There is a question that every performer who uses audience participation needs to answer honestly, and it is a question that most of us avoid because the honest answer is uncomfortable.
How long is too long for a volunteer to be on stage?
The uncomfortable answer, which I arrived at through a series of increasingly painful experiments, is: shorter than you think. Much shorter. And the reason most performers misjudge this is that they experience time on stage differently from the way the audience experiences it.
The Innsbruck Experiment
About a year into adding audience participation to my shows, I performed at a corporate awards dinner in Innsbruck. Beautiful venue, maybe a hundred and fifty people, good energy. I had a mentalism piece that required a volunteer, and the piece, as I had rehearsed it, ran about six minutes with the volunteer on stage.
Six minutes does not sound like a long time. In rehearsal, alone in my hotel room, running through the patter and the beats, six minutes flew by. The piece had a nice arc — an introduction, a building sequence of apparently reading the volunteer’s thoughts, a dramatic pause, and a climax where something they had been thinking about was revealed in an impossible way. Clean structure. Good pacing. Six minutes.
On stage in Innsbruck, with an actual human being standing next to me, six minutes was a lifetime.
Here is what I did not account for. In rehearsal, the volunteer was imaginary. They responded on cue, said the right things, reacted exactly as I scripted them. In reality, the volunteer was a middle-aged accountant named — I think — Werner. Werner was nervous. Werner answered questions slowly. Werner needed me to repeat instructions. Werner, bless him, wanted to be helpful and started telling stories about each answer he gave, adding context and detail that I had not asked for and did not need.
None of this was Werner’s fault. He was a delightful person doing his best in an unfamiliar and slightly terrifying situation. But every additional second he spent on stage was a second the piece stretched beyond its intended rhythm. And every stretched second was visible in the audience’s body language.
At the three-minute mark, the audience was fully engaged. At the four-minute mark, I noticed a few people shifting in their seats. By five minutes, there was a tangible sense that the piece was going on too long. And by the time I reached the climax at minute six and a half, the reveal — which should have been the emotional peak — landed on an audience that was ready for it to be over rather than eager to see what happened next.
The reveal was strong. If I had gotten there ninety seconds earlier, it would have been a showstopper. But those ninety seconds of accumulated drag had bled the tension from the room. The audience applauded, but it was the applause of relief rather than astonishment.
The Grandma Test
After the Innsbruck show, I went back to Scott Alexander’s notes on pacing audience participation, and a concept jumped out at me that I had previously skimmed over. Alexander talks about thinking of the slowest person in your audience when you design participation segments. If the slowest person — the most distracted, the most fatigued, the oldest, the least engaged — would find the pace comfortable, then you are in the right zone.
I call this the Grandma Test, and it has become one of my most reliable pacing tools.
The idea is simple. Imagine the volunteer on your stage is someone’s grandmother. She is wonderful. She is charming. But she moves at her own pace, processes information at her own speed, and does not respond to your questions with the snappy timing you rehearsed in your hotel room. If your participation segment works at her pace — if it stays engaging and doesn’t drag even when the volunteer is slow, uncertain, or talkative — then it will work with anyone.
This is a conservative approach. But the audience’s experience is defined by the weakest moment, not the average. The moment the room starts to feel that the volunteer has been on stage too long is the moment that defines the segment. Everything before that moment is positive. Everything after it is erosion. And the moment comes much sooner than most performers expect.
The Three-Minute Wall
Through experimentation, I have found that three minutes is the maximum time a volunteer should be on stage for any single segment. Not three minutes of effect. Three minutes total, from the moment they arrive beside you to the moment they start walking back to their seat.
Within those three minutes, here is what needs to happen:
The welcome: ten to fifteen seconds. You greet them, tell them their name if they have given it, make a quick joke or warm comment to put them at ease. This is not the time for a lengthy interview.
The setup: twenty to thirty seconds. You explain — or demonstrate without explaining — what is about to happen. What you need from them. Where they should stand. What they should hold or look at.
The effect: ninety seconds to two minutes. This is the core. The thing the audience is actually watching. The interaction, the impossibility, the reveal.
The thank-you: ten to fifteen seconds. You acknowledge them, the audience applauds, and they walk off.
If the math seems tight, it is. Three minutes is not a lot. But the compression forces you to make every second count. There is no room for meandering banter. No room for open-ended questions that might lead the volunteer into a five-minute story about their childhood. No room for beats that exist only because you enjoy the interaction and want to extend it.
And here is the counterintuitive result: the compressed version is more entertaining than the extended version. Because every second is purposeful, the audience never has a chance to lose interest. The segment moves with the crisp efficiency of a well-edited scene in a film. In, action, resolution, out. The audience is left wanting more rather than waiting for it to be over.
