I was about two years into performing seriously when I did something that every performer should do and most avoid: I recorded my show and actually listened to the audio. Not to check the timing. Not to evaluate the reactions. Just to hear myself talk.
What I heard made me cringe.
The magic was fine. The audience was reacting well. The technical execution was clean. But the person speaking — me, ostensibly — sounded like a stranger. Not a bad stranger, necessarily. But a strange one. Someone who spoke in patterns no human being uses in normal conversation. Someone who inserted phrases that sounded lifted from a Victorian instruction manual. Someone who talked about a deck of cards as if it were a sacred artifact and addressed his audience with a formal theatricality that belonged in a different century.
I sounded, in short, like a magician. And not in a good way.
The Language Nobody Uses
Here is a sample of the kind of thing I was saying, reconstructed from memory because listening to it again would be too painful:
“What I have here is a perfectly ordinary deck of playing cards. You can examine them if you wish. Now, I am going to ask you to select any card you like — completely free choice. Are you sure? You can change your mind if you like. Excellent. Now, if you could just remember your card…”
Every sentence in that paragraph contains a problem. “What I have here” — who talks like that? “Perfectly ordinary” — as Weber points out, calling something ordinary immediately suggests it is not. “If you wish” — formal and distancing. “Are you sure?” — filler that implies the choice does not matter. “Excellent” — condescending after a simple task. “If you could just” — wimpy and indirect.
This was not my speaking voice. I do not talk like this in meetings, in conversations, at dinner. This was magician talk — a dialect I had unconsciously absorbed from watching magic tutorials, reading magic books, and hearing other magicians perform. It is a dialect with its own vocabulary, its own rhythms, its own peculiar formality, and it sounds absolutely alien to anyone who is not a magician.
Where It Comes From
Ken Weber devotes significant attention in Maximum Entertainment to the language habits that plague performers, and his list of phrases to eliminate is devastating because every item on it is something I was guilty of using. “For my next trick.” “Just like that.” “That’s fantastic!” “Is that fair?” “I need a volunteer.” “Would you like to change your mind?”
But Weber is identifying symptoms. The disease goes deeper.
Magician talk exists because magic is a tradition-heavy art form. Patter gets passed down from generation to generation — sometimes explicitly in books and tutorials, sometimes implicitly through the culture of magic clubs, conventions, and videos. A phrase that was contemporary in 1950 gets repeated in 1970, then 1990, then 2010, each time sounding a little more antiquated but surviving because “that’s how it’s done.”
The result is a performance language that is decades out of step with how people actually communicate. When I was learning my early routines, I was essentially being taught scripts written by and for a previous era. Nobody told me to update the language because nobody recognized it needed updating. Within the magic community, this language is invisible. It is the water everyone swims in. You only notice how strange it sounds when you step outside the community and hear yourself through civilian ears.
And civilian ears are the only ears that matter. Your audience is not made up of magicians. Your audience is made up of people who text in abbreviations, who consume content in short-form video, who communicate in emojis and voice notes and casual directness. When that audience hears you say “What I have here is a perfectly ordinary deck of playing cards,” they do not hear a professional performer. They hear their weird uncle doing a bit.
The Specific Problems
Let me break down the most common magician-talk problems I found in my own performances, because diagnosing them was the first step to fixing them.
The declarative setup. “What I have here is…” or “I have in my hand…” This is the announcer voice, the formal introduction of objects that need no introduction. If you are holding a deck of cards and the audience can see you are holding a deck of cards, you do not need to announce it. Starting with a statement of the obvious signals that you are performing a routine rather than having an experience. Nobody walks up to a friend and says “What I have here is a cup of coffee.” You just start talking.
The over-qualification. “A perfectly ordinary, regular, nothing-special-about-it deck of cards.” Every qualifier you add raises suspicion. Weber is razor-sharp on this: props are presumed ordinary unless you suggest otherwise. The moment you insist something is normal, the audience assumes it is not. This is basic human psychology — the same reason a politician who says “Let me be perfectly honest with you” immediately makes you wonder what they were being before.
The permission-asking. “Could I get you to…” “Would you mind…” “If you could just…” This is the language of servility. It communicates that you are not in charge, that the audience is doing you a favor, that you are uncertain whether they will cooperate. Compare “Would you mind shuffling the cards?” with “Go ahead and give those a shuffle.” The second version is direct, confident, and sounds like something a real person would say.
