I want to tell you about the night I turned a thirty-minute show into a forty-five-minute ordeal, not because I had too much material, but because I had too many volunteers.
It was a corporate gala in Graz. About two hundred people. Dinner had ended, the energy in the room was good, and I had a solid thirty-minute set prepared. Six effects. Four of them involved audience participation. I had not thought twice about that ratio. Audience participation was the thing that made my show feel alive. Every time I brought someone on stage, the room leaned in. The volunteer’s friends cheered. There was a human connection that my solo pieces did not generate with the same intensity. So naturally, I wanted more of it. More volunteers, more connection, more life.
What I did not account for was time.
The Night That Ran Long
The first participation piece went beautifully. I called someone up, we had our moment, the effect landed, they went back to their seat glowing. Maybe four minutes including the transition time to get them up and back. No problem.
The second participation piece, eight minutes later, also went well. Another volunteer, another effect, another wave of energy. But this time I noticed the transition took longer. The volunteer was seated further back in the room. They had to navigate between tables. There was an awkward twenty seconds of waiting while they made their way to the stage. Then another twenty seconds of settling them in — where are you from, what do you do, the little social lubricant that makes a stranger feel comfortable standing next to you under a spotlight.
The effect itself ran its normal three minutes. Then getting them back to their seat. Another forty-five seconds. By the time I was alone on stage again, the participation segment had consumed nearly five minutes for three minutes of actual content.
The third participation piece is where the trouble started compounding. I brought up two people. Getting two strangers from two different parts of the room to the stage took almost a full minute. Settling both of them in, establishing names and a bit of banter — another minute. The effect itself was a mentalism piece that requires genuine interaction, so it ran four minutes. Then getting both of them back to their seats — another minute. Total elapsed time for one effect: roughly seven minutes.
By the fourth participation piece, I was already running over my allocated time. I knew it. The event coordinator, standing by the tech table, had started checking her watch. But I was committed to the material — I did not have an easy way to skip the piece without the set feeling incomplete.
The show finished at forty-five minutes. Fifteen minutes over. The audience was fine — they did not know or care about the schedule. But the event coordinator was not fine. The band that was supposed to start at nine-thirty started at nine-forty-five instead. The evening’s timeline was disrupted. And I left knowing that I had created a problem not through bad material, but through bad math.
The Math Problem
Here is what I learned that night, and what Scott Alexander captures perfectly in his notes on building a stand-up act: audience participation takes time. More time than you think. More time than you plan for. And if you do not account for that time with ruthless accuracy, your show balloons.
Alexander uses a line that has stuck with me ever since I read it. He points out that it takes time for someone to get from their seat to the stage and back again — and not every audience member moves quickly. Some are elderly. Some are in tight spaces between tables. Some are surprised and flustered by the invitation. Some have had a few drinks and need a moment to collect themselves. Every volunteer is a variable, and variables consume time.
Let me break down the math as I have come to understand it.
The transition to stage: getting someone’s attention, inviting them up, waiting while they navigate the room to the stage. On average, this takes thirty to sixty seconds. Sometimes less if they are in the front row and eager. Sometimes more if they are in the back and reluctant.
The settling-in period: introductions, small talk to put them at ease, maybe a light joke to get the audience engaged with this new person. Thirty to sixty seconds.
The effect itself: whatever you actually planned to do with this person. This is the only part you have rehearsed and timed. Three to five minutes, typically.
The transition back: thanking them, maybe a final joke, waiting while they navigate back to their seat. Twenty to forty seconds.
Total time per volunteer: five to eight minutes for an effect that runs three to five minutes in rehearsal. The participation overhead — the time that has nothing to do with the actual magic — ranges from two to three minutes per volunteer.
Now multiply that by four participation pieces. That is eight to twelve minutes of overhead. In a thirty-minute show, that overhead represents twenty-five to forty percent of your total time. This is the math I had not done before the Graz show, and it is the math that turned thirty minutes into forty-five.
Why More Feels Like More
The insidious thing about audience participation is that each individual piece feels like it adds energy. And it does. A participation piece creates a spike of engagement that a solo piece usually cannot match. The audience sees one of their own on stage. They empathize. They laugh at the volunteer’s reactions. They feel involved by proxy. It is the most powerful tool in a live performer’s arsenal.
