The Stage is a rehearsal simulator with a game in it. A comic or a speaker stands up, says their material out loud, and a room reacts to their timing — how long they talk, how hard they hit a line, and how long they leave the beat after. It never hears the words. Simulator Mode keeps no score; Game Mode scores every beat as you land it. Either way the score is a timing score, there is no leaderboard, and nothing can be won by being funnier.
Comics learn timing by dying in front of strangers. There is no other rehearsal room: a bedroom gives no feedback, and an open mic costs a night and a drive. The Stage is a dark room with a spotlight and a crowd that responds to the rhythm of a set in the browser — five venues that each punish a different habit, a recap that tells you where you rushed and where you lost them, and a standing refusal to have any opinion about whether the joke was good.
| What it is | A delivery simulator for stand-up and for speeches. Free to enter. |
|---|---|
| What it measures | Timing and energy. Never words, never content, never quality. |
| Venues | Five, each punishing a different habit. One is free to everyone; any purchase opens the rest. |
| Recording | None. No video, no audio, no transcript stored. Close the tab and the set is gone. |
| Account | Not required. The room, the practice material and the dry run all work signed out. |
| Also for | Best man speeches, toasts, eulogies, opening a meeting. Four of the eight practice sets are speeches. |
| Platform | Browser. No install, no download. Camera and motion stay on the device. One exception: the optional transcription extra uses the browser's own speech service, which sends audio off-device — see below. |
| Address | plainsightai.app/comedy/circuit/?stage=1 |
A scripted set plays through the real room — about a minute, sound on. No camera, no microphone, no account, no permission prompt. Two blunders are deliberate: a line gets rushed and the room goes cold, so you see what both look like.
Open The StageAn eight-stop walk that opens the room and shows it from the inside — simulator or game, pick a venue, the sound check, the switches before you stand up, your walk-on music, audio and language, take the stage, or watch a run first. Its own address, for sending to a writer who wants the tour without the rest of the site.
Take the walkIt has no opinion about your material. The room hears rhythm. Every number it produces is a delivery number and the recap says so, because a report reading "your bit scored 62" teaches somebody their writing is weak when in fact they rushed it — the exact inversion of the value.
It records nothing. The camera is rendered locally; the microphone goes to an analyser that is deliberately not connected to any output. Optional transcription is clearly labelled with where the audio goes (Google on Chrome, Apple on Safari) and is off by default.
Nothing here can be won by being funnier. All seven trophies are delivery results — Left The Beat ("every scored punchline got its pause"), No Dead Air ("two minutes with no silence long enough to count"), Held Your Ground ("never walked into your own laugh"). A tool built to stop people rushing must not become a machine for chasing laughs.
Simulator Mode keeps no score at all, and there is a Game Mode that does — where each beat lands PERFECT, GOOD or RUSHED as it happens and a run builds a combo. Both modes measure the identical set; the difference is entirely what's on screen. And the score is a timing score in either one. The room has never had an opinion about the material and gaining a scoreboard did not give it one.
It does not use other comics' material. Stand-up is copyrighted the moment it is performed. The practice sets were written for this; the not-comedy lane is original or public domain.
If every venue were simply harder, a comic would learn one thing five times. The Workout Room is free; the rest open with any purchase or a Game Pass ($5 a month, $25 a season), which also opens the house sets — short game bits, two per category, new ones as they land. The Back of a Bar has no big laugh available in it at all. The Listening Room will wait and will not help. Opening Cold means nobody has laughed yet tonight.
On speakers the crowd returns through the mic, so the room must stop listening for 1.4s after every laugh — exactly when talking over your own laugh happens. On headphones that drops to 0.18s and it hears you straight through.
One buzz when you have held the beat long enough — the thing a real room never tells you. Vibration is the only channel that can speak during a silence without ending it. A game controller rumbles along with it, wired or wireless.
Pick a track on the Walk-On station, trim five to thirty seconds, and it plays as you take the stage — then stops before the room starts listening, so the measurement begins in silence.
In Game Mode each line comes back PERFECT, GOOD or RUSHED the moment the pause after it ends, and a combo builds while you keep hitting. A punchline wants a real beat; a setup wants almost none, and they are judged on different windows — one threshold for both would teach the wrong lesson half the time.
The room times its own frames and moves through four levels of detail as the machine copes, like a console's dynamic resolution. Asking the browser for the GPU name is a fingerprinting surface, and a name is not a speed — an unrecognised new card would rank lowest, so the best hardware would get the worst room.
Timing is measured on the audio thread, at a fixed rate no amount of rendering can slow. So the picture can get richer without the instrument getting coarser — and the room deliberately quiets down during a set. From where you stand, a real stage is a spotlight and a dark room.
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Icon (512) OG card Circuit OG card
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Headline face: Alfa Slab One. Body: Karla. Monospace: Courier Prime.
Three phrasings that are true, in descending order of how much room they take:
ps.insightfulactions@gmail.com — happy to walk a writer through the room, or to correct anything on this page that has gone out of date.
