There is a recording I made of one of my early performances — maybe eight months into performing seriously, at a private party in Vienna — that I occasionally revisit when I need a reminder of how far I have come and how far I still have to go.
The recording is thirty-two minutes long. I have timed it. In those thirty-two minutes, there are exactly four seconds of deliberate silence. Four seconds. The rest is wall-to-wall sound: words, instructions, patter, transitions, jokes, questions to the audience, and — filling every gap between these — filler words, throat-clearing, and the ambient noise of a performer who could not bear to let a moment pass without filling it.
I was terrified of silence. Not consciously. I did not think “I am afraid of silence” the way I might think “I am afraid of heights.” It was deeper than that — an instinctual response, wired into my performance habits from the very beginning. Silence meant I had forgotten something. Silence meant the audience was waiting and I was failing to provide. Silence meant death.
So I filled it. Every gap, every transition, every beat that should have been quiet was stuffed with sound. And the result was a performance that had no room to breathe. No moments of anticipation. No peaks and valleys. Just a flat, relentless stream of words and actions that gave the audience no time to process, no space to feel, and no opportunity to be anything other than passive recipients of a verbal avalanche.
The performance was technically competent. The effects worked. The audience was polite. But the experience was exhausting — for the audience and for me. Thirty-two minutes of unbroken output, and I walked off stage drained in a way that was not proportional to the material I had performed. I had worked twice as hard as I needed to, and the audience had received half the impact they should have.
The problem was not what I was doing. The problem was what I was not doing. I was not pausing.
The Fear Beneath the Filling
When I examined my fear of silence honestly, I found two fears underneath it.
The first was the fear of appearing unprepared. In my consulting life, a pause in a presentation often does signal uncertainty. “Let me think about that” is consulting code for “I do not have a ready answer.” I had internalized the association: silence equals ignorance. And I had carried that association onto the stage, where it did not apply but felt absolutely real.
The second fear was subtler: the fear of losing the audience. My mental model of performance, in those early months, was that the audience’s attention was a ball I was juggling. The moment I stopped throwing things into the air, the ball would fall. Silence was the moment of not-throwing, and in my imagination, the ball was crashing to the floor every time I stopped talking.
Both fears were wrong. But they felt true, and feelings override logic in the high-stakes environment of live performance.
The shift began when I encountered a passage in Ralphie May’s standup masterclass material that described the pause as the most underused weapon in a performer’s arsenal.
May’s Philosophy of the Pause
May’s teaching on pauses was direct, practical, and slightly aggressive — which was his style generally. His core principle was this: right before the punch line, stop talking. Just stop. Hold the silence for a beat. Let the audience sit in the space you have created.
What happens in that space is remarkable. The audience, which has been following the story or the setup, suddenly finds itself in a void. The performer has been providing constant input, and now the input has stopped. The brain registers the change and responds with heightened attention. Something is coming. The pause signals it. The silence becomes anticipatory, charged with the energy of what has not yet been delivered.
And when the punch line finally arrives — dropping into that charged silence — it lands with significantly more force than it would have if it had been delivered in a continuous stream. May claimed the technique could double your laughs per minute, and while that sounds like hyperbole, the underlying mechanism is sound.
May pointed to Jack Benny as the ultimate practitioner of the pause. Benny could stand on a stage, say nothing, and get a laugh. Not because his face was funny — although his timing was impeccable — but because the audience knew the setup and they knew the payoff was coming and the silence itself was the experience. The anticipation was the entertainment. Benny understood that what he withheld was more powerful than what he delivered.
This principle applies directly to magic. Perhaps even more directly than it applies to comedy, because magic depends entirely on moments of maximum impact — the reveals, the transformations, the impossibilities. These moments are the reason the audience is there. And every one of them is amplified by silence.
The Pause Before the Reveal
Think about what happens in the standard magic performance. The performer has set up an effect. The audience knows something is about to happen. They have been led through a narrative — a card was selected, a prediction was written, a coin was placed in a hand, whatever the setup requires. Everything points toward a moment of revelation.
In a performance without pauses, the moment arrives and passes in the continuous flow. “You selected the three of hearts, and if you look at the prediction I wrote before the show…” The reveal is embedded in a sentence, one event among many, given no more weight than the setup that preceded it.
In a performance with a well-placed pause, the same moment becomes seismic. The setup is complete. The performer stops talking. The performer stands still. Two seconds pass. The audience holds its breath because the silence has told them: what happens next is important enough to require its own moment. And when the reveal comes, it arrives not as part of a sentence but as an event. A singular thing that exists in its own space, surrounded by silence, given the weight it deserves.
The difference in audience reaction is not subtle. I have performed the same effect both ways — with and without the pause before the reveal — and the version with the pause consistently generates a stronger response. Not because the effect is different. Because the experience is different. The pause creates the conditions for impact.
