For the first year or so of performing in front of rooms, I called for volunteers the way I’d seen it done in countless shows I’d attended as an audience member: scan the room, make eye contact with someone who looked willing, extend a hand, and say some version of “can I get a volunteer?”
It worked often enough that I didn’t question it. Someone would come up. The effect would proceed. The show continued.
What I didn’t notice — because I was looking at the volunteers who came, not the people who didn’t — was who was leaving value on the table. The hesitators. The people who started to move and then stopped. The person who looked genuinely interested but needed just slightly more of an invitation than “can I get a volunteer?” provided.
The phrasing I was using was, I now realize, optimized for people who were already going to come up. It was doing almost no work on the people who needed a reason to say yes.
The Words Are Doing Work
There’s a principle from persuasion research that the framing of a request shapes not just whether people comply, but what mental model they bring to the interaction. The same ask, worded differently, produces materially different rates of agreement — and materially different qualities of engagement from the people who agree.
“Can I get a volunteer?” positions the performer as someone who needs something and positions the audience member as someone being recruited to provide it. The implicit transaction is service: come up here and be useful to me.
“Would you help me with something?” changes the frame subtly but significantly. It acknowledges that what’s about to happen requires the audience member’s participation, not just their presence. It implies collaboration rather than recruitment. “Help” is a word that activates a different kind of social identity than “volunteer.” We want to be helpers. We’re slightly more ambivalent about being volunteers.
These are small differences in wording. They produce non-small differences in outcome.
The Evolution of My Volunteer Invitation
I went through several versions of this over the years, and looking back, each version reflects something I’d learned at that stage.
Early version: “Can I get a volunteer from the audience?” — Standard, slightly theatrical, creates a small social pressure (no one wants to be the hold-out in a room where the performer needs someone). Gets compliance but not enthusiasm.
Intermediate version: “I need someone to help me with this — anyone feel like it?” — More casual, less pressure, but “need” introduces a slight urgency that can feel slightly demanding.
Later version: “Would you help me with something for a moment?” — The phrasing I use most often now. “Would you” is a genuine question, not a demand phrased as a question. “Help me” activates the collaborative frame. “With something” is deliberately vague in a way that feels conversational rather than evasive. “For a moment” manages time expectations without over-promising or under-promising.
The word “for a moment” is doing more work than it appears. One of the invisible resistances to being a volunteer is uncertainty about duration. How long will I be up there? Will it be embarrassing? Will everyone be staring at me for a long time? “For a moment” is a genuine commitment that the ask is bounded. It doesn’t mean it’ll be over in thirty seconds, but it signals that the person isn’t signing up for an extended ordeal.
The Difference Between Permission and Agency
I noticed something in the phrasing shift that I want to name carefully, because I think it’s the most important distinction.
“Can I get a volunteer?” asks for permission — your permission to use you as a participant. “Would you help me?” asks for a decision — your decision to engage as a collaborator.
Those are different psychological positions. The person who comes up because they gave permission is a passive participant in something that’s happening to them. The person who came up because they made a decision to help is an active participant who has a stake in things going well.
This matters enormously for how the volunteer behaves on stage. Passive participants tend to default to whatever they think will get the interaction over fastest. Active collaborators tend to engage genuinely, react honestly, and give the effect the kind of participation that makes it work best.
You can’t guarantee which kind of volunteer you get, but you can dramatically influence it with your phrasing before anyone leaves their seat.
Politeness Is Not Weakness
There’s a version of performer culture that associates directness with authority and authority with good performance. Get someone up here, project confidence, move the show forward. Be the person running the room.
I understand this instinct. I’ve felt it. There’s a real thing called performer authority that has to be established and maintained for a show to work.
But there’s a difference between authority and imposition. You can be clearly in charge of a room while also making the people in it feel that their participation is genuinely welcome rather than compelled. These are not in tension. The best performers I’ve watched — live and on recordings — combine commanding presence with genuine graciousness toward participants. They run the room and they make the room feel good about being run.
Politeness in your volunteer invitation is not a concession of authority. It’s an expression of confidence. The performer who needs to demand participation is revealing that they’re not sure the participation would be freely given. The performer who asks graciously is saying, implicitly: I’m confident you’ll want to do this.
What You Do Before the Words
The invitation itself is only part of the equation. Before you say a word, the audience is already deciding whether they’d be willing to go up.
The single most effective thing you can do before making any invitation is to make the audience feel safe. Not safe as in protected from danger — safe as in: nothing bad will happen if you come up here. The person who comes up will not be embarrassed. They will not be made to look foolish. They will have a good time. You can establish all of this before you invite anyone through your body language, the tone you use when acknowledging audience responses, and how you treat the people you interact with in the earlier parts of the show.
By the time you say “would you help me with something?”, the room should already be predisposed to say yes, because you’ve spent fifteen minutes being someone worth saying yes to.
The words seal the deal. The trust has to be built before them.
When Someone Declines
This used to catch me off guard and now it doesn’t. Sometimes someone will not want to come up. They’ll shake their head or look away or say “no thank you.” The correct response is a warm acknowledgment and an immediate turn to someone else: “That’s completely fine — anyone else feel like it?”
The worst thing you can do is press. Pressing the hesitator is a form of coercion dressed as enthusiasm, and every person in the room who saw the original decline will notice that you didn’t respect it. A gracious accept of a “no” tells the room that participation here is genuinely voluntary, which paradoxically makes everyone else more willing to say yes.
The best volunteer for your show is always someone who actually wants to be there. The words you use to invite them are either making that more or less likely.
Ask the right way, and the right people will come up.