This can be the funniest thing imaginable. Choose someone who is not liable to look very deeply into the hidden meaning of your explanations. Tell him that if he will do exactly as you ask, you can hypnotize him so that it will be physically impossible for him to get up alone. Let me give you a skull and crossbones warning to put your emphasis on “alone,” and not on “up.”
You and your victim are seated facing each other, but make a great point of the fact that you don’t have to touch him to hypnotize him. Ask him to look straight into your eyes and try to get into the spirit of the thing. He is to do everything you do and in the same way. That always seems to make victims feel that if you can do it without bodily injury, they too stand a good chance of coming out of it alive!
The process of hypnotism is on. Make the most ridiculous motions you can think of, accompanied by the most ridiculous noises, all the time looking intently at your subject. For example, sing up the scale (a process which many of us would make a ridiculous noise!) at the same time twiddling your fingers on top of your head as though the fingers were paper ribbons fluttering in the breezes. Your subject imitates you. Rub your hands together as though they were cymbals, while you buzz like a bee. The victim cymbalizes and buzzes. Five or six of these hypnotizing motions, conscientiously imitated, generally have the effect of paralyzing the audience with no further effort on your part, while the victim begins to “feel queer already!” Just about then you give one last intent look, one last hypnotizing motion, and tell him in a sepulchral tone that now it will be absolutely impossible for him to get up alone.
He experiments, putting out first one foot and then the other, and finally stands up triumphantly and crows, “Well I guess you didn’t hypnotize me! I stood up alone!” “Oh no you didn’t,” comes the answer, “I got up with you. You didn’t get up alone!”
Owa Tagoo Siam!
Tell your guests that the Siamese national slogan is very intricate and that only really intelligent people can learn it, but that you have a way of teaching it so that even the simplest person can grasp it immediately. Ask them to repeat what you say. “Owa!” with emphasis on the o; “Tagoo!” with emphasis on the goo; “Siam!” Then ask them to repeat, running all three words together. They will have to do it over and over with much help and encouragement from you before they appreciate the full meaning of your scornful “Well I should say you are!”
Finally they arrive. Each one is exclaiming “Oh what a goose I am!”
Abbreviations.
Ask some dignified man to put the tip of his forefinger under his chin. While he holds it there ask him to tell the assembled multitude the abbreviation for quart. He will look the part when he says “Q-t,” which you’ll all agree sounds like “Cutie.”
Later on get some other guest to point his forefinger at his head and show how well educated he is by immediately giving the abbreviation for mountain “M-t.” certainly sounds like “empty” though it would hardly be right for any of the other guests to thus describe the victim’s head!