Learning to Hold the Silence
Knowing that pauses are powerful and actually deploying them in performance are two entirely different things. The knowledge is intellectual. The deployment is emotional. And the emotions are working against you, because every instinct you have is telling you to fill the silence.
My practice method was systematic. I identified every moment in my set where a pause would serve the performance — before reveals, after key statements, during transitions — and I marked them in my script. Then I practiced holding them.
The first obstacle was duration. In my hotel room in Linz, a two-second pause felt like ten. My internal clock was completely unreliable. So I calibrated using a metronome app, one beat per second. I would reach a pause point and hold for two beats. Sometimes three. The metronome overrode my distorted sense of time.
After two months of deliberate practice, I could hold a four-second pause on stage, in front of a live audience, without my face betraying the internal scream of “say something, say something, say something.” Four seconds does not sound like much. But four seconds of absolute silence with an audience watching is a statement. It says: I am so confident in what comes next that I can afford to make you wait for it.
The Three Functions of the Pause
Through practice and performance, I have identified three distinct functions that pauses serve, and each requires a slightly different approach.
The first is the anticipatory pause — the pause before a reveal or a key moment. This is the pause May describes, the one that creates tension before the payoff. It works by establishing a gap between setup and resolution, and that gap fills with audience anticipation. The anticipatory pause should be clean: no movement, no facial change, just stillness and silence. The audience needs the pause to be empty so they can fill it with their own expectations.
The second is the landing pause — the pause after a reveal, after a key moment, after something significant has happened. This pause gives the audience time to process what they have just seen. It is the performer stepping back and letting the effect exist in the room. Without a landing pause, the performer tramples their own moment — they rush to the next thing before the audience has fully absorbed the current thing. The landing pause should be slightly longer than the anticipatory pause, because processing takes more time than anticipation.
The third is the breathing pause — the pause during transitions, between segments, at natural break points in the performance. This pause is not about anticipation or processing. It is about rhythm. It is the rest note in a piece of music. It gives the performance a shape, a texture, a dynamic range. Without breathing pauses, a performance is a monotone — all the same level, all the same intensity, with no variation. With them, the performance has peaks and valleys, moments of high energy and moments of quiet, a rhythm that the audience can feel even if they cannot describe it.
Fitzkee writes about the importance of efficient pacing and what he calls “precise attack” — the quality of a performance that wastes no time, that moves with purpose and economy. The breathing pause might seem to contradict this principle, but it does not. Efficiency is not speed. A pause that serves the rhythm of the performance is not wasted time. It is time invested in the audience’s experience. The performance that rushes through without pauses is not efficient — it is breathless. And breathlessness is its own kind of waste.
The Audience in the Silence
Something I did not expect when I started incorporating pauses was the change in the audience’s behavior during silence.
When a performer fills every moment with sound, the audience is passive. They are receiving a continuous stream of input and their role is to absorb it. There is no space for them to participate, even internally. They watch, they listen, they follow.
When a performer creates silence, the audience becomes active. In the silence, they think. They process. They anticipate. They imagine. They become participants rather than spectators, because the silence gives them cognitive space to engage with the material rather than simply receive it.
I noticed this first at a corporate show in Vienna. I had paused before a reveal — a good, clean three-second pause — and I saw something in the audience that I had not seen before. They were not just watching. They were involved. Their faces showed engagement, curiosity, investment. They were thinking about what might happen next. They were filling the silence with their own anticipation, their own guesses, their own emotional responses to the setup.
That is the secret function of the pause. It does not just communicate the performer’s confidence. It activates the audience’s imagination. The silence is an invitation: step into this space with me. Be part of this moment. Bring your own anticipation, your own wonder, your own emotional investment.
A performance without pauses is a monologue. A performance with pauses is a dialogue — even though the audience never speaks. Because the silence gives them room to participate in the experience, and an audience that participates is an audience that cares.
What Silence Says
I want to end with what I consider the deepest truth about the pause, the one that has most profoundly changed how I think about performing.
Silence does not say “I have nothing to offer.” Silence says “what I have to offer is so valuable that it deserves its own moment.”
Silence does not say “I have lost control.” Silence says “I am so in control that I can afford to do nothing.”
Silence does not say “I am afraid.” Silence says “I am confident enough to let this moment breathe.”
Every great performer I have studied — in magic, in comedy, in keynote speaking, in music — uses silence as a tool. The best ones use it as their primary tool. They understand that what you withhold creates more impact than what you deliver, that the space between notes is what makes music, that the gap between setup and payoff is where the audience’s experience actually lives.
I started as a performer who was terrified of silence. I am becoming a performer who weaponizes it. The transformation is not complete — it may never be complete. But the direction is clear, and every performance confirms it.
The pause is power. The silence is strength. And the performer who can stand on a stage, in front of an audience, and choose to do nothing — to hold the moment, to let the silence build, to trust that the audience will wait — that performer has achieved something more impressive than any effect in their repertoire.
Control every moment. Including — especially — the moments where nothing happens.
Those are the moments that matter most.