There’s a type of patter that sounds like patter. You can hear it from the audience: slightly artificial, slightly over-constructed, using sentence structures that no human being has ever produced in casual conversation. The performer says something like, “Now, if you’ll allow me to invite you to contemplate the nature of coincidence…” and even if the audience can’t articulate what’s wrong, they feel it. A subtle wrongness. A performance of sincerity rather than sincerity itself.
I’ve written patter like that. I’ve also sat in audiences listening to others perform it. The experience is the same from both sides: technically functional but fundamentally hollow. The structure is there. The words are in order. But the whole thing is happening at one remove from reality.
Matthew Dicks gives you a test for this in Storyworthy. It’s simple, and it’s brutal. Before you put a story on stage, tell it at dinner. Not as a performance — as a thing you actually want to share with real people you know. And see what happens.
If it works at dinner, it’ll work on stage. If it wouldn’t survive dinner, it has no business being on stage.
What the Dinner Test Actually Measures
The test is about authenticity, but the mechanism is more specific than that word suggests.
At dinner, you don’t have a captive audience. The people around the table have no obligation to stay engaged. They can start another conversation, check their phone, refill a glass. They’ll give a story their attention if and only if it earns it. There’s no social contract that says “we’re all sitting here watching, so we’ll listen.” You’re competing for natural attention, in a natural environment, with all the distractions and countervailing interests that implies.
Stage performance has a different dynamic. The lights are down, the social contract is active, the audience has come to watch, and there’s a kind of inertia to attention that doesn’t exist at a dinner table. You can coast on that inertia for a while. You can get through hollow material without losing the room, because the room has committed to paying attention.
The dinner table strips that away. What survives at dinner is real. What only works because of the social contract of performance is artificial, and audiences can sense the artificiality even when they can’t name it.
Running My Patter Through the Test
When I started applying this test to my material, the results were illuminating. Some of what I’d written for routines held up fine — I could imagine telling it at a dinner table in Vienna or at a professional event in Graz, and it would read as a genuine story someone wanted to tell. The words were natural. The pacing was how people actually talk. The point of the story was something worth saying.
Other pieces fell apart immediately. I’d look at them and think: I would never say this to a real person in a real conversation. The language was performing rather than communicating. The structure was constructed for effect rather than for the natural flow of how a story actually comes out when you’re telling it to someone you know.
Interestingly, the material that failed the dinner test wasn’t always the material I’d worked harder on. Sometimes the pieces I’d over-engineered were the ones that felt most artificial — too much structure, too deliberate a cadence, too precisely built to produce an effect on the audience rather than to communicate something genuine.
The material that passed the dinner test was often stuff I’d developed more casually. A story I’d actually told someone before I formalized it. An observation I’d shared with a friend that then became the seed of a presentation idea. Things that started as real communication rather than as constructed material.
The Trap of Performance Language
Performance contexts create a gravitational pull toward performance language. When you’re writing patter, you’re not in a natural conversational state — you’re in creative construction mode, and that mode tends to produce elevated diction, more complex sentence structures, and a cadence calibrated for effect rather than naturalness.
None of that is wrong in itself. But it can drift into material that could only ever exist on stage — language that has no analog in natural conversation. And that drift is what the dinner test catches.
What I’ve found is that even when the content is good, the language often needs to be loosened. Formal sentences broken up. Active voice replacing passive. Ordinary vocabulary replacing the slightly elevated vocabulary that sounds good in my head but would sound strange coming out of my mouth at dinner.
Dicks makes the point that the best storytellers sound like themselves — their natural, talking-to-a-friend selves — even when they’re performing to thousands. The craft is not in constructing a different, more elegant version of yourself. It’s in finding the version of yourself that already exists in conversation and bringing it intact to the stage.
When the Story Is Not Yours
The dinner test becomes particularly important when the story I’m telling isn’t strictly mine. Sometimes in patter, I’m referencing something I read, or describing something that happened to someone else, or building a narrative around a premise that didn’t literally occur to me. The challenge is making this feel genuine rather than constructed.
Here the test takes a slightly different form. Would I naturally bring this up at dinner? Is this the kind of thing I’d actually say, unprompted, because it interested me or moved me or changed how I thought? Or is it material I’m deploying because it serves the routine, regardless of whether it’s something I’d naturally share?
This is where source material gets tricky. The books I read — the frameworks and concepts I’ve absorbed from people like Darwin Ortiz, Tommy Wonder, Pete McCabe — these genuinely interest me. I talk about them with people I know. I bring up ideas from books I’m reading at dinner, at conferences, in casual professional conversations. That’s authentic. I’m not constructing an interest in these topics for the sake of performance.
But there are anecdotes from those books that I might be tempted to use — stories about named performers, historical examples, psychological experiments — that I wouldn’t naturally bring up in conversation unless I were deliberately trying to illustrate a point. That deliberateness shows. It makes the story feel like a vehicle for a lesson rather than a story worth telling.
The dinner test catches this too: would I tell this story at dinner because it was interesting, or would I only tell it if I were trying to prove a point?
What Passes the Test
The material that consistently passes the dinner test, for me, tends to share a few characteristics.
It’s specific rather than general. It happened somewhere, to someone, with real details. The specificity is what makes it feel true — and what makes it interesting at a dinner table, where “I was in Vienna last March and this happened” lands differently than “when I’m performing, sometimes…”
It has a genuine emotional texture. Something was at stake. Something surprised me, or frustrated me, or changed how I saw something. The emotional content is what makes a story worth telling rather than a mere sequence of events.
It’s not trying to prove anything too hard. The stories that feel most constructed are the ones that exist to demonstrate a conclusion — where every element of the story is arranged to funnel toward a predetermined point. At dinner, when someone is clearly building to a lesson, you can feel it. It changes the listening mode from genuine engagement to patient waiting for the point to arrive.
The best material has a conclusion that feels discovered rather than constructed. The story goes somewhere, and where it goes feels like it surprised even the person telling it.
The Practical Application
Now I tell stories before I formalize them. Not always as literally sitting at a dinner table — but I find a natural conversational context where I can try the material out as a thing I’m actually sharing, rather than as material I’m testing. A coffee meeting. A conversation after a conference session. A phone call with someone I trust.
If the story works there — if it holds attention, if the person responds to it genuinely, if they ask a follow-up question or share something in response — I know it has life. If it falls flat, or if I can feel myself performing it rather than telling it, I know the material needs work before it goes anywhere near a stage.
This has slowed down my material development. Testing things in natural conversation takes longer than just writing them and putting them in a routine. But the material that makes it through is almost always better for the process.
The dinner test is not a high bar. It’s a natural bar. And natural is exactly what you’re trying to reach.