There is a number that changed my relationship with new material. Not a technique, not a presentation theory, not a philosophical framework. A number. John Graham writes in Stage By Stage that you should perform a new routine at least a hundred times before you even know if it is going to be good or not.
A hundred times.
When I first encountered that number, I dismissed it as exaggeration. Surely after twenty or thirty performances you have a clear picture of whether a piece works. Surely by performance number fifty, you know whether an effect belongs in your repertoire or needs to be retired. A hundred seemed like the kind of inflated figure that experienced performers throw around to make a point about persistence.
Then I lived it. And the number turned out to be conservative.
The Premature Judgment Problem
Before I internalized the hundred-show principle, I had a pattern that looked something like this: I would learn a new effect. I would practice it in my hotel room until I could execute it cleanly. I would script a presentation, rehearse it until it felt natural, and then test it at a corporate event or a walk-around booking through Vulpine Creations.
The first performance would be rough, and I would expect that. The second and third would be smoother. By the fifth performance, I would start forming opinions. By the tenth, I would have made a judgment. If the piece was getting strong reactions, it stayed. If it was not, I would start thinking about replacing it or reworking it significantly. By performance twenty, the judgment was locked in.
The problem with this timeline is that it is far too short to reveal what a piece is actually capable of. At performance twenty, you know whether the mechanical execution is smooth. You know whether the basic scripting flows. You might know whether the fundamental effect has appeal. But you do not know any of the things that make the difference between a decent piece and a great one.
You do not know how the piece responds to different audience configurations. You do not know what happens when a volunteer is unusually quiet or unusually animated. You do not know how the scripting sounds when you finally relax enough to deliver it conversationally rather than from memory. You do not know what happens when something goes slightly sideways and you have to improvise. You do not know what organic comedy emerges from the piece when you stop trying to be funny and start responding to what is actually happening.
All of these discoveries happen between performance twenty and performance one hundred. And most of them happen between performance fifty and performance one hundred — the territory where most performers have already decided a piece either works or does not.
What Changed at Performance Thirty
I will describe one specific case because it illustrates the principle concretely.
I had a mentalism piece that I introduced into my set during a stretch of regular corporate bookings in Vienna. The effect was clean, the method was reliable, and the presentation had a clear emotional arc. On paper, it was strong material. In practice, for the first twenty performances, it was getting polite but unremarkable reactions. People would nod. They would say “that was good.” They would not gasp.
By performance fifteen, I was already thinking about replacing it. The reactions were not bad, but they were not the reactions I wanted. In the context of a show where other pieces were generating genuine astonishment, this piece felt like a valley rather than a peak.
But I had recently absorbed the hundred-show principle, so instead of pulling the piece, I committed to performing it at least fifty more times before making a decision.
Around performance thirty, something began to shift. Not in the effect itself, but in my relationship with it. I had performed the piece enough times that I stopped thinking about the execution and started thinking about the audience. I began noticing where their attention drifted and where it sharpened. I noticed that there was a specific moment in the presentation — a moment where I was setting up the climax — where eyes would glaze slightly. The setup was too long. Not dramatically too long, but by about fifteen seconds. Those fifteen seconds were creating a tiny gap where engagement dropped, and by the time the climax arrived, the audience was not fully wound up.
I tightened the setup. Cut two sentences. Replaced a third with a pause.
The next performance, the reactions jumped. Not to extraordinary levels, but noticeably. People leaned in during the setup instead of drifting. The climax landed harder.
What Changed at Performance Sixty
The adjustment at performance thirty was a scripting refinement. The kind of thing any thoughtful performer might discover through careful self-analysis. But the discovery at performance sixty was different in kind. It was not about what I was saying. It was about what was happening between me and the volunteer.
By performance sixty, I had internalized the piece so deeply that I could watch the volunteer’s face while the effect unfolded. Not glance at it — watch it. I could track the exact moment when confusion shifted to surprise, and when surprise shifted to something closer to awe. And I realized that the audience was not just watching the effect. They were watching the volunteer’s reaction. And they were watching my reaction to the volunteer’s reaction.
This is the kind of layered awareness that does not exist at performance ten. It barely exists at performance thirty. It lives in the territory beyond performance fifty, where your conscious mind is finally free enough from execution that it can attend to the interpersonal dynamics that actually drive the experience.
Once I saw this, I began adjusting my physical positioning so the audience had a better sightline to the volunteer’s face. I began pausing after the climax — not for dramatic effect in the traditional sense, but to let the audience see the volunteer process what had happened. I began responding verbally to the volunteer’s reaction in a way that acknowledged the shared experience rather than performing over the top of it.
These adjustments transformed the piece. By performance seventy, it was one of the strongest pieces in my set. By performance ninety, I could not imagine the set without it.
If I had judged the piece at performance twenty, I would have cut it. The version I was performing at performance twenty was not good enough. But the version I was performing at performance ninety was exceptional — and it only existed because I gave it enough flight time to reveal itself.
