There is a moment in live performance that separates the experienced from the inexperienced, and it has nothing to do with technique, material, or stage presence. It is the moment immediately after something works. The moment after the laugh lands. The moment after the gasp. The moment after the audience sees the impossible thing and their brains are trying to catch up with what their eyes just witnessed.
What you do in that moment — what you choose not to do — defines the quality of the experience you are creating.
For the first two years of my performing life, what I did in that moment was panic. Not visibly, not dramatically, but internally. The routine had worked. The audience was reacting. And some deep, anxious part of my brain interpreted the reaction not as a success but as a vacuum that needed to be filled. The audience is making noise. They are looking at each other. They are murmuring. Nobody is doing what I expected. Quick, say something. Move to the next thing. Regain control.
I was stepping on my own reactions. And I had no idea I was doing it.
The Two Mistakes
Ken Weber identifies two major mistakes performers make with audience reactions in Maximum Entertainment. The first is not positioning the reactor where others can see and hear them — a topic I will address in a later post. The second is not allowing the reaction to fully develop.
The second mistake is the one that haunts most performers, and it haunted me. Weber describes a pattern that will be familiar to anyone who has watched amateur or intermediate magicians: the effect lands, the audience begins to react, and the performer immediately starts talking. The next sentence of the script comes tumbling out. The transition to the next effect begins. The reaction — which was real, which was earned, which was the entire point of everything that came before — gets truncated. Cut short. Buried under new information that nobody was ready to hear because they were still processing the last impossible thing.
When I first read Weber’s description of this pattern, I felt a physical jolt of recognition. He was describing me. Precisely, accurately, devastatingly describing the thing I did in every single performance.
Why We Rush
Understanding why performers rush past reactions is important, because the instinct is strong and it does not feel like a mistake while you are doing it. It feels like professionalism. It feels like keeping the show moving. It feels like being in control.
Here is what is actually happening, at least in my experience.
The first driver is anxiety. When I was newer to performing, every moment of silence felt dangerous. Silence meant I was not doing my job. Silence meant the audience might lose interest. Silence meant something had gone wrong. My entire orientation was toward filling time with content, and the idea of deliberately not speaking — of standing on stage and doing nothing while the audience reacted — felt like a dereliction of duty.
The second driver is tempo. When you rehearse alone in a hotel room, your routine has a certain rhythm. Line, action, line, action. You practice the flow of words and moves until they feel natural, until the timing is internalized. But that rehearsal tempo does not include audience reactions, because there is no audience. When you perform the routine live and the audience reacts — laughs, gasps, murmurs — those reactions disrupt the rehearsed tempo. And the instinctive response is to push through the disruption and get back to the rehearsed flow.
The third driver is ego, though I did not recognize this one for a long time. When the audience is reacting, they are not listening to me. Their attention is on each other, on their own experience, on processing what just happened. And some part of me — the part that had worked so hard on the script, the timing, the delivery — wanted their attention back. I wanted them to listen to my next line. I wanted to show them the next thing. I wanted to be the center of the room again.
All three of these drivers push in the same direction: toward talking, toward moving, toward filling the space that the reaction is trying to occupy. And all three of them are wrong.
What a Reaction Actually Is
A reaction is not a gap in the show. It is not dead time. It is not a disruption of the performance.
A reaction is the performance.
Everything else — the script, the effects, the staging, the music, the lighting — is machinery designed to produce reactions. The reactions are the product. They are what the audience came for. They are what the audience will remember.
When you truncate a reaction, you are cutting short the experience you spent all that effort creating. You are pulling the plug on the machine right as it starts producing what it was designed to produce. It is like spending an hour cooking a meal and then eating it in thirty seconds. The work is wasted not because the cooking failed, but because you did not let yourself enjoy the result.
This reframe was essential for me. Once I stopped thinking of reactions as interruptions and started thinking of them as the payoff, my relationship with those moments changed completely.
The Anatomy of a Full Reaction
Here is what I have observed about how reactions develop when they are given space.
An astonishment reaction typically moves through several phases. First, there is the initial gasp or exclamation — the involuntary, physical response to witnessing something impossible. This lasts perhaps one second. If the performer starts talking at this point, the reaction dies here. Most performers start talking at this point.
Second, there is the processing phase. The audience looks at each other. They look at the volunteer. They look back at you. They are trying to reconcile what they saw with what they know to be possible. This phase produces murmurs, whispered conversations, people turning to their neighbors with wide eyes. It lasts three to five seconds.
Third, there is the communal phase. The individual reactions start feeding off each other. Someone says “no way” loud enough for others to hear. Someone else laughs in disbelief. The energy in the room builds as people realize that everyone around them is having the same experience. This is where the reaction transforms from individual surprise into collective astonishment. It lasts five to ten seconds.
