Shock and Awe: Being an Entertainer

When I perform in front of an audience I know that only 10% of the audience in front of me is going to have any sort of appreciation for the kind of skill or talent that I actually have.  I have performed with four clubs before and gotten a bigger reaction from doing four clubs then I have for doing a three club routine that includes extremely difficult tricks (five club level difficulty).  There is a huge difference between performing for a laymen audience and an audience of performers.  (There is a rather large set of problems within the fire performance community with this problem as often people will perform as if everyone was a performer).
There is a sense in which before I can be an artist I must be an entertainer first.  I have to entertain the audience.  Think of Monty Python, they make you laugh with slapstick and humor.  After you are being entertained they throw an intellectual micky into the concoction and often enough a lot of people who won't realize it,  but they do that after they have the rest of the audience engaged and enjoying themselves.
This is the same thing that we as entertainers have to do.  We need to create a sense of emotions, awe, or shock in the audience that is going to keep them engaged and enjoying themselves before we can create any form of "intellectual micky" (this is the point when we start calling ourselves artists).  But the thing is we need to create that emotional reaction.  Comedians do it with humor,  burlesquers often do it with lust,  other performers do it with blood and danger, there are many ways but they are necessary.
Now that being said,  there is a sense of novelty within many of these areas.  Just as our emotional reactions get lessoned each time we get exposed to something we lose a little bit of our reaction to it.  We lose a little bit of novelty.  Often enough illusionists will stop performing an effect when enough illusionists are doing a similar effect (even when the methods are radically different). 
So with these all being said then that makes a huge level of responsibility on the performer to be able to understand these things.  And to be able to accept the responsibility for these things as well.  That means that when an effect is widely known among the audience or potential audience, since only 10% of people are really going to care for the difficulty( since the novelty and emotional reaction has been lost) ;it isn't nearly as good as other effects as we could choose to use.  I encounter this when I choose to do say juggling,  say between doing a three cigar box routine (which is almost never done) and say contact juggling (say the words fushigi I dare you ).  I have to pick and choose because the audience that pays me is a laymen audience it isn't the other professionals.  Performing for other professionals is honestly "showing off" then anything else.