For the first two years that I performed magic, I had a speed problem. Not that I was too fast. Not that I was too slow. The problem was more fundamental: I did not understand the difference between speed and timing.
I thought timing meant doing things at the right speed. Fast effects should be fast. Slow effects should be slow. Dramatic moments should be delivered slowly. Comedy moments should be delivered quickly. Speed was the variable, and getting it right was what people meant by good timing.
I was wrong in a way that seems obvious to me now but was invisible at the time. And the person who finally made the distinction clear was Dariel Fitzkee, writing in the 1940s about a principle that has not changed in the eighty years since.
Timing, Fitzkee argued in Showmanship for Magicians, is not speed. It is the deliberate control of tempo — speech, movement, action — to accomplish a definite objective unmistakably. Speed is a rate. Timing is an intention. Speed asks: how fast am I going? Timing asks: what am I trying to make the audience feel, and what tempo will create that feeling?
That distinction changed how I perform every routine in my set. It may be the single most practically useful concept I have encountered in all of my reading about performance.
The Metronome Mistake
Let me describe what my performances looked like before I understood timing. I had developed what I now think of as a metronome approach to pacing. Each routine had a baseline tempo, and I performed the routine at that tempo from beginning to end. The tempo was consistent. The delivery was even. Every phrase received roughly the same emphasis. Every action was executed at roughly the same speed. The result was technically competent and emotionally flat.
Watching recordings of those early performances, what strikes me is how mechanical they sound. Not rushed, not sluggish — just uniform. The words come out at a consistent rate. The movements happen at a consistent pace. There are no moments of acceleration that create excitement. There are no moments of deceleration that create tension. There are no moments of complete stillness that create anticipation. Just a steady, even, utterly forgettable tempo.
The audience had no trouble following me. They had no trouble understanding what was happening. But they had no emotional roadmap. Nothing in my delivery told them when to lean forward, when to hold their breath, when to brace for surprise. I was providing information at a consistent rate. I was not creating experience through the deliberate manipulation of time.
What Deliberate Control Actually Means
Here is what changed when I started thinking about timing as intentional tempo control rather than speed selection.
I began planning the tempo of every routine as deliberately as I planned the effects themselves. Not in a general way — “this piece should be slow and dramatic” — but moment by moment, phrase by phrase, action by action. Where does the tempo increase? Where does it decrease? Where does it stop entirely? And most importantly: why? What is each tempo change designed to make the audience feel?
The “why” is everything. Fitzkee’s definition is precise: timing accomplishes a definite objective. Every tempo choice should have a purpose. Speeding up is not just moving faster — it is creating forward motion, urgency, excitement, or the sensation that events are accelerating beyond control. Slowing down is not just moving slower — it is creating weight, significance, intimacy, or the sensation that something important is about to happen. Stopping is not just pausing — it is creating anticipation, emphasis, or the sensation that the next moment will change everything.
When tempo changes are deliberate and purposeful, they function as emotional instructions. The audience does not consciously think “he is speaking more slowly now, something important must be coming.” They just feel it. Their emotional state shifts in response to the tempo change, and they experience the performance differently than they would if the tempo were constant.
A Practical Example from My Own Set
Let me walk through how I now approach the timing of a single routine — a mentalism effect I perform regularly at corporate events.
The routine has three phases. In the first phase, I introduce the concept and engage a volunteer. In the second phase, I lead the volunteer through a series of choices. In the third phase, I reveal the prediction.
Before I understood timing, I performed all three phases at roughly the same tempo. Conversational, friendly, steady. It worked, in the sense that the audience understood what was happening and reacted appropriately to the reveal. But the reaction was proportional to the effect itself — the surprise of the prediction matching. My delivery was not adding anything to the experience.
Now, I perform the three phases at deliberately different tempos, and the tempos shift within each phase as well.
Phase one is fast. Not rushed — energetic. I move with purpose. My voice has forward momentum. The sentences are short and the pace carries the audience quickly through the setup, establishing the premise before they have time to overthink it. The energy says: something is happening, and it is happening now.
Phase two gradually slows. As the volunteer makes their choices, my voice drops in speed and volume. The sentences grow longer. I let silences appear between phrases. The deceleration is not dramatic — it is a gentle, continuous slowing, like a river widening before it reaches a lake. The audience does not consciously notice the change, but they feel it. The mood shifts from energetic to contemplative. The room gets quieter because I am getting quieter. The space for anticipation opens up.
Phase three is where the real timing lives. I approach the reveal slowly, deliberately, with full awareness that the next ten seconds are the most important ten seconds of the entire routine. My movements become larger and more controlled. My voice drops in pitch and speed. I pause before the key moment — not a brief hesitation, but a full, deliberate pause of two or three seconds. In that pause, the audience holds its breath. They know something is coming. The pause tells them: this is the moment. Pay attention.
And then the reveal. Which, after that deceleration and pause, lands with significantly more impact than it would if I had arrived at the same moment at the same tempo I started with.
The effect is identical. The method is identical. The timing transforms the experience.
Slow Is Not Always Better
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to take from this post the lesson that slower is always more powerful. It is not. Slowness without purpose is just slowness. A performer who moves and speaks slowly throughout their entire act is not using good timing — they are boring.