Fourth, if the reaction is strong enough, there is the release phase. The built-up energy resolves into applause, into cheering, into the kind of sustained response that performers dream about. This phase only happens if the first three phases were allowed to develop fully. If any of them were cut short, the energy never builds enough to reach this point.
The entire arc, from initial gasp to full release, takes ten to fifteen seconds. Most performers give it two or three. They are throwing away seventy to eighty percent of the reaction they earned.
A laughter reaction follows a similar arc. The initial laugh. The build as others join in. The peak where the room is fully engaged. The natural decay. And then, sometimes, the second wave — the aftershock that comes when someone makes eye contact with a friend and the absurdity hits them again. Performers who talk over the initial laugh never get the second wave. And the second wave is often funnier than the first.
How I Learned to Wait
Knowing I should wait and actually waiting are two different things. The intellectual understanding came quickly. The physical ability to stand on stage and do nothing for ten seconds took months to develop.
My first approach was brute force. I wrote “WAIT” into my script after every major reaction moment, in capital letters, sometimes multiple times. WAIT. WAIT. WAIT. Not a suggestion — a command to myself. Do not speak. Do not move. Do not do anything.
The first few times I performed with these annotations, the waiting felt interminable. Three seconds of silence felt like thirty. I had to physically resist the urge to speak. My mouth would start to open. I would catch it. My hands would start to move toward the next prop. I would stop them. Every fiber of my performer’s instinct was screaming at me to fill the silence, and I had to overrule that instinct with conscious effort.
But here is what happened in those early attempts: the reactions were bigger. Not because the material was different — it was the same material I had been performing before. Not because the execution was better. The only thing that changed was the space I gave the audience after the moment landed. And that space alone — just waiting, just standing still, just letting the room breathe — produced noticeably stronger, longer, louder reactions.
The difference was so clear that even my anxious, silence-fearing brain could not deny it. The evidence was right there, night after night. More space equals more reaction. Less rushing equals more impact.
The Three-Breath Rule
Over time, I developed a personal technique for managing the wait. After a major reaction moment, I take three slow breaths before speaking. Not deep, dramatic breaths that the audience can see. Quiet, internal breaths that give me a physiological anchor for the waiting.
Three breaths is roughly ten to twelve seconds, which is enough time for most reactions to develop through all their phases. It is long enough to feel uncomfortable — and that discomfort is exactly the point. If the wait feels comfortable, it is probably too short.
During those three breaths, I have a checklist of things to notice. What is the audience doing? Are they looking at each other? Are they looking at the volunteer? Are they murmuring? Are they laughing? Is the energy building or decaying? These observations are not just idle monitoring — they are information that tells me when the reaction has peaked and when it is time to move on.
Because there is a flip side to this principle. If you wait too long, the energy dissipates. The reaction finishes, and then there is genuine dead time — time that the audience experiences as the performer freezing or losing their place. The art is in reading the room: giving the reaction enough time to develop fully without letting it decay into awkwardness.
Three breaths has become my default, but it is a starting point, not a rule. Some reactions peak quickly and do not need the full count. Others build slowly and need more time. The skill is not in the counting — it is in the reading.
What Changes When You Stop Rushing
The most profound effect of allowing reactions to develop is not the reactions themselves — although those are unmistakably better. It is what happens to the overall experience of the show.
When reactions are given space, the audience feels heard. They feel like their experience matters. They feel like the performer is performing for them, not at them. The show becomes a conversation rather than a monologue. The performer offers a moment. The audience responds. The performer acknowledges the response through the simple act of waiting. And then the show continues.
This dynamic changes the audience’s relationship with the performance. They become more invested because they are being treated as participants rather than recipients. Their reactions become more generous because they know those reactions will be received. The show builds in a way that a rushed performance never can, because each reaction becomes the foundation for the next.
I also noticed something about my own experience on stage. When I stopped rushing, I started enjoying performing more. The frantic, anxious energy of trying to fill every second gave way to something calmer, more confident, more present. I was in the moment with the audience rather than ahead of them, thinking about the next line. The performance became a shared experience rather than a solo sprint.
The Discipline of Stillness
I will be honest: this is still hard. Years of performing later, the instinct to rush is still there. It is quieter than it used to be, but it never fully goes away. Every time a reaction lands, there is a small voice in my head that says “keep going, keep the energy up, do not lose them.”
The discipline is in overriding that voice. In trusting that the reaction is not a void to be filled but a moment to be savored. In understanding that the audience is not waiting for me to resume — they are having the experience I worked so hard to create for them.
Let them have it.