Tips for Distracting Magician Audience

"Hi, I?m Doug on behalf of ExpertVillage.com. Let's talk about patter. How much should you use patter as distraction? Patter is very important. It's what you say, is what patter is. How you say it, what you're emphasizing. In the coin trick or the French Drop, you never want to forewarn the people what you are going to do. Because then they're going to be looking for it. And it's very important if I said, hey look at, I'm going to make this coin disappear. It's gone, there's no element of surprise. And it's okay if you're really good at your sleight of hand. But then again, they've already seen it coming, not so good. My patter before this trick is, I like to say, Okay, we're going to take an ordinary coin. What is it? So they're thinking, okay what is it, oh it's a quarter, or it's a large coin. What's the date on the coin is a good question to ask people. So they're thinking, they're getting into the trick. They're being involved; you're involving them into the trick. And they're not thinking you're going to make it disappear. So the importance of patter is to again, create a little bit more element of surprise in what you're saying. It's also part of patter is telling stories. Let's say we're going to take an ordinary orange, a small orange, actually who here likes orange juice? Because we're actually going to, oh oops. The trick has gone wrong. Which indeed it didn't go wrong, because you made it disappear an now they're all amazed. Because they're thinking you're going to squeeze the orange, whatever you're going to do. Your patter can really be used as misdirection to help guide people to look at something or pay attention to something that you want them to, so they're not paying attention to the other stuff."