There is a moment, roughly twenty minutes into any talking performance, when you can feel the audience’s processing power start to thin.
It is not boredom. It is not disengagement. It is cognitive fatigue. The audience has been listening, parsing language, following stories, reacting to jokes, tracking the logic of effects, and processing verbal information nonstop for twenty minutes. Their conscious minds have been working hard. And like any system under continuous load, they start to slow down.
I did not understand this for the first year of my performing life. I thought more talking meant more connection. More patter meant more personality. More words meant more entertainment. I was wrong, and a corporate event in Linz taught me exactly how wrong I was.
The Linz Show
It was a product launch for a tech company. About a hundred and twenty people. Good room, good lighting, good sound. I had a forty-five-minute slot, and I had prepared a forty-five-minute talking show. Every piece had a script. Every transition had a joke. Every effect had a story wrapped around it. I was proud of the material. I had rehearsed it exhaustively.
The first fifteen minutes were excellent. Strong reactions, genuine laughter, that feeling of a room that is fully with you. Minutes fifteen through twenty-five were solid but the energy had shifted. The laughs came a beat slower. The reactions were a touch more polite. Nothing alarming, but if you are paying attention — and performing teaches you to pay attention — you could feel the room cooling by a degree.
By minute thirty, the cooling was undeniable. The audience was still watching. Still responding. But something had changed in the quality of their attention. They were working to follow me, and working is not what an audience wants to be doing during entertainment.
I pushed through. More words, more stories, more jokes to try to re-energize the room. It was like pressing the accelerator when the engine is overheating. More fuel does not fix an exhausted system. It just makes the problem louder.
The show finished fine. Polite applause. The client was satisfied. But I drove back knowing the second half of my show had been a grind — for the audience and for me.
The Hans Christian Andersen Principle
A few weeks later, I was reading Scott Alexander’s notes on building a stand-up act, and I encountered a quote from Hans Christian Andersen that reframed everything: “Where words fail, music speaks.”
Alexander’s argument was simple and, to me, revelatory. In a forty-five-minute talking act, the audience — and the performer — need breaks from processing words. Two or three silent routines performed to music give the show textural variety, visual focus, and an emotional shift that no amount of clever scripting can achieve.
The key word is “break.” Not a break in the sense of an intermission where the lights come up and people check their phones. A break in the mode of processing. When the performer stops talking and music fills the room, the audience’s cognitive system shifts from verbal processing to visual and emotional processing. They stop parsing language and start absorbing imagery, movement, and feeling. It is the difference between reading a novel and looking at a painting. Both are engaging. But they engage different systems, and switching between them prevents either system from hitting its fatigue threshold.
I had been running my audience’s verbal processing system at full capacity for forty-five straight minutes and wondering why it overheated. The answer was not better words. It was fewer words, strategically placed.
My First Musical Piece
Adding a silent routine to music was one of the most uncomfortable decisions I made as a performer. I am a talker. My personality is built on conversation, stories, humor. Taking away my voice felt like taking away my primary instrument. It felt like performing with one hand tied behind my back.
The first piece I set to music was a visual effect that I had been performing with full patter — a routine where objects transformed in a way that the audience could follow visually. It did not need words. The magic was in what they saw, not in what I said. But I had always layered talking over it because talking was my comfort zone.
I stripped the patter. Found a piece of music that matched the emotional arc of the routine — building from quiet curiosity to dramatic revelation. Rehearsed the timing so the visual moments aligned with the musical peaks. And performed it for the first time at a private event in Salzburg.
The silence was terrifying. The first few seconds after the music started and I was not talking felt like standing naked on stage. Every instinct told me to say something, to fill the void, to connect through words. I had to actively resist the urge to speak.
But the audience did not experience a void. They experienced a shift. The room transformed. For the previous twenty minutes, they had been listening and watching simultaneously. Now they were only watching. Their full visual attention was on my hands, on the objects, on the transformations happening in front of them. And because they were not splitting their attention between my words and my actions, they saw things more clearly. The reactions to each visual moment were sharper and more immediate than they had ever been with patter.
When the music swelled and the final transformation happened, the applause was different from anything I had received in that show. It was not the appreciative applause that follows a good talking piece. It was the emotional applause that follows a moment that moved people. The music had done something my words could not — it had given the audience permission to feel rather than think.
The Performer’s Break
Here is something I did not expect: the musical piece was a break for me too.
