricks, your stories, your audience interactions, and fit them to the skeleton. Which effect serves the opening function? Which one provides the emotional center? Which one works as contrast? Which one is your closer?
Fifth, perform it and adjust. The structure will not be perfect the first time. But it will be better than anything you would have built by defaulting to the magic-show template.
The Deeper Lesson
Fitzkee’s advice to study non-magic entertainment is not really about structure, though structure is its most immediate application. The deeper lesson is about standards. When you compare yourself to other magicians, you set the bar where magicians have set it — which, by Fitzkee’s assessment, is far too low.
When you compare yourself to the best entertainers in any field — the comedian who can hold a theatre for ninety minutes with nothing but words, the musician who makes two thousand people cry with a single song, the filmmaker who constructs an emotional journey that lasts for hours — you set a different bar entirely.
You will not reach that bar immediately. But you will start building toward it. And the audience will feel the difference, even if they cannot name it. They will not say “This magic show has excellent structural parallels to a well-constructed comedy set.” They will say “That was different from any magic show I have ever seen.”
That is the compliment. That is the goal. Different from any magic show they have ever seen — because the architecture came from somewhere else entirely.