There was a period when I was deeply invested in being distinctive. Not just competent — different. Every choice I made in constructing routines was filtered through a question: is this original? Does it set me apart? Have I done something here that marks this as specifically mine?
The result was performances that were, objectively, trying too hard. You could feel the effort. Not the effort of skill — the effort of cleverness. Things were more complicated than they needed to be, because simple felt unoriginal. Choices were more baroque than the material required, because straightforward felt derivative.
Keith Johnstone identified this pattern so precisely in Impro that I felt personally seen in a mildly embarrassing way. The need to be original, he argues, is one of the primary obstacles to genuinely interesting work.
Why Originality as Goal Fails
Johnstone developed his insight about originality through running improvisation workshops. He observed that actors who were trying to be original consistently produced boring scenes. Their choices were unexpected but not resonant. Surprising but not true. The effort to avoid the obvious response produced responses that were merely unusual rather than genuine.
Meanwhile, actors who committed fully to the first, obvious response — the thing that came to mind before the internal censor intervened — consistently produced more interesting scenes. Their responses were predictable in retrospect but surprising in the moment. They felt inevitable, which is the quality good storytelling has.
The paradox is that the obviously authentic response is more surprising than the deliberately unusual one. Because genuinely authentic responses are actually rare. Most people in performance situations aren’t being authentic — they’re being strategic, managed, calculated. Authenticity, when you encounter it, reads as startling.
The Internal Censor
What Johnstone calls the internal censor is the voice that evaluates your first impulse before it becomes action. In ordinary social life, this censor is valuable — it stops you from saying the first thing that comes to mind when the first thing that comes to mind would be inappropriate or destructive.
In creative and performance contexts, the same mechanism becomes an obstacle. The censor kills the good ideas along with the inappropriate ones. Specifically, it kills the obvious good ideas — the responses that feel too simple, too conventional, too uncreative — in favor of more elaborate alternatives that have the advantage of seeming more original but lack the advantage of being true.
I recognized this pattern in my own creative process. When I was working on patter for a routine, I’d frequently have an immediate response to what the situation called for — something direct, something with a genuine emotion in it — and then the censor would activate. Too simple. Too obvious. Hasn’t this kind of line been done before?
So I’d develop something more complicated. More clever. More unexpected.
And it would be less alive.
The Cleverness Problem in Magic
There’s a specific version of this problem that shows up in magic performance and is worth naming directly.
Cleverness, in a magic context, tends to manifest as routines or presentations that prioritize the ingeniousness of the construction over the human experience of the effect. The performer is more interested in demonstrating how interesting and original they are than in creating a genuine experience for the spectator.
The audience can feel this distinction. Not always consciously, but in their emotional response to the performance. Clever magic impresses in a particular way — it makes you slightly aware of the performer’s pride in their own invention. Genuine magic makes you forget about the performer entirely and simply have an experience.
The route to genuine magic usually runs through simple, not complicated. Direct, not baroque. The effect that is clearly about one thing, pursued honestly, lands harder than the effect that is clearly about the performer’s creativity.
This doesn’t mean never take creative risks. It means don’t mistake complexity for originality. The simplest version of a genuine idea is almost always more powerful than the most elaborate version of an idea you’ve forced to seem original.
What Happens When You Drop It
I had a specific experience that crystallized this for me. I was developing a new presentation for a mentalism effect I’d been doing for a while. I had a version that was reasonably clever — it had a narrative frame that I’d spent time building, a sequence of reveals that were ordered for maximum surprise, some specific language that I was proud of.
And I had an earlier instinct I’d discarded: just ask them a simple question at the beginning and let that thread run through the whole thing. Too simple. Too direct. Not original enough.
I tried the discarded version in a rehearsal setting. It was better. Considerably better. The simplicity created room for the audience to feel things. The clever version had been filling all that room with my choices, leaving no space for their experience.
The simpler approach also left me freer in performance. I wasn’t managing an elaborate structure. I was following a genuine thread, responding to what actually happened, trusting the basic premise to carry the weight.
The result was a performance that felt more spontaneous, more present, and more connected — not because I’d worked harder but because I’d stopped working against the material.
Trust the First Response
The practical implication of Johnstone’s insight is deceptively simple: trust the first response more. Not always — sometimes the first response genuinely isn’t the best one, and reflection is valuable. But far more often than the internal censor would have you believe, the first response is the honest one, and the honest one is the right one.
For me, this has meant building a practice of capturing first responses before evaluating them. When I’m working on material and something comes to mind, I write it down before I assess it. This delays the censor’s veto. Frequently, looking at it later with some distance, the first response is better than I thought it was in the moment when the censor was active.
It’s also meant developing some tolerance for the discomfort of doing things that feel too simple. The too-simple feeling is the censor’s alarm system. It’s not a reliable guide to whether something is actually good — it’s a signal that you’re doing something that feels risky, that doesn’t have the armor of cleverness around it.
The performances that have connected most powerfully with audiences have consistently been the simpler ones. Not the most elaborate, not the most clever, not the most visibly original.
The ones where I trusted the obvious move, committed to it fully, and let it do its work without interruption.
Originality as Byproduct
Here’s the actual relationship between authenticity and originality, as Johnstone articulates it: if you follow your genuine responses fully, you will be original automatically. Because your genuine responses are yours — they come from your specific history, your specific way of seeing things, your specific aesthetic sense. Nobody else has exactly your combination of all these.
Originality that arrives as a byproduct of genuine expression is real originality. It’s indistinguishable from you. Originality that’s pursued directly tends to be superficial — different for the sake of being different, which is not the same thing as being authentically distinctive.
The paradox is that the path to genuine distinctiveness runs through authenticity, not through the deliberate pursuit of originality.
Stop trying to be original. Start trying to be honest.
The originality will take care of itself.
From originality to something closely related: what happens when the audience doesn’t follow the script? When a volunteer says something unexpected, or the moment goes sideways? Johnstone’s improv framework has a direct answer, and it’s one of the most useful things I’ve taken from any performance source.