In the last post, I talked about my Clark Kent inventory — the uncomfortable exercise of filming my performances and cataloguing every moment where I leaked uncertainty on stage. Of all the findings in that audit, one category dominated: filler words.
Fourteen filler words in thirty minutes. That was the count from one performance. “Um” appeared six times. “Uh” appeared three times. “So” as a meaningless connector appeared twice. “Well” as a stalling device appeared twice. And one “like” — mercifully only one, but still.
Fourteen moments where my mouth broadcast to the audience: I am searching for what to say next. Fourteen tiny fractures in the illusion of command. Fourteen invitations for the audience to wonder, even for a microsecond, whether I knew what I was doing.
When I shared this count with a friend who does public speaking coaching, she laughed. Not at me — with a kind of sympathetic recognition. “Fourteen? That’s actually not bad for someone who hasn’t worked on it. I’ve counted forty in a twenty-minute corporate presentation.”
That did not make me feel better. Fourteen was fourteen too many.
Why Filler Words Are Toxic
The thing about filler words is that they are invisible to the person using them. I had no idea I was saying “um” six times in a performance until I watched the footage. In the moment, those syllables are not conscious choices. They are autonomic responses — the verbal equivalent of blinking. Your brain hits a gap between thoughts, and before you can stop it, your mouth fills the gap with noise.
The evolutionary logic is sound. In conversation, silence signals that you have finished speaking, which invites someone else to start. Filler words hold your turn. They say: I am not done yet, I am still formulating, please wait. In casual conversation, they are harmless and universal. Everyone uses them. Nobody notices.
On stage, the dynamics are completely different. You are not in a conversation. Nobody is going to interrupt you. The audience is not waiting for a gap so they can jump in. They are waiting for you to deliver something worth hearing. And every “um” and “uh” tells them that what is coming next has not been prepared, has not been rehearsed, is being assembled in real time.
Ken Weber makes the point sharply in Maximum Entertainment: a pause communicates confidence. A filler word communicates nervousness. The difference is not subtle. A performer who pauses between sentences projects command — they are so secure in their material that they can afford silence. A performer who fills every gap with “um” projects the opposite — they are afraid of silence because silence might reveal that they do not know what comes next.
The audience reads both signals instantly. They do not think about it consciously. They do not think “that performer said um, therefore they are unprepared.” It operates below the level of conscious analysis, in the same social-signaling system that reads body language, facial expressions, and vocal tone. Filler words register as uncertainty. Pauses register as control. The audience feels the difference even when they cannot articulate what they are feeling.
The Recording Revelation
The first step in my war on filler words was simple and painful: I recorded everything.
Not just performances. Practice sessions. Run-throughs in my hotel room. Even conversations where I was explaining effects to friends. I used my phone, propped up on a desk or a table, and I captured audio of myself talking through my material.
Then I listened back. With a pen and paper. Making tick marks every time a filler word appeared.
The pattern was immediately obvious. Filler words did not appear randomly. They clustered at specific points: transitions between effects, the moments after audience interactions where I needed to resume my scripted material, and anywhere I had to deliver information as opposed to narration. When I was telling a story, my speech was relatively clean. When I was giving instructions — “now take a card, any card, look at it, remember it” — the fillers multiplied.
This made sense once I thought about it. Storytelling engages a different part of the brain than instruction-giving. When you tell a story, you are recreating an experience, and the words flow from memory. When you give instructions, you are monitoring the audience’s comprehension while simultaneously delivering content, and the cognitive load creates gaps that your mouth fills with noise.
The other cluster was more revealing. Filler words spiked after anything unexpected: a laugh that was louder than anticipated, a spectator response that surprised me, an ambient noise that broke my concentration. The “um” was my brain’s reset button. Something jolted me out of my prepared flow, and the filler word gave me a fraction of a second to get back on track.
Understanding the pattern was the first step toward fixing it.
The Substitution Method
I tried several approaches to eliminating filler words. The first was pure willpower: just stop saying them. Think before you speak. Be conscious of every word.
This did not work. Filler words are too deeply embedded in speech patterns to be overridden by conscious intention during a performance. You can suppress them for a few minutes through sheer concentration, but the effort required steals attention from everything else — your effects, your audience management, your timing. It is like trying not to blink. You can do it briefly, but the effort makes you worse at everything else.
The method that actually worked was substitution. Instead of trying to eliminate the filler, I trained myself to replace it with something that communicates the opposite message.
The replacement is silence. A pause. A closed mouth.
This sounds trivially simple, and in concept it is. But in execution, it requires retraining a deeply embedded habit, and that takes a specific kind of practice.
Here is the drill I developed. I would stand in my hotel room — my eternal practice studio — and run through my material out loud. Every time I felt a filler word forming, I would physically close my mouth. Lips together. Jaw closed. The filler word dies in the throat because the mouth will not let it out.
The first few times I tried this, the pauses felt agonizingly long. Three seconds of silence, standing alone in a hotel room in Salzburg, mouth clamped shut, feeling like the gap was going to swallow me whole. My brain screamed at me to fill it. Say something. Anything. The silence is wrong. The silence is failure.
It is not. The silence is power. But my nervous system needed convincing, and convincing took weeks.
