Hello from the land of surf and Spam musubi, where you tip the beach boys by day and Shoot Ogawa by night. That’s right, as I write this I’m absorbing the mana of Hawai’i. I’m not sipping a Mai Tai on the beach, unfortunately. I’m in an airport lounge punching keys on my laptop and thinking about magic.

I came here for an 8-day cruise around the islands, and now that has come to an end. And as much as I would love to chat about the boat’s resident magician, that’s not the experience that stuck with me. Instead, I’m going to talk about trivia. What do you mean going to? Everything you’ve said so far is entirely trivial. Fine! I’ll get to the point. Soon.

One morning, while docked on Kauai, most of the cruisers got off the boat to go on excursions to places I’ve already been, so I went to the morning trivia game alone. And I mean alone. I was the only one who showed up to play. It was just me and the host from the entertainment staff. We chatted about the life of working on a cruise ship for a while, and when the start time came and no one else walked in, he sat down at the table and said “I guess it can be an out-loud trivia then.” And then he did something strange.

He began his rote introductory spiel for a trivia competition. He introduced himself even though we had been chatting for several minutes. He explained what we were going to do despite the fact he knew it was the very thing I had shown up to do and had already confirmed I would win by default. I could tell not a word had been altered due to the unique circumstance. He didn’t even preface it with “This is what I have to say to introduce this activity,” nor conclude with a wink and a nod and a “But you knew all that already.”

At first, I found the sudden shift of gears into this canned speech jarring, but within moments I found myself getting excited. I was actually enjoying myself more because of it. And for a moment I found myself distracted from the trivia questions as I was reminded of something Andy over at The Jerx once wrote in this article:

I call this sort of thing “Lecture Patter.” It sounds like you’re listening to a rehearsed lecture. It’s not the way friends talk when they get together. It says, “I’ve anticipated this moment and prepared for it and you are just the person I decided to unleash this on. Pat[sic] attention. Class is in session.” Everything feels pre-planned.

He calls this the “wrong way” to introduce an experience in casual settings. “Avoiding Lecture Patter is one of the ways we can make magic feel more spontaneous and unpredictable,” he argues. I’m not here to dispute the fact that Lecture Patter makes magic feel less spontaneous, but I am going to dispute that this necessarily makes it utterly wrong for casual settings. I’m not saying it’s absolutely fine to use all the time either.

Lecture Patter as a Ritual Incantation

Rather, the interaction above led me to the realization that one can intentionally use it as presentational style for casual settings for certain effects and certain circumstances. Namely, when you want to begin a ritual for acquaintances and new friends that you can credibly claim to be an expert at conducting.

By “ritual,” I don’t mean like a ceremony to summon demons or some esoteric religious rite. Rather, I just mean that you intend to conduct an experience that has to proceed in a specific way to achieve a specific result. And by “expert,” I don’t mean an award-winning noted sage at the top of a field. Rather, I just mean someone who has done this ritual professionally often enough that they can be trusted to lead it in this moment.

For example, suppose I want to do a trick with a stack of index cards with words written on them that I claim came from vocabulary flash cards I used with students during my years as a teacher. I can credibly claim to be an expert at testing mental abilities of people using those cards, and so I could introduce my effect as a “test” using a canned spiel that sounds like the instructions test proctors have to read at the beginning of standardized tests. In order to sell my story, I need to be able to deliver a canned speech fluently and fluidly with no effort or misspeaking. A casual “hey, check out this weird thing” style would actually detract from this presentation.

What about Andy’s black hole presentation? Well, there’s no way I personally could use this presentational style for that imp. But, I argue, someone could. I think someone with a Ph.D. in psychology and a history of academic research, for instance, could. They could say that they spent years doing academic research on people’s perception and predictive abilities, and then introduce the black hole illusion as an example of something used in their experiments. And they could do so using a clearly well-rehearsed speech that sounds like it could plausibly have been delivered countless times to the subjects of experiments.

On top of all that, actually having some personal historical connection to the subject of the presentation like this allows you to bring back some of the spontaneity. By steering a conversation towards your personal history, you can bring up the subject of the presentation in a natural way before switching to the canned spiel. With this introduction, the sudden shift to memorized patter will make sense in context in spite of its disorienting nature.

Aims and Misuse

The goal of the canned spiel in these contexts is not to establish your credibility. It’s entirely about setting the scene, setting the mood, transporting your participants to a context supposedly drawn from your life history. If you jump into such a canned spiel with minimal lead-up, you should expect to create a moment of imbalance followed by a heightened attention and excitement for what’s to come. See the post-script for a more in-depth discussion of this principle.

Now, you might reasonably ask “Well, what’s stopping me, a professional magician, from saying ‘here’s a magic trick I always used to perform; do you want to check it out?’ and then going into canned patter for a magic trick?” Well, for one “magic trick” is not the kind of thing I mean by “ritual,” because the outcome of a magic trick is presumed to be a foregone conclusion. A test of the participant’s mental abilities, for example, is not. Just because you, the expert, know how to conduct a ritual and see it through to its proper conclusion doesn’t mean you know what that conclusion will be. And that’s critical because there’s no fun to be had in foregone conclusions.

But for another, and more importantly, “doing a magic trick” is too ill-defined a space to play in. This is about make-believe. When children play a role-play game, they want to play as ninjas or princesses or adventurers, not as “a child playing a game.” In other words, our goal here is not to entirely defy Andy’s sagacity on magic in social settings but rather to provide it support from one more angle. As he said long ago:

You see where this is going, right? I’m saying up the bullshit, and make it entertaining. Don’t say it tongue in cheek, play it completely straight. You don’t need to do it with a wink because what you’re saying should be so incredible that it’s obvious you don’t intend to be taken seriously. 

Post-Script: Games Theory

You can quit reading right there if you like, but if you want to read on, you’ll have to put on your academic hat because things are about to get a bit more theoretical. As I said above, magic, and especially social magic, is a form of play, so the academic field of games theory can be applied. In particular, social magic presentational styles can be seen as methods to create one of the “play-grounds” Johan Huizinga described in Homo Ludens:

All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc, are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.

Eric Zimmerman and Frank Lantz are best known for popularizing this concept, saying “the term magic circle is appropriate because there is in fact something genuinely magical that happens when a game begins.” But the underlying logic of the Lecture Patter presentational style is that this relation is reflexive: something genuinely game-like happens when magic begins.

The purpose of the Lecture Patter within this presentational style is to demarcate the boundaries of the “magic circle.” Once the speech that you are reciting so effortlessly that you have clearly recited it a thousand times before comes pouring forth, your participants will subconsciously hear you say “we’re beginning a game of make-believe, so frame your responses as if everything I’m saying from here on, no matter how ridiculous, is absolutely true.” And the briefly unsettling feeling of entering that space, a space clearly delineated as being for play should not create boredom or predictability, but rather a sense of impending fun.

Here’s another way to look at it: When you watch a stage magician, as when you watch a play, you know where the magic circle is: it’s the space inside the theater. Likewise, you know that the magic circle of the close-up magician is the table. But social magic can happen anywhere at any time, and so your audience is depending on your words to delineate how your interaction will take place. But the key to making it effective and memorable as a bit of guerilla theatre is to avoid making it an explicitly narrative drama. You are playing a role within a fiction, and you make it clear you are taking charge, but you aren’t a narrator. You’re just a facilitator. Many of the presentational styles Andy describes; the Romantic Adventure, the Peek Behind the Curtain, etc.; are all approaches to accomplishing exactly this. And I think this particular usage of Lecture Patter deserves a place on this list.