The power of slowness comes from contrast. A slow moment is powerful because it follows a fast moment. A pause is powerful because it interrupts motion. A whisper is powerful because it follows normal volume. Without the contrast, the slow moment has nothing to push against. It is just the baseline, and the audience’s attention adjusts to it the way your eyes adjust to darkness.
This is why timing is about control, not speed. The deliberate performer controls the full range of tempos, moving between fast and slow, loud and quiet, motion and stillness, in service of specific emotional objectives. The performer with bad timing is not necessarily too fast or too slow. They are too uniform. They live at one tempo, and the audience’s emotional response flatlines accordingly.
The Conversation Test
Here is a test I use to calibrate my timing. I think about how people naturally tell stories in conversation.
When a friend tells you something exciting that happened to them, they speed up. Their voice rises. Their words come faster. You feel their excitement because the tempo carries it. When they get to the important part — the thing they have been building to — they often slow down. They drop their voice. They might pause before the key detail. “And then… she said yes.” The tempo shift signals the significance of the moment.
Nobody teaches people to do this. It happens naturally in conversation because humans instinctively use tempo to communicate emotional significance. But when those same people step on stage, they often lose access to that instinct. The self-consciousness of performing overrides the natural tempo variation that they would use in casual conversation.
What I try to do, when rehearsing in my hotel room, is speak the script as if I were telling a friend what happened. Not performing it. Telling it. And I pay attention to where my voice naturally speeds up and slows down, where I naturally pause, where I naturally increase or decrease in volume. Those natural tempo shifts are often the correct ones for performance, because they are rooted in the same emotional instincts that the audience shares.
Then I take those natural shifts and amplify them slightly for the stage. A little faster when I would naturally be fast. A little slower when I would naturally be slow. A little longer on the pauses. The amplification is necessary because the stage demands larger gestures, both physical and temporal. But the foundation is conversational, which keeps the timing from feeling manufactured.
What I Learned from Stand-Up Comedy
I came across a masterclass by Ralphie May where he talked about the power of silence and pauses in comedy. His point was that the pause before a punchline serves multiple functions: it creates nervous anticipation, it signals that something important is coming, and it actually increases the laugh because the release of built-up tension adds energy to the response. He noted that Jack Benny built an entire career out of the pause.
The principle translates directly to magic. The pause before a reveal is not dead time. It is active time — time in which the audience’s anticipation is building, their theories are forming and being discarded, their emotional investment is deepening. Every second of that pause increases the impact of what follows, up to a point. Too short and the anticipation does not build. Too long and the tension breaks and the audience becomes confused rather than excited.
Finding the right length for the pause is one of the subtlest skills in performance. It is not something you can learn from a book. It is something you learn from performing before live audiences, feeling the energy of the room, and calibrating the pause to the specific moment and the specific crowd. Some audiences need a longer pause. Some need a shorter one. The deliberate performer reads the room and adjusts in real time.
Timing as Respect
There is one more dimension of timing that I have come to appreciate, and it is perhaps the most important. Deliberate timing communicates respect.
When you rush through a reveal, you are telling the audience that the moment is not important enough to dwell on. When you speak at a consistent, rapid pace, you are telling the audience that no particular moment is more significant than any other. When you fail to pause before a climax, you are telling the audience that their experience of anticipation does not matter to you.
By contrast, when you slow down before an important moment, when you let silence do the work of building anticipation, when you give the audience time to absorb what they have just seen — you are telling them that their experience matters. That you are not just executing a routine but creating a shared moment. That you have thought about what they need and when they need it.
This is what Fitzkee meant by accomplishing a definite objective unmistakably. The objective is not just the effect. The objective is the audience’s emotional experience. And the tempo is the tool that shapes that experience from moment to moment, creating the rises and falls, the accelerations and decelerations, the sounds and silences that transform a sequence of events into a living, breathing performance.
The Ongoing Calibration
I am still learning this. Every performance teaches me something new about timing. A pause that worked perfectly in Vienna was too long in Linz. A tempo that created excitement for one audience created anxiety for another. The variables are endless, and the calibration is never finished.
But the framework Fitzkee gave me — timing is not speed, it is the deliberate control of tempo for a specific objective — remains the foundation. Every time I catch myself performing at a constant tempo, I know something is wrong. Every time I catch myself rushing a reveal because I am nervous or excited, I know I am violating the principle. Every time I catch myself pausing without purpose, I know I am being self-indulgent rather than deliberate.
Timing is not speed. It is intention. And once you understand that distinction, you can never unhear it. You start noticing it everywhere — in conversations, in music, in films, in speeches, in every form of communication where a human being is trying to make another human being feel something. The good ones all do the same thing. They control the tempo. They speed up and slow down with purpose. They use silence as deliberately as they use sound.
And the great ones make it look like they are doing nothing at all. Like the tempo is simply the natural rhythm of the moment. Like they could not possibly be performing any other way. That effortless quality is the mark of timing so thoroughly rehearsed that it has become instinct. And it is, I am convinced, the single most important delivery skill any performer can develop.