Aligning with recent sociolinguistic interest in bodies and affects, this paper analyses the interweaving of “affective practice” (Wetherell, 2013) and “epistemic practice” (Kelly, 2008) by “celebrity tutors” (i.e., famous private tutors) in Hong Kong’s commodified shadow education. I use Bell and Gibson’s (2011) notion of “staged performance” to understand tutors’ teaching as enacted for, rather than simply to, the student audience. Drawing on a 17-episode tutoring talent show that supplies both interactional and metapragmatic data, I employ critical epistemic discourse analysis (van Dijk, 2011) to examine the construal of knowledge and expertise by tutors. I argue that tutors’ “effective” teaching hinges on their ability to establish affects. The management of the body in various ways emerges as key in such affective-epistemic performance. In the interactional data, tutors refer to their own bodies, as well as others’, to teach. This involves moving their hands in a specific way and explicitly asking students to follow in order to teach them how to recite a particular word. Tutors also make fun of their own bodies (e.g., pointing to their chubby belly) as they explain examination skills. While teaching playfully enhances students’ enjoyment of the lesson, the embodied experiences as described also lead students to “feel” that they are learning something from the tutors. The latter is also topicalised in the metapragmatic discourses surrounding tutors’ expertise. It is mentioned that tutors are expected to never stop talking even when they are writing or drawing diagrams since their sustained audio input makes students feel that someone is guiding their knowledge. The research illuminates the linguistic and semiotic characteristics of the wordsmithery (Thurlow, 2019) of professional social actors against the backdrop of the increasing influence of the market (and in our case, the demand for performativity, i.e., good results, in high-stakes testing).