The magician vocabulary. “Silk” instead of cloth. “Effect” instead of trick or experience. “Riffle” instead of flip through. These words mean nothing to a lay audience and everything to a magician. Using them is like a doctor saying “bilateral periorbital hematoma” when they mean black eye. It is jargon that excludes rather than includes.
The theatrical transitions. “For my next miracle…” “And now, something truly impossible…” “Ladies and gentlemen, what you are about to witness…” These phrases sound like they were written for a vaudeville emcee in 1923. They create distance, they sound scripted, and they telegraph that you are about to do a trick, which gives the audience’s critical brain time to activate before the magic even starts.
The Recording That Changed Everything
After I listened to that first recording, I transcribed about ten minutes of my show — wrote down exactly what I said, word for word. Then I read the transcript as if it were dialogue in a novel. And it was immediately, painfully obvious which parts sounded like a real person and which parts sounded like a magician.
The real-person parts were my ad-libs, my responses to audience members, my off-script moments where I reacted to something unexpected. Those sounded natural because they were natural. Nobody speaks in magician-talk when they are genuinely surprised.
The magician-talk parts were my scripted patter — the transitions, the setups, the instructions. All the parts I had learned from magic sources. Those sounded stilted because they were stilted. They were not my words. They were inherited phrases that had been rattling around the magic community for decades, and I had adopted them without questioning whether they sounded like something Felix Lenhard would actually say.
The fix was simple in concept and brutal in execution: I rewrote everything. Every transition, every setup line, every instruction. I asked myself one question about each sentence: Would I say this to a friend sitting across from me at a coffee shop? If the answer was no, the sentence got rewritten until the answer was yes.
“What I have here is a deck of cards” became nothing. I just held up the cards and started talking about what I was going to do. “Would you mind selecting any card you like?” became “Grab one.” “For my next piece” became a story or a thought that led naturally into the next routine.
The Resistance
I want to be honest about something: rewriting my patter this way felt wrong at first. The magician-talk phrases felt professional. They felt like what a performer is supposed to sound like. Stripping them away felt like stripping away my credibility. Without the theatrical language, I felt exposed, like a businessman in a suit who suddenly has to give a speech in jeans and a t-shirt.
This resistance is real and it is worth acknowledging. Magic culture trains you to believe that performance language should sound different from everyday language. The theatrical register is a signal of professionalism within the community. Dropping it feels like dropping your standards.
But your audience does not share that frame of reference. To them, theatrical language signals distance, artifice, and a lack of authenticity. They are not measuring you against other magicians. They are measuring you against every other person they interact with in their daily lives. And in their daily lives, nobody talks like a vaudeville emcee.
What Replaced It
My current patter sounds like me. It sounds like a conversation. When I set up an effect, I tell a brief story about why it interests me or ask the audience a question about something related. When I give instructions to a volunteer, I use the same tone I would use giving directions to a friend. When I transition between routines, I talk about what I was thinking or wondering, not about “what you are about to see.”
The result is that my show sounds like one continuous, engaging conversation that happens to include impossible things. The magic emerges from the conversation rather than the conversation serving the magic. And audiences respond to this radically differently than they responded to my old, magician-talk-heavy performances.
People lean in more. They laugh more. They talk to me after the show in a way that suggests they feel they know me. These are the markers of genuine connection, and they are directly attributable to speaking like a human being instead of speaking like a character from a different era.
The Ongoing Purge
I still catch myself falling into magician talk. It creeps back in, especially when I am nervous or when I am performing material I have not fully internalized yet. Under pressure, I default to the patterns I first learned, and those patterns are saturated with the language of magic culture.
So the purge is ongoing. After every show, I listen to the audio and flag any phrase that sounds stilted, formal, theatrical, or generally unlike how I speak in real life. Then I rewrite it. Then I rehearse the rewrite until it feels natural. Then I perform it and listen again.
It is not glamorous work. It is the kind of microscopic, sentence-level editing that most performers never bother with because the audience is already clapping and the show is already working. But working and connecting are different things. A show full of magician talk can work — the effects land, the reactions happen, the audience politely applauds. A show stripped of magician talk and rebuilt in genuine human language connects. The audience does not just see a show. They feel like they spent time with a real person.
That is the difference. And it starts with how you sound.
Stop sounding like a magician. Start sounding like yourself. The audience will thank you for it with the only currency that matters: their genuine attention, their real laughter, and their honest astonishment.