Let me tell you about the night my thirty-minute show became a forty-five-minute show, and nobody asked for the extra fifteen minutes.
It was a corporate event in Graz. About sixty people, post-dinner, the kind of audience that has had enough wine to be generous but not so much that they have lost the ability to follow a narrative. I had been performing my restructured set — the one I had spent months rebuilding using the four-part structure, with an opener that established credibility, a personality piece that built connection, and a closer that was meant to bring the house down.
The middle section was new. I had decided, after reading Scott Alexander’s work on show construction, that the middle of the show is where audience participation lives. It is the heart of the performance, the section where you move from “me performing for you” to “us experiencing something together.” Alexander is emphatic about this: audience participation is not decoration. It is the engine of the show’s middle section, the thing that transforms a demonstration into a shared experience.
I believed him. I still believe him. He was right about that.
What he also warned about — and what I did not take seriously enough until that night in Graz — is that audience participation is a pacing killer if you are not careful about how you manage it.
The Fifteen-Minute Catastrophe
My plan for the middle section was straightforward. Three routines, two of which involved audience volunteers. The first volunteer routine was a mentalism piece where someone from the audience would join me on stage, make some choices, and experience something impossible. The second was a visual piece near the end of the middle section that required a different volunteer to hold something and react.
On paper, the timing was clean. Each routine was scripted to about five minutes. Three routines, fifteen minutes for the middle section, total show time thirty minutes. I had rehearsed the routines dozens of times. I knew the pacing cold.
What I had not rehearsed — what I had no way of rehearsing — was the reality of getting actual human beings from their seats to the stage and back again.
The first volunteer was a woman in her sixties. Lovely person. Enthusiastic. The kind of audience member who lights up when you make eye contact. When I invited her to join me, the audience clapped warmly. She stood up, gathered her purse, apologized to the person whose legs she had to step over, adjusted her chair so it would not block the aisle, walked to the stage at a pace that can only be described as deliberate, and then needed a moment to find the step up to the raised platform we were using.
Ninety seconds. Ninety seconds of dead time before the routine even started.
I had planned for maybe fifteen seconds. Walk to stage, step up, smile, begin. In my rehearsals, using an imaginary volunteer who existed only in my head, the transition was seamless. In reality, it was a small eternity during which the audience’s energy slowly leaked out of the room like air from a punctured balloon.
The routine itself went beautifully. She was a wonderful participant, expressive and genuine, and the audience loved her. But then the routine ended, and I needed her to return to her seat. More applause. A moment of “which way do I go?” Some laughter as she pretended to want to stay on stage. Walking back. Sitting down. Settling.
Another sixty seconds.
Then the second routine — no volunteer, just me. Fine. Pacing recovered somewhat. But then the third routine, which needed a different volunteer, and the entire process repeated itself. A different person, a different set of obstacles between seat and stage, a different tempo of movement, a different personality bringing its own rhythm to the transition.
By the time I reached the closer, my thirty-minute show had consumed thirty-eight minutes, and the audience was showing the subtle signs of fatigue that I had learned to recognize. The checking of watches was not quite furtive enough to be invisible. The shifting in seats had become more frequent. The energy that had been buoyant twenty minutes ago was now merely polite.
I performed my closer. It landed. But it did not land the way it should have, because the momentum that should have been building through the middle section had been bled out by the logistical reality of moving human beings through physical space.
What I Call Grandma Time
After that Graz show, I sat in my hotel room and did what I always do after a performance that did not go the way I planned: I took notes. I mapped the entire show on a timeline, marking every transition, every volunteer movement, every moment of dead air.
The problem was immediately obvious. I had budgeted zero time for what I now think of as “grandma time” — the minutes that evaporate when real people interact with the physical reality of a performance space.
Getting someone out of their seat takes time. Finding the aisle takes time. Walking to the stage takes time. Stepping up onto a platform takes time. Figuring out where to stand takes time. Adjusting to the lights and the microphone and the strange sensation of sixty pairs of eyes focused on you takes time.
None of these things are fast. And none of them can be rushed without making the volunteer feel pressured, which is the opposite of what you want. The volunteer is your guest, not your prop. If you hurry them, the audience feels it. The warmth curdles into something uncomfortable.
So the time is real. It is non-negotiable. And if your show plan does not account for it, your show will run long, and every minute over your planned time comes directly out of your closer’s impact.
The Rules I Built
Over the next several months, I rebuilt my middle section around a set of rules that I developed through trial and error. Each rule is a response to a specific mistake I made in front of a live audience.
The first rule is the simplest: if you do not need them on stage, leave them in their seat. A remarkable number of audience participation routines can be performed with the volunteer remaining seated. They hold something up. They make a choice. They call out a number or a word. The effect happens right where they are, surrounded by their friends, with no need for anyone to walk anywhere.