I practiced the drill for fifteen minutes every evening. Run through material. Close mouth at every gap. Hold the silence. Resume. Run through again. Close mouth. Hold. Resume. Over and over, building the neural pathway that connects “gap in speech” to “close mouth” instead of “gap in speech” to “say um.”
After about three weeks, something shifted. The pause started to feel natural. Not comfortable, exactly — silence on stage still requires a kind of discipline that casual speech does not. But natural. The pause became a choice rather than a void. I was not failing to fill a gap. I was choosing to let a moment breathe.
What the Audience Hears
The audience’s experience of a pause is radically different from the performer’s experience of the same pause.
To the performer, a three-second pause feels like an eternity. Time distorts under the spotlight. Every second of silence feels like five. The performer’s internal monologue during a pause is urgent, anxious: Is this too long? Do they think I forgot my line? Should I say something?
To the audience, that same three seconds is a moment of pleasant anticipation. The performer has paused, which means something is coming. The pause creates space for the audience to process what has just been said or done. It gives them a beat to catch up emotionally. It builds a small pocket of tension that the next sentence or action will release.
Ralphie May — whose stand-up masterclass I have studied closely — built an entire philosophy around this principle. His advice was direct: right before the punch line, pause. Just stop talking. The audience becomes anticipatory. They lean in. And when the line finally drops, it lands harder because the silence gave it weight. May pointed to Jack Benny as the master of this technique — a comedian who built an entire career on pauses, who could get a laugh from silence alone because the audience knew something was coming and the anticipation was funnier than any words could be.
The principle translates directly to magic performance. The moment before a reveal is the most powerful moment in any effect. And the most powerful thing you can do in that moment is nothing. Silence. Stillness. Let the anticipation build. Let the audience feel the weight of what is about to happen.
A performer who fills that moment with “so, um, now watch closely” has taken the most charged moment in the routine and drained it of power. A performer who holds silence in that moment has communicated that what is about to happen is so significant that it deserves a breath before it arrives.
The Recording Feedback Loop
After three weeks of nightly drill, I filmed another performance. Same format — thirty minutes, corporate audience, this time in Linz.
The count: four filler words. Down from fourteen. An improvement of roughly seventy percent, which in any consulting engagement would be cause for celebration.
But more importantly, the character of the performance had changed. The pauses — the replacements for the former filler words — gave the entire set a different quality. More deliberate. More controlled. More confident. The audience could not have known that I had been saying “um” ten more times three weeks earlier, but they could feel that this version of the performance had more weight, more authority, more command.
I kept filming. Kept counting. Over the next two months, the number dropped further: three, then two, then consistently one or zero on good nights. The filler words did not disappear entirely — they still resurface when I am tired, when the venue is challenging, when something genuinely surprises me. But they are no longer my default response to a gap in speech. The default is now the pause.
The Transition Problem
The hardest place to eliminate filler words, I discovered, was during transitions between effects. The moments where one routine ends and the next begins are the most cognitively loaded moments in any performance. You are resetting props, recalling the opening of the next script, reading the audience’s energy, adjusting your pacing — all simultaneously. It is in these high-load moments that the filler words are most likely to reappear.
My solution was to script the transitions. Not loosely — precisely. Every word between one effect and the next is written, memorized, and rehearsed. The transitions are, in some ways, more carefully prepared than the effects themselves, because the effects have their own internal structure that carries the performer forward, while the transitions are exposed — there is nothing happening except a person talking, and that is exactly where the filler words hide.
I wrote bridge sentences. Short, purposeful sentences that connect the theme of one effect to the theme of the next. “That was about perception. This next piece is about choice.” Clean, direct, no room for a stray “um” because every word is pre-determined.
This might sound rigid, and it is — initially. But once the transitions are memorized to the point of automaticity, they actually feel more natural than the improvised transitions they replaced. Because improvised transitions were never truly improvised. They were filler-word-laden fumbling disguised as spontaneity.
The Broader Lesson
I want to step back and say something about what this process taught me beyond the specific issue of filler words.
The elimination of “um” and “uh” and “like” was not really about those specific syllables. It was about accepting a principle that applies to every aspect of performance: the things you are not doing communicate as loudly as the things you are doing. Silence communicates. Stillness communicates. The absence of a filler word communicates confidence in a way that no positive action can replicate.
In my consulting life, I have given hundreds of presentations. I was considered a good presenter. But I was a good presenter by consulting standards, which means I was clear, organized, and well-prepared. By performance standards — by the standards of someone who stands in front of an audience with nothing but their presence and their material — I was sloppy. The filler words that were invisible in a boardroom were glaring under a spotlight.
The spotlight reveals everything. That is what makes performance such a demanding discipline. There is no table to hide behind, no slide deck to deflect attention, no Q&A format to share the burden of silence. It is just you, standing in front of people who are watching every movement, listening to every syllable, reading every micro-expression.
In that environment, “um” is not a neutral sound. It is a signal. And the signal it sends is: this person does not have complete control.
Replace it with silence, and the signal reverses: this person is so confident that they can afford to say nothing. This person is so prepared that they do not need to fill every gap. This person is, in a word, in command.
Fourteen filler words down to zero on a good night. It took about three months of deliberate, nightly practice. And the transformation it created in how audiences respond to my performances was more dramatic than any new effect I have ever added to my set.
The pause is not the absence of something. The pause is the presence of control. And control, as we are going to keep exploring in this series, is everything.