How I Redesigned My Participation Pieces
After adopting the three-minute principle, I went through every participation segment in my show and timed them ruthlessly.
The mentalism piece that had run six and a half minutes in Innsbruck? I stripped it down to three minutes. I cut the lengthy buildup sequence — the multiple questions that had created a nice escalating tension in rehearsal but had sagged with real volunteers. I replaced it with a single, striking interaction that established the premise in thirty seconds and moved directly to the climax.
Did I lose something? Yes. The gradual build of the longer version was elegant. It created a narrative arc that I was proud of. But pride in structure is a performer’s luxury. The audience does not care about your narrative arc if they lost interest two minutes ago. The shorter version sacrificed elegance for impact, and the impact was immediately, measurably greater.
The first time I performed the compressed version was at a small private event near Klagenfurt. When the reveal happened — at the two-and-a-half-minute mark instead of the six-and-a-half-minute mark — the reaction was explosive. Not because the reveal was different. The identical reveal, happening while the audience was still fully engaged rather than starting to fade, produced twice the reaction.
This taught me something I now consider fundamental: the quality of a reveal is not just about what is revealed. It is about the state of the audience at the moment of revelation. A moderate reveal landing on a fully engaged audience produces more impact than a spectacular reveal landing on an audience that has been waiting too long.
Variable Time vs. Fixed Time
One of the practical challenges of participation segments is that they are inherently variable in length. A solo piece runs the same time every performance. A musical number is locked to the track’s duration. But a participation piece depends on the volunteer, and volunteers are unpredictable.
I handle this by building in what I think of as compression points — moments in the segment where I can cut material if the volunteer is running slow, or add a beat if they are running fast. These are not visible to the audience. They are structural options that allow me to keep the segment within its time window regardless of the volunteer’s pace.
For example, I have a moment early in one piece where I ask the volunteer a question. If they answer quickly and concisely, I have a follow-up line that extends the beat by ten seconds and adds a laugh. If they answer slowly or with a long story, I skip the follow-up line and move directly to the next beat. Either way, the segment hits its marks. The audience never knows that two different versions exist because both feel natural and complete.
This kind of flexible structure is something I borrowed from my keynote speaking work. In a business presentation, you always build in sections you can expand or contract depending on time pressure. You have slides you can skip without the audience noticing a gap. You have anecdotes you can deploy or hold back depending on the room. The same principle applies to participation segments. The external experience is seamless. The internal structure has multiple paths.
The Empathy Dimension
There is another reason to keep participation segments short, and it has nothing to do with pacing or timing. It has to do with empathy for the volunteer.
Being on stage is terrifying for most people. Even people who eagerly volunteer — who raise their hands and bounce out of their seats — experience a spike of adrenaline the moment they are standing under the lights with a hundred pairs of eyes on them. That adrenaline is exciting for about two minutes. After that, it becomes stress. The volunteer starts to feel exposed, aware of their awkwardness, worried about doing something wrong.
Keeping the segment short is an act of kindness. It ensures the volunteer’s experience peaks while the adrenaline is still fun and ends before the stress kicks in. The volunteer returns to their seat feeling like a hero — they did the thing, it was amazing, it is over, and everyone is applauding. They have a story to tell. If you keep them up there too long, they return to their seat feeling relieved rather than exhilarated, and the story they tell is about how nervous they were rather than how incredible the effect was.
I think about this every time I design a participation segment. My responsibility is not just to the audience. It is to the individual standing next to me. They trusted me by coming up to the stage. The least I can do is make sure their time with me is brief enough to be a highlight of their evening and not an endurance test.
The Grandma Test in Practice
I now run every participation segment through the Grandma Test before it goes into the show. I imagine the slowest, most nervous, most talkative volunteer possible. I imagine them taking thirty seconds to answer a yes-or-no question. I imagine them needing every instruction repeated. I imagine them telling me their life story when I ask their name.
If the segment still works at that pace — if it stays within three minutes even with the slowest possible volunteer — it goes in the show. If it does not, I cut material until it does.
This approach has transformed my participation segments from the most unpredictable part of my show to the most reliable. Because when you design for the slowest possible pace, every real-world volunteer is faster than your design specification. The segment always runs at or under its planned time. The energy never sags. The audience never shifts in their seats wondering when the volunteer will sit down.
The Grandma Test is not glamorous. It is not the kind of creative insight that makes you feel like an artist. It is an engineering principle — design for the worst case, and the normal case takes care of itself. But engineering principles are what keep shows running on time and audiences staying engaged. And a show that runs on time, with participation segments that never outstay their welcome, is a show that the audience remembers for the magic rather than the waiting.