The Compound Effect of Small Discoveries
What happens between performance one and performance one hundred is not a single breakthrough. It is dozens of tiny discoveries that compound.
A line that gets a chuckle at performance eight gets a bigger laugh at performance forty because your timing has improved by fractions of a second. A transition that feels slightly awkward at performance fifteen becomes seamless at performance fifty because you have found the exact physical movement that bridges it. A moment that is merely interesting at performance twenty becomes genuinely moving at performance seventy because you have learned to be emotionally present for it rather than just technically correct.
No single one of these improvements is dramatic. If you compared performance forty to performance forty-one, you would see no difference. But if you compared performance fifteen to performance eighty, the piece would be almost unrecognizable. The scripting would be tighter by dozens of words. The timing would be sharper by cumulative seconds. The emotional arc would be deeper because you have learned where to push and where to pull back. The audience interaction would be richer because you have encountered hundreds of different audience members and absorbed patterns about how people respond.
This compound effect is the reason the hundred-show principle exists. You are not performing a hundred times to test whether the basic effect is viable. You are performing a hundred times to build the piece layer by layer, discovery by discovery, until it reaches a level of refinement that was invisible from the starting point.
The Courage to Wait
The hardest part of the hundred-show principle is not the performing. It is the waiting.
When you are twenty performances into a piece that is not clicking, every instinct tells you to fix it immediately or replace it. You are standing in front of real audiences at real events, and you want to give them the best possible show. Performing a piece that is still in development feels like a compromise. It feels like you are subjecting your audience to an experiment.
But here is the thing I learned: the audience does not know the piece is in development. They do not have a reference point for what the piece could become. They experience it as a complete entity. And if the piece is even moderately engaging — if it targets at least one of the reactions that matter — then the audience is having an acceptable experience while you are building something exceptional.
The courage to wait is really the courage to trust the process. To believe that a piece that is generating polite reactions at performance twenty might generate astonishment at performance eighty. To resist the urge to judge prematurely. To keep performing, keep observing, keep making micro-adjustments, and let the compound effect do its work.
I have gotten better at this over time, but I am not immune to the temptation. I still catch myself forming opinions too early. I still have to remind myself of the principle. A hundred shows. At least. Before you know.
Applying the Principle Across the Transition
The hundred-show principle becomes even more important during the transition from close-up to stage, because the variables multiply.
A piece that worked in close-up does not automatically work on stage. The angles change. The distance changes. The energy calibration changes. The scripting that felt conversational at a dinner table might feel thin from a stage. The physical movements that read clearly at arm’s length might be invisible from the back of a room. Even the timing changes, because audience reactions in a room of two hundred people propagate differently than reactions at a table of six.
When I began adapting close-up material for stage, I made the mistake of judging the adapted versions too quickly. A piece that had been polished through hundreds of close-up performances felt clumsy on stage, and I assumed the issue was with the piece itself rather than with the adaptation process. I wanted the stage version to feel as polished as the close-up version immediately, which was unreasonable because the close-up version had hundreds of performances behind it and the stage version had three.
The hundred-show principle applies separately to each context. A piece that has been performed a hundred times in close-up has earned its place in your close-up repertoire. But the stage version of that piece is a new piece. It needs its own hundred performances. It needs its own cycle of discovery and refinement. The close-up experience accelerates the process — you already know the material, the scripting, the emotional arc — but it does not replace the need for stage-specific flight time.
I now budget for this explicitly when I add material to my stage set. When a new piece enters the rotation, I mark it mentally as “in development” and commit to performing it at least fifty times before making any significant judgment about its viability. I pay attention to reactions, I take notes after every performance, and I make small adjustments. But I do not make the big decision — keep it or cut it — until the piece has had enough flight time to reveal what it is capable of.
The Deeper Lesson
The hundred-show principle is ultimately a lesson about humility. It is an acknowledgment that you are not smart enough to evaluate a piece of performing material after a handful of shows. That the interaction between a performer, a piece of material, and a live audience is complex enough that it requires extensive data before patterns emerge. That your first impressions of your own material are unreliable because you are too close to it, too invested in it, and too distracted by execution to see what the audience is actually experiencing.
A hundred shows is the admission price for genuine understanding of your own material. You can get useful information from fewer performances. But you cannot get the kind of deep, intuitive, bone-level understanding that transforms a decent piece into a great one without putting in the time.
I think about Adam Wilber, my partner at Vulpine Creations, and how he approaches new material. He has an instinct for effects that I respect enormously. But even he does not judge material quickly. He performs it, and performs it, and performs it again, letting the audience teach him what the piece actually is rather than deciding in advance what it should be.
That patience — that willingness to let a piece reveal itself over time — is one of the most important skills in performing. More important than any single technique. More important than any scripting principle. Because without it, you will cut pieces that could have been great, and you will keep pieces that merely seemed adequate early on.
Give every piece a hundred shows. Then decide.