There was a specific failure mode in my early routines that I could feel but couldn’t diagnose. The opening worked — something grabbed their attention, established the premise, got them engaged. The climax worked — the payoff landed. But somewhere in the middle, around the second or third beat, the energy would plateau. Not drop — plateau. The audience was still with me, but the aliveness of the room had changed. They were watching, not leaning forward.
I thought this was a pacing problem. I tried speeding things up. Then I thought it was a presentation problem — maybe the middle section was too dense, too much explanation. I tried trimming it. Nothing fully worked, because I was treating the symptom rather than the underlying structural issue.
The structural issue has a name. Matthew Dicks describes it, and so do Trey Parker and Matt Stone in a famous piece of creative advice about South Park’s writing process. The issue is “and then.”
The Rule
The rule is simple: if you can describe the scenes of your routine by connecting them with “and then,” your routine has no narrative momentum. And then this happened. And then that happened. And then there was a climax. This is a sequence of events, not a story.
Momentum comes from causal and adversarial connection. “But” means something resisted — a complication arose, a problem appeared, something got in the way. “Therefore” means something followed from what came before — a consequence, a development, something that had to happen because of what preceded it. These connections create a sense of narrative inevitability. The audience is leaning forward because they can feel the story is going somewhere, not just accumulating events.
When I went back through my routines with this lens, the problem became visible immediately. The openings used “therefore” logic — I established a premise, therefore I could do something with it. The climaxes used “therefore” logic too — given everything that had come before, therefore this was impossible. But the middle sections were almost universally “and then.” Effect happened. And then I gave some context. And then I showed them something else. And then we moved to the next phase.
The middles were sequences. Not stories.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Let me describe the problem in structural terms without getting into specific methods.
A typical early routine structure of mine:
Section 1: Introduce premise [strong, purposeful — THEREFORE logic] Section 2: Demonstrate the premise with a first phase [weaker — AND THEN] Section 3: Demonstrate with a second phase [AND THEN] Section 4: Major climax [stronger, because it’s payoff — THEREFORE logic]
The problem is sections 2 and 3. They exist to escalate the effect — to show progressively more impressive versions of the premise before the climax. But they’re connected to each other by “and then” logic. They don’t complicate each other. They don’t create adversarial tension. They’re just… accumulation.
What should happen in sections 2 and 3 is something more like:
Section 2: First demonstration — seems to confirm the premise [THEREFORE from section 1] Section 3: Something goes wrong, or resistance appears, or the audience’s skepticism is engaged — BUT something is off Section 4: The complication is what makes the climax possible — THEREFORE the impossible resolution
This changes the middle from a plateau into a rising action. The “but” creates stakes where there were none. The audience moves from “I’m watching to see what happens” to “I need to know how this resolves.”
Why Routines Are Structurally Resistant to This
The challenge in applying this to magic routines is that effect sequences are often designed around progressive intensity — each phase stronger than the last, building to a climax. That’s a valid structure. But progressive intensity without adversarial connection still reads as “and then.” Stronger and stronger doesn’t create the specific quality of tension that “but” creates.
“But” requires something to push against. A complication. A moment of apparent failure or resistance. Something that changes the direction of the story rather than just increasing its amplitude.
In a performance context — especially a corporate performance context in Vienna or Graz, where the audience is sophisticated and partially skeptical — this is actually a strength, not a weakness. Skilled corporate audiences don’t want to be relentlessly impressed. They want to feel like the story is going somewhere real, with genuine stakes.
A “but” gives them a moment of uncertainty: is this going to work? Will this resolve? And then the “therefore” resolution — the climax — lands with the force of relief and satisfaction, not just admiration for a completed sequence.
The Skeptic Moment
One specific application I’ve developed: the “but the audience knows better” moment. At some point in the middle of a routine, I invite a form of intelligent resistance. Not a trick-failure, not a manufactured problem, but a genuine acknowledgment of the audience’s skepticism.
Something like: “You’re thinking I control this. That’s a reasonable thing to think. So let’s make it so I can’t.” What follows is something that addresses their reasonable suspicion — but the addressing of it is itself the next phase of the effect.
This is “but” logic in practice. The audience’s skepticism is the “but.” The complication they’ve introduced — their reasonable doubt — is now the adversarial force that the rest of the routine has to resolve. And because they introduced it, they’re invested in how it resolves.
This only works because the routine has a “but” built into it. If the routine is pure “and then” — impressive, impressive, more impressive — there’s no way to authentically incorporate the audience’s skepticism without stopping the momentum entirely.
A Different Way to Rehearse
Since learning this principle, I’ve changed how I rehearse narrative structure. I run through a routine and try to verbalize the connections between each beat: “therefore… but… therefore… but… therefore.” If I get stuck saying “and then,” I know I haven’t built the structure correctly yet.
This is uncomfortable, because it often means recognizing that a section I’ve practiced extensively doesn’t have a structural purpose. It’s there because it’s cool, or because it escalates, or because I like it. But it doesn’t push the story forward in causal terms. It accumulates.
The fix is usually not to cut the section but to find the “but” or “therefore” that connects it to what came before and after. Sometimes that requires reordering. Sometimes it requires adding a small complication or a moment of apparent resistance. Sometimes it requires changing the framing of what the section is for — what does this phase do to advance the story, not just intensify the sequence?
Once you start thinking in “but” and “therefore,” the routines that were plateauing start to move. The audience stops watching and starts leaning.
The Broader Principle
What Dicks’ framework reveals, and what I’ve come to believe about performance in general, is that audiences are not passive recipients of content. They are active processors of narrative. They’re constantly asking, implicitly: where is this going? Why did that happen? What does that mean for what comes next?
“And then” routines don’t answer those questions. They just provide more content. The audience’s processing apparatus isn’t engaged because there’s nothing to process — just events arriving in sequence.
“But” and “therefore” routines give the audience something to do. They create questions and then answer them. They establish expectations and then complicate them. They make the audience feel like they’re following a developing situation rather than watching a demonstration.
That feeling — of following something that’s developing, of being inside a story rather than watching a sequence — is the fundamental difference between a performance that produces genuine engagement and one that produces polite attention.
The fix is almost always structural. Find the “but.” Build in the complication. Connect the sections with causal logic rather than chronological accumulation.
When you do, the middle stops plateauing. The whole routine gains a quality that’s hard to describe but easy to feel from the audience side: it feels like it had to go exactly the way it went. Like there was no other way it could have resolved. That inevitability is what great storytelling produces, and it comes from “but” and “therefore” doing their work in the right places.