I am going to describe something embarrassing, because it is the only honest way to explain what this post is about.
There is a recording from a show I did at a corporate retreat outside Vienna. Maybe eighty people. Nice room, good energy, responsive audience. The kind of gig where everything seems to be working. I was performing a mentalism piece, and there was a moment — a genuinely good moment — where the volunteer said something unexpectedly funny. The audience started laughing. Big laugh. Real laugh. The kind of laugh you dream about when you are practicing alone in a hotel room at midnight.
And I talked right through it.
I watched the recording the next morning over coffee, and there it was. The volunteer delivers the line. The audience starts to laugh. And before the laugh has even peaked — before it has reached its full height, before the wave has crested — I jump in with my next line. I am so eager to keep the momentum going, so anxious to maintain control of the performance, that I step directly on top of the best audience reaction of the entire show.
You can actually see it happen in the video. The laugh begins to build, hits maybe seventy percent of its potential, and then my voice cuts through and the audience falls silent. Not because they stopped finding it funny. Because they shifted their attention back to me. I stole their laughter from them. I interrupted their experience of joy because I was too nervous to stand in silence for three more seconds.
Three seconds. That is all it would have taken. Three seconds of quiet, three seconds of letting the room enjoy itself, and that seventy percent laugh would have been a hundred percent laugh. The difference between a good moment and a great one. And I threw it away because I could not bring myself to wait.
The Disease of Talking Too Soon
I am not unique in this. Nearly every performer I have watched — especially less experienced performers, especially performers who are still building their confidence — has the same disease. We talk too soon. We step on our laughs. We fill silence with words because silence feels dangerous.
Ralphie May addresses this directly in his Standup Masterclass. He is emphatic about it. Do not step on the laugh. Wait. Let it happen. Let it build. The laugh has a natural arc — it rises, it peaks, it begins to decline — and you should not say a single word until it is on the downslope. Not the peak. The downslope. The moment when the laugh is still alive but starting to fade is when you deliver your next line.
Greg Dean makes a similar point about timing in joke delivery. The pause after the punch is as much a part of the joke’s structure as the setup and the punch themselves. Without the pause, the audience does not have time to process the reinterpretation, to feel the gap between what they assumed and what was revealed. You are rushing them through an experience that needs room to breathe.
When I first encountered this advice, I thought I understood it. I nodded. Sure, wait for the laugh. Makes sense. Do not rush. Got it.
Then I watched my recordings and realized I had not understood it at all.
What Silence Feels Like from the Stage
The reason performers step on their laughs is not ignorance. It is fear.
From the audience’s perspective, laughter is pleasure. From the stage, laughter is a void. You have said your line. The audience is reacting. And you are standing there with nothing to do. Every instinct screams: fill the void. Say something. The silence means you have lost control.
This instinct is especially powerful for people who come from professional backgrounds where silence is awkward. In consulting, I learned to fill gaps quickly, to keep the conversation flowing, to never let the energy drop. All of that conditioning is exactly wrong for performance. On stage, silence after a laugh is not a void. It is a gift. Cutting that space short is one of the most destructive habits a performer can have.
The Video Review That Changed Everything
After the Vienna recording debacle, I started a systematic review process. For every performance I could record, I would watch the video with a specific focus: find every laugh, and measure how long I waited before speaking again.
The results were humbling.
On average, I was waiting about one second after the laugh began before I started talking. One second. The laugh had barely started, and I was already jumping back in. Some of my best comedy moments were being compressed into tiny windows because I could not tolerate the silence.
I started marking the recordings with timestamps. Laugh begins here. I speak here. Laugh would have peaked here. The gap between “I speak here” and “laugh would have peaked here” was consistently two to four seconds. That is the time I was stealing from the audience. Two to four seconds of joy that I was cutting short because I was uncomfortable doing nothing.
Two to four seconds sounds trivial. It is not. In performance, two seconds is an eternity. Two seconds of a room full of people laughing together is one of the most powerful moments you can create. And I was throwing it away, show after show, because my consulting brain could not handle the gap.
The Discipline of Waiting
I developed a practice exercise that was simple, painful, and effective. At home, I would rehearse my effects in front of a camera. When I reached a moment where I expected a laugh, I would stop talking and count silently to five. Five Mississippi. Then, and only then, deliver the next line.