Performing a talking act is exhausting. You are simultaneously tracking your script, reading the room, managing timing, making decisions about pacing, monitoring audience reactions, and adjusting your delivery in real time. Your conscious mind is running at maximum capacity for the entire duration of the show. A musical piece gives your verbal brain a rest. You still need to perform the effect with precision, but you are not generating language. You are not making split-second decisions about which joke to use or how to frame a transition. You are executing a choreographed sequence, and there is something almost meditative about it.
After my first musical piece, I noticed that the second half of my show was noticeably better than the second half had been before I added it. Not because the material was different. Because I was less fatigued. The two-minute musical break in the middle of the show had recharged my cognitive resources, and the patter that followed came out fresher, more spontaneous-sounding, more alive.
This makes perfect sense from the perspective of my consulting work. I have sat through enough strategic planning sessions to know that a ninety-minute session with two ten-minute breaks produces better thinking than a ninety-minute session with no breaks. The breaks are not lost time. They are the moments when the system recovers and resets. The same principle applies to performance. The musical piece is not dead time in the show. It is the moment that keeps the rest of the show alive.
Why Two or Three, Not Just One
After the success of my first musical piece, I experimented with adding more. Currently, my forty-five-minute show has two musical pieces, and when I do longer sets, I sometimes add a third. Here is what I have learned about the distribution.
One musical piece gives the show a single moment of tonal contrast. It is better than none, but it creates an asymmetric experience — a long block of talking, a brief musical interlude, then another long block of talking. The second talking block still suffers from the same fatigue issue, just delayed.
Two musical pieces divide the show into three talking sections, each short enough that the audience’s verbal processing does not hit its limit. The show feels like it has chapters with different moods. The contrast between talking and music, repeated twice, creates a rhythm that the audience can feel even if they cannot articulate it. It makes the show feel structured, varied, and intentionally crafted.
Three musical pieces, in a longer show, push the variety even further. But I have found there is a ceiling. If you do too many musical pieces, the talking sections start to feel like they are just connecting the musical numbers, and the show loses its conversational quality. For my forty-five-minute set, two is the sweet spot. For sixty minutes, three works well.
The placement matters as much as the number. I do not put both musical pieces in the second half of the show. I spread them out so the audience gets a break from verbal processing roughly every twelve to fifteen minutes. This is not a rigid formula — it shifts depending on the material and the room. But as a general principle, evenly spaced musical breaks keep the audience’s energy more consistent than clustered ones.
The Emotional Dimension
There is something else that happens when you add musical pieces to a talking act, and it is the thing I value most: emotional range.
A talking act, even a great one, tends to operate in a narrow emotional band. You can be funny, surprising, impressive, and warm through words. But music unlocks emotions that words cannot reach. A lyrical piece of music paired with a visual transformation can create a sense of beauty, melancholy, or wonder that would feel forced if you tried to create it through patter.
My show now has an emotional range it never had before. The talking sections are where I connect through humor, personality, and shared experience. The musical sections are where I connect through something deeper and less verbal — through imagery and feeling and the pure visual pleasure of watching something impossible happen in silence.
After one corporate show in Vienna, a woman came up to me and said something I will never forget. She said, “The funny parts were great. But the quiet part with the music — that was the one that stayed with me.” She could not articulate why. She just knew that the musical piece had reached her in a way the talking pieces had not.
That is not a failure of the talking pieces. It is a recognition that different modes of presentation reach different parts of the audience’s experience. A show that only talks is a show that only reaches the verbal mind. A show that mixes talking with music reaches the verbal mind and the emotional core. The combination is more than the sum of its parts.
What I Wish I Had Known
If I could go back to the Linz show — the one where the second half ground down into cognitive fatigue — I would change exactly one thing. I would take the effect at the twenty-minute mark, strip the patter, set it to music, and let the audience’s minds rest for two minutes before I started talking again.
That single change would have transformed the show. Not because the musical piece would have been the highlight, but because the talking that followed it would have landed on fresh ears and an audience with renewed processing capacity. The jokes would have been funnier. The reveals would have been more surprising. The energy would have stayed up instead of slowly draining away.
Words are my natural instrument. I love language, I love stories, I love the connection that comes from talking to an audience. But loving words means knowing when to stop using them. Knowing when to step back, let the music play, let the audience watch in silence, and let a different kind of connection happen.
Where words fail, music speaks. And sometimes, the smartest thing a talking performer can do is shut up and let the music do the work.