“Be careful not to compromise what you want most for what you want now.” Zig Ziglar.

This quote popped into my head recently when sitting backstage after one of the worst gigs of my professional career. I’m not sure where I first read the quote. It was probably in some goofy book about sales I read as a teen, more geared toward selling Bibles door to door than booking magic shows, but anyway…

I performed at a corporate event. It was the standard show I had spent 18 years slowly and carefully building. This is a show that I’m at least a little confident in presenting to a group. To put it lightly, I took a severe cock stomping from this audience.

Everything about this event was off. The audience was exhausted. I clearly didn’t connect with them for any number of reasons. They didn’t like my music. They didn’t like my suit. The venue opened up into an active casino, so nobody could hear anything. They didn’t want to see my subversive, “clever” Spirit Bell routine, and for sure nobody wanted to cut my sock off. They didn’t want to play, especially with me. They wanted the free drinks and their piece of literal silver bullion that the event organizers were giving them for their hard work… and their $5,000 registration fee. So they were kind enough to sit through my skit. The show normally takes 60 minutes to get through, and if we’re really having fun, a little more than that. That night it took 38 minutes, and 5 minutes in, I prayed for death.

I walked offstage and immediately started spiraling. I doubted all the work I had put into the material I had. Why was it that, this far into performing magic professionally, I did not have “the show that could be done for any audience”? How was it that a handful of times in my life, I had bombed in very similar ways? Why hadn’t I just created a more vanilla show with safe, stock tricks that I could do “anywhere”? Plenty of others had done it and probably made a ton of money doing so. Growing up, I had always heard the advice that if you don’t swear, dress nicely, and do good magic, you can work for any audience. I felt like my lifelong issues with “rules” and “authority” had finally caught up to me at 29. I had a bit of a meltdown.

My entire life, it has always bothered me that, somehow, magic as a medium is sometimes seen as a social Band-Aid for events. Safe entertainment. I think that because of this, a lot of magicians end up creating material for the sake of pleasing others. Not creating for any particular taste in mind. Certainly not their own. Just “everyone”. I think it’s fair to say that most Pixar movies have stronger, more opinionated views of the world than most corporate magicians’ shows. The word “safe” is featured on a massive number of magicians’ websites. I’m not saying that everyone should be creating some sort of anarchist counterculture sideshow. I just think we could all benefit by not bending to please every single human on the planet.

All the things that I love or that inspire me to live the life that I do don’t live in every space. The bands I like, the paintings I like, and the movies I really connect with are certainly not always things that have broad appeal. The art on the t-shirts in Target is probably not changing anyone’s life. It’s just safe enough to sell millions of shirts. Those shirts usually end up in landfills and not MOMA. If you make art for “everyone,” you’re probably not going to make art that shakes people up either positively or negatively.

Cruises were a rough market for me at the beginning because I wanted to build the show that would lead to things that weren’t cruises. This means that the (sometimes) ultra-vanilla cruise market saw what I was doing as a little taboo. I wasn’t opening with a bowling ball from a pad and closing with a snowstorm, so some entertainment directors didn’t get it. I would open with a gag that involved a “failure,” and I got a comment card one of my first weeks that said, “He screwed up every trick he did.” Turns out they heard the spectator say “nope” in the first gag and left the theater immediately to complain.

Trying to please people like those passengers is a common trap that acts fall into while at sea. They make a show that will never get a single complaint and leave everyone totally content, but that show usually flounders in hipper venues on land. It was incredibly hard for me not to get off the ship in Seattle and buy everything to do with Bill in Lemon and Tossed Out Deck before getting back on. I’m glad I lived through a few more years of sometimes tough shows without doing so.

I believe there are ways for us to modify small things to make certain events work without totally throwing away your original voice and vision. One thing I’ve done actively is reorder the show so a more digestible thing happens earlier. Hopefully that builds more trust, and now we can connect and maybe take them further on the ride I set out to take.

Building trust is something I have to do very actively, even on a small scale in a short set. I still have plenty of “failure” moments, silence, and awkwardness that I use to my benefit, but I can ease them into that by making sure they trust me at least a bit. I make friends, then I can pivot into something where I push limits. Putting my foot on a guy 8 minutes in doesn’t work for an awards dinner, but it does work for the alt circus show I’m in. If I structure the evening with intent, I can still put my foot on a dude, but I give it 40 minutes of relationship building.

I talked to my friend and incredible artist Jay Gilligan while spiraling about all of this. He used the analogy “playing rap at a country music show.” It fits perfectly. It’s not that one style is wrong or worse. Humans have preferences. Some people will like one and not the other. Some will like both but prefer one. Sometimes that preference changes day to day. Some folks don’t want rap at a funeral but love it in the car.

What’s important is seeing both for what they are and not making watered-down, bland music that tries to please everyone. In some cases, playing rap at a country show and having it bomb is almost proof the rap artist is doing something right. Not always, but sometimes. The art needs a spine. It can’t be softened to dodge every possible complaint. Lean into what makes your work distinct. Stay true to the original goal.

“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.” It might sound like a generality, but it’s accurate. And it helps to actually think about why it’s accurate.

So what am I supposed to do when one family in a crowd of 1300 sits with their arms crossed and doesn’t laugh? Or I get a mean comment on a TV performance? Or some redneck garage door repair company’s annual dinner doesn’t like my little magic show? I press on. That’s all I can do.

After some time to think about what happened, why it happened, and what I’m willing to change, I have to keep moving. It’s easy to say this. It feels hard in the moment. When you’re making original work, it feels like it’s really you out there. It’s personal. When someone hates it, it’s not a character they dislike. It’s a real person. It stings. But you can’t dwell on it.

Stay focused on the real goal. When it all lines up, and you present your most genuine work to the right people, the feeling is indescribable. A vanilla show built to please everyone never gets you that. Make work that’s real. Show it proudly. Your crowd will find you.

I’ve changed my goals in magic a lot over the last few years. Right now, one of the biggest accomplishments for me would be to do a show where someone walks away saying the magic-show equivalent of “I wanted shrimp. I got some other foods I had never heard of, and it was one of the best meals I’ve ever had.”