Five seconds felt absurd. Standing in my apartment in Vienna with no audience, five seconds of silence after a non-existent laugh felt like an eternity. My hands itched. My mouth twitched. Every fiber of my being wanted to fill that silence with words. That discomfort was the point. I was training myself to be comfortable in the gap.
After a few weeks, I modified the exercise. Instead of a flat five-second count, I started imagining the audience’s reaction — the initial burst, the build, the peak, the slow decline. And I would not speak until I imagined the decline. Not the peak. The decline.
This is the key principle, and I want to state it clearly because it took me far too long to learn: you speak on the downslope of the laugh, not the peak.
The peak is where the energy is highest. The audience is fully engaged, fully released, fully in the moment. If you speak at the peak, you kill the moment. You pull them out of their experience and redirect their attention to you.
The downslope is where the energy is still present but beginning to transition. The audience is starting to come back from the laugh, starting to return their attention to the performer. Meeting them on the downslope means your next line arrives at exactly the moment they are ready to hear it. The transition is seamless. The momentum carries forward.
What Happened When I Started Waiting
The first show where I consciously applied the waiting discipline was at a conference in Klagenfurt. It was a keynote for about a hundred and twenty people, and I had three magic elements woven into the presentation.
I was terrified. Not of the magic. I was terrified of the silence. Standing on a stage in front of a hundred and twenty people with my mouth closed and nothing planned felt like standing on the edge of a cliff.
The first comedy moment came about five minutes in. I said something that got a genuine laugh. And instead of jumping in with my next line, I did nothing. I stood there. I made eye contact with a few people in the front row. I waited.
Two seconds. Three seconds. The laugh built. Four seconds. It peaked. Five seconds. It began to decline. And then — right there, on the downslope — I delivered my next line.
The laugh had been bigger — noticeably, measurably bigger — than what I typically experienced with the same material. Because I had given it room. I had let the wave complete its natural arc instead of cutting it off at the knees. The transition into the next moment was smooth, effortless. The audience flowed from laughter into attention because the timing was right.
I did this for every laugh in the show. And by the end of the keynote, the energy in the room was fundamentally different. Not because the material was better. The material was the same. The difference was the space between the moments.
The Counter-Intuitive Truth
Here is what I learned from Klagenfurt and from every performance since: pausing does not slow down your show. It speeds it up.
When you step on your laughs, the audience struggles with the transition. They are being pulled in two directions — toward the laugh they want to complete and toward the performer who is demanding their attention. That internal conflict creates friction. When you wait, the transitions are clean. The audience completes one experience and is ready for the next. A flowing show, paradoxically, feels faster than a rushed one, even though it contains more silence.
I timed my shows before and after the waiting discipline. The total runtime was about two minutes longer. But audience feedback forms described the post-waiting shows as “tight,” “fast-paced,” and “seamless.” The version with less silence was merely “good” and “entertaining.”
More silence. Better pacing. It makes no logical sense until you experience it.
The Laugh as Information
There is one more dimension to this that I want to explore, because it has become central to how I think about performance.
The laugh tells you something. Not just “this was funny.” The laugh tells you how funny, in what way, and for how long the audience wants to stay in that moment.
A short, sharp burst of laughter says: that was funny, now move on. A building, rolling laugh says: this is a big moment, give us time. A laugh that peaks and then erupts again — the double laugh, the callback laugh, the laugh where people start and then think about it more and laugh harder — says: this is extraordinary, this is a moment we want to live in, do not dare take this away from us.
Each of these requires a different response. The short burst needs a brief pause and a quick transition. The building laugh needs a longer pause. The double laugh needs patience and the confidence to let the room do whatever it wants for as long as it wants. Learning to read the laugh is an advanced skill. I am still developing it. But the foundation is the same principle from that Vienna recording: wait. The audience will tell you when they are ready. Your job is to listen.
The Three-Second Rule
I will leave you with the practical rule that I use now, the simplified version of everything I have learned about pause timing.
After a laugh, wait three seconds longer than you think you should.
That is it. Whatever your instinct tells you — add three seconds. If your gut says “speak now,” count to three and then speak.
You will almost certainly not wait too long. In dozens of performances across Austria, I have never once waited too long after a laugh. Not once. I have talked too soon hundreds of times. I have never waited too much.
The laugh is a gift from the audience. The pause is your way of accepting it. And the three seconds you add are the difference between a performer who gets laughs and a performer whose laughs transform the room.
Wait for it.
And then wait a little longer.