The Art of Witty Banter: Be Clever, Quick, & Magnetic

By Patrick King

Think quickly on your feet: be smooth, funny, and clever – all at once. Goodbye awkward silences, hello conversational agility.

In any interaction, witty banter is almost always the end goal. It allows you to (1) disarm and connect with anyone, (2) immediately exit boring small talk mode, and (3) instantly build rapport like you’re old friends.

Flow with the conversational twists and turns like water.

The Art of Witty Banter examines the art, nuance, and mechanics of banter and charm to make you awitty comeback machine, the likes of which your friends have never seen. You’ll be able to handle, defend, disarm, and engage others in a way that makes you comfortable and confident with each growing day.

Transform "interview" conversations into comfortable rapport.

Patrick King is an internationally bestselling author and Social Skills and Conversation Coach. As someone who teaches people to speak for a living, he’s broken wit and banter down to a science and given you real guidelines on what to say and when.

Make a sharp, smart, and savvy impression every time.

•Why the questions you use make people freeze.
•How to master teasing, witty comebacks, and initiating jokes and humor.
•What free association is and how it makes you quick-witted.

There’s no guesswork here – you’ll get exact examples and phrases to plug into your daily conversations.

•The reactions and exact phrases to make yourself be heard.
•The best types of compliments to give and what you’re doing wrong.
•What a fallback story is and how it can save you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Aug 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9798674002192

Patrick King

Patrick King is a social interaction specialist/dating, online dating, image, and communication and social skills coach based in San Francisco, California. His work has been featured on numerous national publications such as Inc.com, and he’s achieved status as a #1 Amazon best-selling dating and relationships author. He writes frequently on dating, love, sex, and relationships. Learn more about Patrick at his website, patrickkingconsulting.com.

Book preview

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Flow Like a River

Never Speak in Absolutes

Think Before You React

Practice Free Association

Use Double Explanations

More Effective Compliments

Chapter 2. Conversation Is Play

Break the Fourth Wall

The Us Against the World Technique

Use Fallback Stories

Instant Role Play

Chapter 3. A Touch of Witty Banter

The Witty Comeback Machine

Instigate a Banter Chain

Go Beyond the Literal

The Art of Misconstruing

Chapter 4. Funny on Command

Vivid Imagery

The Comic Triple

Misdirection Aplenty

Chapter 5. Captivating Stories

A Life of Stories

The 1:1:1 Method

The Story Spine

Inside Stories

Ask for Stories

Summary Guide

Chapter 1. Flow Like a River

When I was growing up, my favorite television show wasn’t one of the conventional cartoons like G.I. Joe or X-Men.

People tend to assume I had a sad childhood when I say this, but it’s not that I was deprived of cartoons by draconian parents.

Cartoons typically aired early on weekend mornings, which meant you had to go to bed early the night before to get up in time for the shows. I always overslept, so I never saw the cartoons. But why was I oversleeping?

Because I always stayed up late to watch David Letterman, the host of The Late Show with David Letterman for over thirty years.

I didn’t know it at the time, but of all the late-night television hosts, David Letterman was one of the most legendary. I just watched because I thought his Top Ten Lists were funny in an adult way that I couldn’t quite understand. He would talk about economics, and though I didn’t quite grasp the specifics, I knew the general feeling he was trying to convey and would laugh when my older brother laughed. I didn’t get many of the digs and jabs he would take at guests, but I saw a specific tone and facial expression and went along with it.

It wasn’t until I grew older that I started to really notice the subtle tactics Letterman used to energize boring guests and turn dull segments into funny ones.

In particular, it was his ability to banter wittily with his band leader, guests, and even himself in a self-deferential way that was the engine of the show. Letterman was like Teflon—he was so smooth and slick, he could always go with the flow, nothing ever seemed to faze him, and he was never without a witty quip or two.

It seemed as if he could joke about anything, and his jokes never seemed forced or out of place. It didn’t work as well for me when I tried emulating Letterman the next day at school, but it did get me thinking about what constituted a person who was conversationally so slick and smooth, so able to let anything negative roll right off of them, that they were Teflon.

How can you not just always have something to say, but always have something witty and clever to say? Witty banter is many things at once—disarming, charming, intelligent, and quick. It almost sounds impossible when you think about the effects it has on others.

But banter is a skill just like pitching a baseball or underwater basket weaving. Once you know the patterns and building blocks, you can practice and improve them. And once you practice enough, they become instinct and habit that come easily to you because they are second nature.

This book is going to be one of your best tools for becoming adept at the kind of witty banter that will help you succeed in social situations.

You’ll learn what makes a statement clever, how to deliver it quickly, and how it all comes together to make you someone of note and worth talking to. We’ll start with techniques for flowing conversation. You can’t achieve wit if you’re caught in awkward silence!

Never Speak in Absolutes

Don’t mind the irony in the section title (using the word never to warn against using the word never). But I stand by it.

One of the most common ways to kill any kind of conversational flow, regardless of how interesting the topic might be, is when one of the speakers reduces their questions to absolutes. Absolutes are tough to answer and sometimes even to contemplate, as you’re about to read.

I was once set upon with absolute questions by a cousin at a family gathering. He was eight at the time, so it was excusable, but I’ll never forget how it felt when someone kept talking to me in absolutes.

