Adam Wilber said something to me during a rehearsal session that I resisted for months before admitting he was right. We were working through material at the Vulpine Creations office, and I had just run through a mentalism routine that I was planning to debut at an upcoming corporate keynote. I felt good about it. The structure was solid. The script was tight. The climax was strong.
Adam watched the whole thing without interrupting, which is unusual for him. When I finished, he sat quietly for a few seconds and then said, “That was really good. Now do it again at half speed.”
Half speed. I thought he was joking. The routine was already paced well, or so I believed. It had momentum. It had energy. It moved from one phase to the next without dead time. It was, I thought, the right tempo for a corporate audience that had limited patience for anything that dragged.
But Adam was not joking. He sat there and waited. So I ran the routine again, forcing myself to take twice as long on every section. Twice as long on the setup. Twice as long on the audience interaction. Twice as long on the build. Twice as long on the pause before the reveal.
The routine took almost ten minutes instead of five and a half. It felt glacial. Every instinct in my body was screaming at me to speed up, to fill the silence, to move the thing along before the imaginary audience started checking their watches.
But when I finished, Adam grinned and said, “That. That is the version you should perform.”
The Speed Problem
I did not believe him at first. It took three live performances at the slower pace before the evidence overwhelmed my resistance.
The first show was in Graz, an annual leadership retreat for a mid-sized Austrian firm. I performed the routine at roughly the slower pace Adam had suggested, fighting against my instincts the entire time. My internal monologue was a running commentary of anxiety: too slow, you are losing them, pick it up, this is dying.
But the audience told a different story. The laughs were louder. Not because I had changed the comedy — the lines were the same. They were louder because I was giving the audience time to laugh. Previously, I had been delivering the next line while the laugh from the current one was still developing. I was cutting my own laughs short. By slowing down, I created space for the reaction to fully form, crest, and begin to fade before I continued. The laughs felt bigger because they were being allowed to be bigger.
The moments of astonishment were deeper. Previously, I had been moving from one reveal to the next with barely a breath between them. The audience would react to an impossible moment and I would already be setting up the next one. By slowing down, I held those moments. I let the audience sit with the impossibility. I watched their faces process what they had just seen. And their processing — the murmured “no way” exchanges with their neighbors, the slow shaking of heads, the leaning back in the chair with widened eyes — became part of the show. Their reaction became visible and audible to the rest of the audience, which amplified the reaction across the room.
And the applause at the end was noticeably stronger. Not because the routine was different. Because the audience had been given time to fully invest in each moment, and their cumulative investment paid a larger dividend at the finish.
Eugene Burger’s Four Words
Pete McCabe quotes Eugene Burger’s advice in Scripting Magic, and it is four words that I now think about before every single performance: “Don’t talk so much, and slow down.”
Burger was famous for his deliberate pace. His performances moved like a deep river — unhurried, powerful, impossible to resist. Where other performers filled silence with words, Burger let the silence do the work. Where other performers raced through procedure to get to the magic, Burger made the procedure itself feel meaningful by giving every moment its full weight.
The instinct to speed up is primal and nearly universal among performers. It comes from fear. Fear that the audience will get bored. Fear that the silence will become awkward. Fear that momentum, once lost, cannot be recovered. Fear that if you stop moving, the energy will drain out of the room.
These fears are understandable but almost always wrong. The audience does not experience your internal tempo. They experience the show at their own processing speed, and that speed is almost always slower than the performer’s internal clock. What feels like a dangerously long pause to the performer feels like a natural beat to the audience. What feels like dragging to the performer feels like breathing to the audience.
This mismatch between performer time and audience time is one of the most important things I have learned. When I am on stage and my internal voice says “too slow,” I now know to interpret that as “probably about right.” When my internal voice says “good tempo,” I know to interpret that as “slightly too fast.” The performer’s instinct is to compress. The audience’s need is to expand.
The Weber Counterintuitive Move
Weber offers a technique in Maximum Entertainment that is specifically counterintuitive and specifically powerful: when you feel the audience slipping away, slow down. Do not speed up. Slow down.
The natural response to a drifting audience is to increase energy, increase pace, push harder. But Weber argues — and my experience confirms — that this response backfires. Pushing harder when the audience is drifting comes across as desperate. It raises the volume without changing the frequency. The audience does not re-engage because you are talking faster. They re-engage when something changes.
Slowing down is that change. When you have been moving at one pace and you suddenly drop to a lower gear, the change itself captures attention. The audience notices the shift. They notice the quiet. They notice the performer becoming more deliberate, more focused, more present. The slowdown signals that something important is happening, and the audience’s attention sharpens in response.
I tested this at a keynote in Vienna where I could feel the after-lunch energy working against me. The audience was polite but slightly glazed. My instinct was to pick up the pace, to inject more energy, to push through the resistance. Instead, I dropped my volume, slowed my delivery, and locked eyes with one person in the third row. I let a silence develop. Five seconds. Maybe seven. The room shifted. People sat up. The glazed quality disappeared. Not because I had done something exciting, but because I had done something unexpected. The change in pace broke the pattern their minds had settled into, and the break forced them to re-engage.
