A thought occured to me the other day when I was thinking how to improve my showmanship, patter, etc. If you keep fairly regular patter, timing, and whatnot, eventually it becomes almost difficult to do a trick WITHOUT the patter to aid in your timing and delivery. One thing that usually disrupts me are people trying to be clever and funny during your patter or heckling as its sometimes called. So I was thinking of the best way to deal with this. Then it hit me. With my regular patter one can almost predict what people may say in certain situations. I therefore chose a few effects and attempted to write down a few possible things your average spectator may say in a given situation and then snappy comebacks that would get a laugh.

Lo and behold. Less than 24 hours later I was showing a trick to my father-in-law who is a real wise arse. Right on queue he chimes in with a wise remark. I slam dunked him with my preplanned comeback. Everyone in the room roared.

That pretty much made a believer out of me so now I'm going to spend this week planning out lines for all of my effects. You don't necessarily have to take anything away from this, I just thought it was an entertaining anecdote.

That's great! Aside from out lines I also plan alternative endings to my effects. There might be a magician in the room, or there might be someone who has seen the effect and tries to get ahead of the group. Alternative endings are pretty good slammers IMO.
The best thing is planning out lines and alternative endings does'nt require "silly clear tapes" such as 3M!
Great post!

peace!

Rannie

This is very good boys. All magi should use their heads more than their skill. It is this kind of thinking that makes magic an art, as opposed to just a skill.

I've always said that the best ad libs are those you've prepared.

I never use word-for-word "patter" (I hate that word, patter) but have a general theme and work as conversational as I can doing table/close up magic.

Almost as loose on stage too... I feel you need to talk at the level of those watching you.

One of the great lessons I got from Comedy writer/genius Lou Derman (wrote for All in the Family TV show, created Mr. Ed) was "for ever action there must be a reaction... whenever anyone speaks you MUST answer, funny or not."

It flows better if you have several patters for each effect. If your doing a trick it would always be better to make it into an effect by raping oround it some part of yourself.