This is almost always better than bringing them on stage, for two reasons. First, it eliminates transition time entirely. Second, it keeps the volunteer in their comfort zone. People are much more natural and expressive when they are sitting next to someone they know than when they are standing alone on a stage under a spotlight. Their reactions are bigger, their laughter is louder, their genuine surprise is more visible to the people around them.
I reserve bringing someone on stage for moments where it is genuinely necessary — where the effect requires physical proximity, or where the staging demands that the audience see the volunteer’s face during a critical moment. And even then, I have learned to choose my moments carefully.
The second rule is to stagger participation with solo pieces. Never follow one volunteer routine with another volunteer routine. The audience needs time to recover from the heightened energy of participation, and the show needs time to rebuild momentum before asking anyone else to give up the safety of their seat.
My current middle section follows a pattern: solo piece, volunteer piece, solo piece, seated participation piece. The solo pieces reset the pacing. They give me control of the rhythm again. They are tightly scripted, rehearsed to the second, and I can accelerate or decelerate them to compensate for however much time the volunteer pieces have consumed.
The third rule is to keep stage time brief. When someone does come up, the routine they participate in should be concise. Not rushed — there is a difference. But lean. Every moment they are on stage should serve the effect. No extended patter while the volunteer stands there looking awkward. No lengthy setups that could have been done before they arrived. Get them up, involve them immediately, make the magic happen, and send them back as a hero.
Alexander talks about this. The volunteer should feel like a star, not a stagehand. Their time on stage should be the highlight of their evening. And the way to ensure that is to make every second of their presence purposeful and impactful, rather than stretching it out until the purpose thins and the impact fades.
The fourth rule — and this is the one I learned last and value most — is to build the transition into the entertainment. The walk to the stage does not have to be dead time. You can talk to the volunteer as they approach. You can ask them questions. You can make observations. You can do bits. The audience is watching the volunteer anyway, so give them something to watch that is engaging rather than empty.
I started developing transition patter — light, warm, conversational material that fills the gap between “please come up” and “you are standing next to me.” Questions about their name, where they are sitting, whether they were warned this might happen. Simple stuff, but it keeps the energy alive during the walk and makes the volunteer feel welcomed rather than processed.
The Balance
The deeper lesson here is about balance. Audience participation is the most powerful tool in the middle section of a show. When it works, it creates moments of genuine connection that no solo performance can replicate. The audience sees one of their own up there, sharing an impossible experience, and they project themselves into that person. They feel the magic more intensely because someone just like them is feeling it first.
But participation is also the most dangerous tool in the middle section. It introduces variables you cannot control. The volunteer’s personality, their walking speed, their comfort level, their willingness to play along, their tendency to try to be funnier than you — all of these factors are unknown until the moment they unfold, and any one of them can derail your carefully built pacing.
The solution is not to avoid participation. That would be like solving a weight problem by avoiding food. The solution is to manage participation with the same precision you apply to every other element of your show.
Know exactly how much time each volunteer segment will take — and add ninety seconds for reality. Know exactly where in the set your participation moments fall, and make sure they are buffered by material you can expand or contract to stay on time. Know how to read the room during participation: if the volunteer is energetic and the audience is loving it, you can let the moment breathe. If the volunteer is nervous or the energy is flagging, you compress and move.
What the Middle Is Really For
The middle of the show is not just a collection of routines between the opener and the closer. It is the section where the relationship between performer and audience transforms. In the opener, you established credibility. In the personality piece, you established humanity. In the middle, you establish partnership.
Audience participation is how that partnership is made tangible. When someone from the audience stands with you, holds something, makes a choice, experiences something impossible — they are not just volunteering. They are representing the entire audience. Their experience becomes the audience’s experience. Their astonishment becomes the audience’s astonishment. Their laughter becomes the audience’s laughter.
This is why the middle matters so much, and why getting the pacing right is so critical. If the participation drags, the partnership feels forced. If the participation is rushed, the partnership feels shallow. But if the participation is warm, well-timed, and purposeful — if the volunteer feels like a guest and the audience feels like they are all part of the same experience — then the middle section does something no amount of solo performance can achieve.
It makes the audience feel like the show belongs to them. Not just to the performer. To them.
And when the closer arrives — when the show builds to its mountaintop moment — the audience is not just watching. They are invested. They are partners. They are ready to go to the mountaintop together, because the middle section taught them that this show is a shared journey, not a one-man demonstration.
That is worth the extra ninety seconds. That is worth the careful planning and the transition patter and the constant recalibration. That is worth learning, the hard way, in a conference room in Graz, that real people do not move at rehearsal speed.
They move at their own speed. And the show that accommodates them — that welcomes them into its rhythm rather than demanding they match yours — is the show that earns the right to take them somewhere extraordinary.