What Slowing Down Actually Means
Slowing down is not about speaking at a lower speed throughout the entire performance. That would be monotonous and would create its own energy problems. Slowing down means three specific things.
First, it means allowing reactions their full life. When the audience laughs, wait. When they gasp, hold. When they murmur to each other, let it happen. Do not step on those moments. Do not start the next line while the current reaction is still alive. The reaction is not an interruption of the performance. The reaction is the performance. Weber’s principle — sell the reaction, not the trick — requires that you give the reaction room to exist.
This is the mistake I was making at double speed. I was treating audience reactions as background noise that happened while I continued performing. In reality, the audience reactions are the payload. The magic creates the conditions for the reaction. The reaction is the result. And if you race past the result to get to the next setup, you are throwing away the thing you worked so hard to create.
Second, slowing down means taking full pauses before revelations and climactic moments. The exaggerated pause — hands still, body still, eyes on the audience, five seconds or more of absolute silence — is one of the most powerful tools in a performer’s arsenal, and it is only possible at a slow pace. A performer who is racing cannot hold a five-second pause. The momentum will not allow it. But a performer who has been moving at a measured pace can drop into stillness and the audience will follow them there.
Third, slowing down means speaking fewer words. This connects directly to Burger’s advice. When you slow down, you realize how many of your words are filler. How many sentences exist only to maintain the illusion of momentum. How many phrases serve the performer’s need to keep talking rather than the audience’s need to understand. Fewer words at a slower pace produces a denser, more impactful delivery than many words at a fast pace.
The Laughs Equation
The connection between slowing down and getting more laughs deserves its own discussion because it is so concrete and so measurable.
Comedy timing depends entirely on rhythm, and rhythm depends on pace. A laugh line has three components: the setup, the pause, and the punchline. The setup creates the expectation. The pause builds the anticipation. The punchline subverts or fulfills the expectation.
At fast pace, the pause between setup and punchline is compressed. The audience does not have time to fully form the expectation before it is subverted. The laugh is smaller because the anticipation was smaller.
At the right pace, the pause between setup and punchline is long enough for the audience to commit to their expectation. They think they know where you are going. They are invested in that prediction. And when the punchline arrives and reveals that they were wrong — or, sometimes, that they were exactly right — the laugh is proportional to their investment.
Ralphie May’s technique, which I wrote about earlier in this blog, quantifies this beautifully. Pause before the punch line. The audience reacts to the pause itself — a nervous laugh, a held breath, a shift in their seats. Then deliver the punch line. They react again. Two reactions for the price of one. But this only works if you are moving slowly enough to hold that pause without it feeling like you have lost your place.
I started tracking my laugh counts after I made the conscious decision to slow down. Not scientifically — just a rough mental tally after each show. The results were unambiguous. The slow shows produced more laughs, louder laughs, and longer laughs than the fast shows. Same material. Same audience demographics. Different pace.
The Consulting Parallel
In strategy consulting, I witnessed the same dynamic dozens of times. The junior consultant who knows the material cold but presents it too fast. They race through the slide deck because they are anxious to prove they have done the work. They pile insight upon insight without giving the client time to absorb any of them. The client walks away thinking, “That was dense. I need to read the document.”
The senior partner presents the same content at half the speed. Each point lands. The pauses give the client time to react, to connect the insight to their own experience. The client walks away thinking, “That was brilliant.”
The difference is not intelligence. It is pace. The speed at which you deliver information is as important as the information itself. On stage, the same principle applies with even greater force. The audience cannot process an effect they were not given time to anticipate. They cannot laugh at a joke they were not given time to understand. Speed robs them of the processing time that makes everything work.
Where I Am Now
I still catch myself speeding up. It happens especially in the first two minutes of a show, when the adrenaline is highest and the need to establish energy and rapport feels urgent. I compensate by scripting a deliberate slow moment into my opening minute — a pause, a long look at the audience, a quiet aside — that forces me into the right gear before the habits take over.
I also use a specific physical cue: before I walk on stage, I take three slow breaths and say to myself, in my head, the slowest version of my opening line. Not the words. The tempo. I feel the tempo I want to hit, the way a musician feels the tempo before the first note. Then I walk out and try to match that feeling.
It does not always work. Some nights the adrenaline wins and I find myself at the five-minute mark going faster than I planned. But even on those nights, I know how to recover. I know that slowing down at any point will re-engage the audience. I know that a single well-held pause can reset the tempo for everything that follows. And I know that the audience will always be grateful for the breathing room, even if they never consciously notice it.
Slow down. Give the audience time to laugh, to gasp, to process, to feel. The magic is not in the words or the moves or the reveals. It is in the spaces between them. And those spaces only exist if you are brave enough to leave them open.