When I was in New Orleans with the family and one of the things we did was a cemetery tour. The first thing that he did was tell us about himself and his connection to the city.
That’s something that many magicians miss, they don’t tell the audience about them or their connection to whatever they’re doing onstage. When you start performing on a more national scale, the “where you’re from” becomes a lot more important. It doesn’t need to be a while chunk of your show, sometime it can be a little aside about being from where ever.
The one thing that I didn’t like, but it’s a common tour guide and magician joke was at the end he was asking us to review him. He said, “if you didn’t like the tour my name is Joe, if you did like the tour my name is _____“. There’s a lot wrong with that joke, first of all you shouldn’t use anyone else’s name in your closing remarks if you want the audience to remember your name. The tour guide is a great example, in the hack line above I left his name blank, and that’s because I remember the fake name he said, but not his real one. The line got a laugh, but in the long run it hurt him as I can’t leave him a positive review because I don’t remember his name.
It was a short term win (laugh) with a long term loss (me not remembering his name). If you use this line, you really consider if using that line is worth it the little laugh it gets. If that line gets a huge laugh in your show, you really should reexamine your show to find out why your other lines aren’t getting the same reaction as the stolen line (if you didn’t write it, or have permission from the person who wrote it to use it, it’s stolen).
-Louie