How many people here have telekenetic powers? Raise my hand.

Emo Philips is an American stand-up comedian known for a deadpan, sing-song delivery and for jokes built on literalism, misdirection, and self-referential wordplay. This line comes from his stage act in which he riffs on paranormal or New Age topics by treating them with mock-serious logic. The setup mimics a performer polling an audience (“How many people here…?”), then undercuts it by claiming telekinesis while simultaneously revealing the speaker’s lack of it—he can’t even raise his own hand. The joke is typically delivered as a short one-liner within a sequence of similarly structured, absurd observations in live performance.

The humor hinges on a quick reversal: the speaker asks for a show of hands, but the punchline (“Raise my hand.”) shifts the request from the audience to an imagined telekinetic helper. It satirizes credulity about supernatural powers by presenting a would-be psychic who cannot perform even the simplest demonstration without outside assistance. The line also plays with the ambiguity of imperative speech—commands can be directed at others, but here the command is comically misdirected. More broadly, it exemplifies Philips’s persona: a narrator whose confident tone masks a fragile grasp on ordinary reality, turning a familiar audience-participation trope into a miniature absurdist sketch.