I perform what’s known in the trade as a “Patter Act”. Really all this means is that I talk while I do things, as opposed to doing magic silently to music.
Although I am by nature a talktative lout, I do develop “patter” – really a “script outline” for my show. The actual things I say start out as an outline of what I want to convey and gets edited on the fly while I’m performing based on my audience, the environment and how I’m feeling at the time.
There are, however, some fixed bits of dialog in the show. These are jokes and one-liners, or sometimes just reactions which I’ve found get the best reception from my audiences. I spend a suprising amount of time working over these lines when I’m off stage – reviewing tapes and replaying the show in my head to get a feeling for what lines “roll” properly and which don’t.
Here’s an example – during a recent set of shows at Faire in the Grove, I started on my traditional Epic Audience Enthusiasm Generating Exercise and on the bit where I ask the audience to “Yell and scream like the bloodthirsty heathens you are!” … I got a particularly … impressive response. This wave of sound washed over me… and after a slightly stunned pause, what came out of my mouth was this half-chortle, half-astonished noise, a sort of “heh-heh-heh” (if you have a Facebook account, you can check out the video here-ish, I think… )
It got a laugh, so I mentally filed it away under “Things to keep in the act.” Later on, I reviewed the video clip (linked above) so I could remember exactly what sound I made during that bit…
I suppose it takes a lot of effort to be spontaneous…
Tags: nuts and bolts
