I performed the same thirty-minute set three times in one week. Same material. Same order. Same effects, same transitions, same scripted lines. The three audiences could not have been more different.
The first was a corporate awards dinner in Vienna. Two hundred people in a hotel ballroom. Post-dinner, post-speeches, post-awards. The audience had been sitting for three hours. They had eaten a four-course meal, drunk wine, and listened to a CEO give a forty-minute address about quarterly targets. By the time I walked on, their collective energy was somewhere around their ankles.
The second was a theatre audience in Graz. Eighty people who had bought tickets specifically to see a magic and mentalism show. They had arrived freshly, had not eaten a heavy meal, and were sitting in raked seating with good sightlines. Their attention was sharp and voluntary.
The third was an outdoor festival crowd in Klagenfurt. A mixed audience of all ages, standing, in daylight, with food vendors and music stages competing for their attention from every direction. Their engagement was conditional and could evaporate at any moment.
Same show. Three completely different pacing requirements. And I learned this the hard way, because I performed the first two shows at the wrong pace before I figured out what was happening.
The Vienna Dinner: Too Fast
The Vienna corporate dinner was the first of the three. I walked out with the energy I had been cultivating in recent months — tight structural pacing, no dead time, quick transitions, efficient setups. The kind of pacing I had been refining based on the TV news principle and the lessons about modern audiences processing information fast.
The audience could not keep up.
It was not that they were slow. They were tired. Their attention was not weak — it was depleted. Three hours of sitting, eating, and listening had consumed their cognitive reserves. What they needed was not efficiency. They needed warmth. They needed to be gently gathered up from wherever their minds had wandered and brought back into the room.
I did not do that. I hit them with my opening piece at full efficiency, and while the effect was strong, the reaction was muted. Not because the magic was not impressive. Because the audience had not yet arrived. They were physically present but psychologically still processing the CEO’s speech, the wine, the awkward table conversations during the awards ceremony. They needed thirty seconds of easy, gentle, human connection before they were ready for magic.
Instead, I gave them magic immediately, and the first piece — which should have been a strong opening — felt like it landed in an empty room.
I adjusted partway through the show, slowing down, adding more personal moments, giving the audience more time between effects. But the opening had set a tone, and recovering from a mismatched opening is like trying to restart a conversation after an awkward first impression. Possible, but harder than getting it right from the start.
The Graz Theatre: Too Slow
Two days later, the theatre show in Graz. I had learned from Vienna. The audience needed gentleness and patience. So I softened my approach. I opened with a warm personal story. I took my time. I gave pauses extra beats. I let the room settle into a comfortable, languid rhythm.
The theatre audience did not need settling. They were already there. They had chosen to be there. They had paid for tickets. They were sitting in proper theatre seating, focused and ready. And my gentle, patient opening felt, to them, like a performer who was not confident enough to start strong.
I could see it in their body language. They were leaning forward, ready for something to happen, and I was giving them a preamble. They wanted to be surprised, challenged, astonished. Instead, they were being warmed up — which is what the Vienna audience needed but exactly what the Graz audience did not.
The show recovered — it always recovers if the material is strong — but I had wasted two or three minutes at the top reading the wrong pace. Those minutes matter. They establish the audience’s expectations, and the wrong expectations require recalibration that costs momentum.
The Klagenfurt Festival: Just Right
By Klagenfurt, three days later, I had started to understand what was happening. The festival audience was different from both previous audiences, and this time I read them before I started.
The outdoor crowd was standing. Some had drinks. Some had children. The nearest food vendor was twenty meters away, and the competing music stage was close enough to hear during quiet moments. These people had no obligation to watch me. They were browsing. If I was interesting, they would stay. If I was not, they would drift to the next attraction.
This audience needed immediate impact. No preamble, no personal story, no gentle warmup. I opened with the most visual, striking thing I had, and I hit it within the first fifteen seconds of standing in front of them. The crowd that had been casually glancing in my direction suddenly locked on. They stayed because the opening earned their attention instantly.
From there, the pacing was fast but varied. Quick effects interspersed with moments of audience interaction that created investment. When I had a quiet moment — a mentalism piece that required concentration — I made it shorter than I would in a theatre and kept it visually engaging even during the setup. The transitions were essentially invisible. I never gave them a moment where they could look around and think, “Maybe the food vendor would be more interesting.”
That show was the best of the three. Not because the material was different, but because the pacing matched the audience.
Reading the Room Before You Start
Ken Weber makes a point in Maximum Entertainment that I did not fully appreciate until that week of three shows. He describes the technique of slowing down and lowering your volume when the audience drifts — the counterintuitive move of getting quieter to regain attention. But embedded in that advice is a deeper principle: the pace of your show should be determined by the audience in front of you, not by the show you rehearsed.
This seems obvious when stated plainly. Of course you should adjust to your audience. But in practice, most performers — including me, for much of my early performing life — develop a default pace and apply it to every audience. We rehearse at a certain tempo. We script our pauses. We time our transitions. And then we walk out and perform the show we rehearsed, regardless of who is sitting in front of us.
The show I rehearsed is not the show I should perform. The show I rehearsed is the raw material. The show I perform should be sculpted in real time based on who I am performing for.