He asked me what my favorite ice cream flavor in the entire world was. I thought for a while and said rocky road. He started howling that I had horrible taste and demanding to know how I could forget Neapolitan. Next, he asked me what my favorite television show of all time was, and so on. It was a tortuous conversation full of long pauses and subsequent judgment of my tastes and opinions.

Years later, he would discover that he was lactose intolerant, so the joke was ultimately on him.

There are more common absolute questions that you’ll come across in your daily life, but the point is that they are difficult to answer off the cuff, because doing so requires some indexing, thought, and decision-making. That’s a lot to ask within the flow of a casual conversation. Whatever train of thought you previously had must first be derailed in order to answer this question. And then where does that leave you?

Absolute questions usually appear very innocent. For example, What's your number-one favorite movie of all time? That’s a pretty innocuous question on its face, but it is an absolute question. It puts people on the spot and usually leads them to answer with, Oh, I'm not sure, let me think about that, then never finish their thought, which of course then derails your conversation. You might as well ask them to solve an arithmetic problem. For instance:

What's your favorite band?

I don't know, let me think about that.

Hmm... I'm not sure. What's yours?

I’ll get back to you on that. I have no idea!

The problem here is that you're asking an absolute question, which begs for an absolute answer. When you do that, you offer the other person no wiggle room and, worse, you’ve given them the difficult task of coming up with a definitive answer to your question. What is my favorite movie?

Your question will fail, the conversation will stall, and you may never get back on track. Most people like to tell the truth, and if they are tasked with something that requires them to really dig deep and come up with an honest answer to an absolute question, they will try to complete this difficult task. A small percentage of people will be able to come up with something quickly, and another small percentage of people will give a response that vaguely satisfies your question. About 1 percent of people will have these things on the tip of their tongues for whatever reason, and the rest won’t know how to respond.

The bottom line: it sounds simplistic and unimportant, but using absolute statements, answers, and questions makes conversation difficult and leads to premature death. (Of the conversation, not the people involved.)

A primary rule of thumb for conversation is to make it easy for the other person, which of course makes it easy for you. Moreover, it’s obvious that no one wants to carry the burden of a conversation. No one wants to fill in all the blanks, prevent all the silences, and direct the entire discussion. If your line of questioning ends up putting the burden on the other person as if it were a job interview, that other person is either going to disengage quickly, or bounce everything back to you with a What about you? response. Then you’re going to have to deal with the mess you’ve created.

When you ask somebody What's your absolute favorite (fill in the blank)? you're putting them on the spot. You’re really asking them to dig down and think, and worse, to commit to something they may not have strong feelings about. They’ll likely just say the first name that pops up in their mind and pass it off as their favorite because they don’t want to take too long to respond. This might be fine once or twice, but imagine how they will feel after a while if every question you ask is along similar lines.

They will start to feel as if they’re at a job interview or in an interrogation instead of a pleasant social interaction. They will feel as if they’re being put in a position of carrying the burden of the conversation—a responsibility they don’t particularly want. It’s very tiring.

So what’s the solution here? Let’s see how we can modify those absolute questions into questions that are far easier to answer and won’t stymie people or stall the exchange.

Put boundaries around the question and make it non-absolute and people will be able to answer the question far more easily.

A common absolute question might be What’s your favorite movie? Transform this question into:

What are your top few movies?

What are some good movies you’ve seen recently?

Any movies you can recommend?

Do you prefer to watch television or movies?

These questions go from more specific to broader and easier to answer. By doing this, you're not tying somebody into an absolute commitment or an absolute statement. There are several qualifiers here based on number or time, and when people don’t feel pressured to come up with an absolute answer, they can relax and answer just about anything.

Moreover, open-ended questions like these give you enough material to respond well. If someone names a movie as their favorite, but you haven’t seen it, you’re likely headed for an awkward dead-end in the conversation. On the other hand, if someone names several movies, it gives you a better chance of being able to connect at least one of them to your own favorites and move forward with the conversation.

Here's another example. Imagine asking someone, What’s your ultimate dream vacation? This question would likely put the person in a conundrum as to how they should answer. Do they decide based on how appealing the destination is? Do they put more weight on the place’s sites or its culture? Do they need to

Reviews for The Art of Witty Banter

[EZI · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Informative and easily digestible nice summary of the art of quick wit

[Rae Huang · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

it felt mundane like a sad microwaved meal with scripted instructions- though one can relate the second part of the book with their own experiences

[612priya · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"A fun and insightful summary that captures the essence of Patrick King's tips for mastering Witty banter and becoming a more engaging conversationalist"

[Dee Tee · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Informative and refreshing I loved it solid points great examples

[Anders · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

this book will tell you how to get out you're personality.

[Josh Robinson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great book really helps you understand the fundamentals of conversation reading this book will definitely improve your conversation quality.

[Marcel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As fruitful a book as only you can get from an veteran author.

[Danny D · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Ideal for those who have never spoken to another person or someone who is chronically depressed. Not much useful in the book for someone who on the occasion makes people laugh

[Oisín Tracey · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Since reading this book, I'm better at conversation, I've made a few people chuckle and I'm under investigation for tax evasion... That last one is my own fault though, Patrick King does give ample warnings about when and how to crack a joke. Honestly, a great read with practical tips! Highly recommend!