But here is the problem: each spike comes with a trough. After the volunteer returns to their seat, there is a natural energy dip while the room resets. The audience has been focused on a specific person — their reactions, their embarrassment, their delight. When that person leaves the stage, there is a moment where the room’s attention needs to refocus on the performer. If you immediately launch into another piece, that transition is manageable. But if you immediately launch into another participation piece — calling someone else up, waiting for them to navigate to the stage, settling them in — the trough between spikes gets wider.
What I experienced in Graz was a series of energy spikes separated by increasingly long troughs. Each individual spike was great. The overall shape of the show was not. It was not a smooth arc of building energy. It was a jagged line with high peaks and low valleys, and the valleys kept getting deeper as the audience fatigued from the constant cycle of engagement and disengagement.
The Staggering Principle
After the Graz experience, I restructured my show around what I now think of as the staggering principle. The idea is straightforward: never put two audience participation pieces back to back. Always separate them with a solo piece or a musical number.
The solo piece serves multiple functions. It gives the audience a break from the cycle of “someone comes up, something happens, someone goes down.” It resets the room’s focus to the performer. It allows the next participation piece, when it comes, to feel fresh rather than repetitive. And critically, it controls the show’s timing — solo pieces run the same length every time because there are no variables. A five-minute solo piece always takes five minutes. A five-minute participation piece might take five minutes or might take eight, depending on the volunteer.
My current thirty-minute set has two participation pieces, separated by solo and musical material. My forty-five-minute set has three. In both cases, the participation pieces are strategically placed: one early in the show to establish connection, one in the middle to maintain energy, and — in the longer set — one near the end for a climactic moment.
This structure gives the audience the experience of participation without the fatigue of constant participation. They get the spikes of energy that come from seeing real people interact with the performer, but the spikes are separated by enough variety that each one feels special rather than routine.
The Three-Volunteer Maximum
I have also adopted a personal rule: no more than three volunteers in any show, regardless of length. This is not a universal principle — some performers work with more. But for my style of show, which blends mentalism, visual effects, and personality-driven comedy, three is the ceiling that keeps the balance right.
Here is the reasoning. Each volunteer needs to feel important. If you bring ten people on stage during a show, no single volunteer feels special. Their moment is one of many, indistinguishable from the others. But if you bring three people on stage, each one has a distinct role in the show’s narrative. The first volunteer is the one who helped establish the show’s energy. The second is the one who participated in the most interactive piece. The third is the one involved in the climax. Each volunteer has a story to tell their friends afterward — “I was the one who…” — and that story is more memorable because it was unique rather than one of a crowd.
There is also a practical consideration. Each volunteer is a risk. Not a dramatic risk — most audience members are cooperative and pleasant. But a pacing risk. A volunteer who talks too much extends the piece. A volunteer who is shy and quiet requires more energy from the performer to draw them out. A volunteer who has had too many drinks becomes a wildcard that can derail the entire segment. Three volunteers means three chances for a variable to throw off your timing. Ten volunteers means ten chances. The risk compounds.
What the Audience Does Not See
The audience does not see the math. They do not know that you have allocated six and a half minutes for the participation piece — three minutes for the effect, two minutes for transitions, ninety seconds for settling and banter. They do not know that the show is timed to the minute, that every solo piece serves a structural purpose, that the musical number between participation pieces is not just variety but a timing buffer.
What the audience sees is a show that feels effortless. A show where the participation moments arrive at just the right frequency — enough to feel inclusive and interactive, not so much that it feels like an exercise in calling people up and sending them back. A show where the energy builds rather than spikes and crashes.
This is the paradox of audience participation: the audience loves it most when they get less of it than you think they want. Three perfectly timed participation moments, each one a genuine highlight, each one separated by contrasting material, will create a more participatory-feeling show than eight participation moments crammed together. Because what the audience remembers is not the quantity of interaction. It is the quality of each interaction and the space around it that allows each one to breathe.
The Lesson I Keep Relearning
I still have to remind myself of this. Every time I design a new set, my first instinct is to add more participation. Because participation is fun. Because it is where the show comes alive. Because the connection between performer and volunteer is the thing that makes live magic irreplaceable.
But the discipline is in restraint. The discipline is in looking at the set list and asking: does this piece need someone on stage, or can it be just as effective with the volunteer staying in their seat? Does this segment require a new volunteer, or can I reuse the same person from earlier? Is this participation moment serving the show, or am I adding it because I enjoy the energy it creates?
The answers to those questions are what separate a show that runs on time and builds to a climax from a show that runs fifteen minutes over and leaves an event coordinator checking her watch. The heart of the show is audience participation. But too much heart, without structure around it, can kill the body.