The Signals
How do you read the room? Over the past few years, I have developed a mental checklist of signals that tell me what pacing an audience needs. These signals are available before the show starts and during the first sixty seconds of performance.
Before the show, I look at four things. How long has the audience been sitting? An audience that has been in their seats for three hours needs a different approach than an audience that just sat down. What have they been doing? If they have been listening to speeches, they are in passive-reception mode. If they have been socializing, they are in active-engagement mode. What is the seating configuration? Theatre-style seating with everyone facing forward creates focus. Banquet-style seating with round tables creates distraction. And what is the ambient energy? Is the room buzzing or subdued? Are people talking animatedly or sitting quietly?
During the first sixty seconds of performance, I watch for three things. Response latency — how quickly does the audience react to my first joke or surprising moment? A fast response means they are ready and I can push the pace. A slow response means they need warming up. Physical attention — are they facing me, are their phones away, are they making eye contact? And vocal energy — when they laugh or react, how loud is it? A quiet reaction does not mean they are not engaged, but it does mean the room needs calibration.
The Adjustment Toolkit
Once I have read the signals, I adjust. The adjustments are specific and practical.
For a depleted audience — the corporate dinner crowd, the post-conference audience, the late-night event — I slow my opening significantly. I start with a personal moment rather than a big effect. I make eye contact with specific people and speak to them directly, creating one-to-one connections before attempting one-to-many performance. I give my first effect extra breathing room, letting the audience catch up to the performance rather than demanding they meet me at full speed. And I use Weber’s slow-down technique throughout: when I feel the audience drifting, I lower my voice and reduce my pace rather than speeding up. The change itself is what re-engages them.
For an eager audience — the theatre crowd, the dedicated show attendees — I start strong and maintain a brisk structural pace. These audiences are ready. They want to be impressed. They have come with full attention tanks and they want you to challenge their capacity. With these audiences, the danger is not going too fast but going too slow. If you over-prepare them for an effect, they feel patronized. If you over-explain, they feel like you think they cannot keep up. Trust their intelligence and their readiness.
For a conditional audience — the festival crowd, the walk-up audience, the bar crowd — I lead with impact. Visual, immediate, undeniable. Something that interrupts whatever they were doing and gives them a reason to stay. With these audiences, you earn attention in five-second increments. Every five seconds, they are unconsciously deciding whether to keep watching or move on. Your pacing must make that decision easy, over and over, for the entire duration of the show.
The Corporate Dinner Paradox
I want to spend a moment on the corporate dinner audience, because it is the context I encounter most frequently in my keynote work, and it is the audience that presents the most complex pacing challenge.
The paradox of the corporate dinner audience is that they are simultaneously the most polite and the most disengaged audience you will ever face. They will sit quietly and clap at appropriate moments regardless of whether they are actually paying attention. This politeness is misleading. It can make you think the show is going well when, in reality, twenty percent of the room mentally checked out five minutes ago.
The polite non-attention of a corporate dinner audience requires specific pacing strategies. First, direct engagement. Get people involved physically — not just watching, but participating, responding, making choices. Participation forces attention in a way that passive viewing does not. Second, shorter pieces. A piece that runs seven minutes in a theatre should run four minutes at a corporate dinner. Not because the audience cannot handle seven minutes, but because their attention needs to be re-earned more frequently. Third, more frequent peaks. The peaks-and-valleys principle still applies, but at a corporate dinner, the valleys should be shallower and the peaks should come more often. The audience does not have the sustained attention for a long valley, but they will re-engage enthusiastically for each new peak.
Fourth, and this is the most important: be human first, performer second. The corporate dinner audience has been watching performances all night — the CEO’s performance of confidence, the sales director’s performance of optimism, the awards ceremony’s performance of recognition. They are tired of performances. What they want is a person. Someone real, someone warm, someone who acknowledges that everyone has been sitting here for a long time and that what comes next is going to be worth it.
That human opening — that moment of genuine connection before the magic begins — is the single most important pacing decision you make at a corporate dinner. It says, “I see you. I know you are tired. I am going to make this worth your time.” And from that moment of trust, you can take them anywhere.
The Universal Principle
Every audience tells you what it needs. Not in words. In energy, in body language, in response latency, in the quality of their attention. The performer who walks out with a fixed pace — a show that runs the same way regardless of who is watching — is like a conversationalist who speaks at the same volume and speed regardless of whether they are in a library or a nightclub. Technically they are saying the right words. Practically, they are failing to communicate.
Pacing is not a fixed property of your show. It is a variable that you adjust in real time based on the audience in front of you. This does not mean your show is different every time — the material is the same, the structure is the same, the effects are the same. What changes is the space between the moments. The breathing room. The tempo of transitions. The length of pauses. The warmth of the opening. The speed of the setups.
These adjustments are small. A few seconds here, a few seconds there. A slightly slower delivery in one section, a slightly tighter transition in another. But they are the difference between a show that fits the audience and a show that ignores them.
I learned this over the course of one week, performing the same set three times for three different audiences and getting it wrong twice. The lesson cost me two suboptimal shows. But what it gave me was something I could not have learned from any book: the understanding that the best show is the one that listens to the room before it starts talking.
The right pace is not a number. It is a relationship between performer and audience. And like all relationships, it requires attention, adjustment, and the willingness to meet the other person where they are.