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I've just purchased a bowler hat as part of my costume for kid's shows. I have some ideas for a routine with the hat, but I'm looking for some gags/bits of business with the thing.
I was thinking somewhere along the lines of the hat trying to get away from me and i need to catch it - like it jumps off my head and then every time I approach it it jumps away. It would be a nice lead in to producing a rabbit
Anyway - any ideas would be welcome - or if any of you know of any material I could get hold that would help me here i'd appreciate the help.

b.t.w. - this is quite a nice site i saw on another forum:
http://www.trickswithhats.org

Hi

This is the place to be for hat tricks:-

http://www.trickswithhats.org/


Paula

The book, "The Complete Juggler" contains a full section dedicated to hat tricks alone. So, the site that Paula suggests is probably everything you need, but if you want to couple some hat tricks with juggling in general, I can't recommend the book highly enough.

Mike.

How about doing a "Zombie Floating Hat" with the bowler? That would fit in with a comedy style, as the hat bobs away underneath a foulard, occasionally popping up at the top.

I couldn't get much out of that website, so maybe this was already covered.

A zombie hat is a really nice idea - thanks

Hi

Get a second hat and cut in the back a hand size hole and then fit a glove puppet so that when your hand goes into the hole the puppet goes on.

Simple to do and the Children love it.

Ps

I keep some balloons in the hat as well and a Goesinta box so that the puppet can get involved.

Paula

If you can find or make a bat puppet, you can tie in Paula's idea with mine.

Offer to let the kids in on the "secret" of how the hat can fly. Then reveal the bat inside the hat. You can make rhymes about the bat in the hat for little children and for slightly older ones you can explain that wherever you see a bowler, there's likely to be a bat. You could even move into a joke about Batman.

Bats might be a bit scary for children, but if your puppet is cute, you can have fun with it and kids like being scared a little bit, as long as they know they are safe really.

Any puppet could be the "pilot" of the flying hat, but some kind of flying creature would make sense.

I like the idea of animating the hat somehow and then producing whatever was supposed to be causing it.
Anyone have any ideas on how to make the hat jump when it's on the floor?
I thought of getting it to fall off my head while I check for something in my shoe. I'll use a squeaker to make a squeaking noise every time I step. I bend down to take my shoe off and my hat falls off. I take something out of my shoe - like a rock or something, put it on my table - bend down to get my hat and it jumps away from me. I'm thinking I'll just flick it up as i put my hands down to lift it.
The picture I want to create is my chasing my hat with one shoe on. I eventually catch the hat and put it on my head - only to realise I don't have my shoe on - so I bend down to put my shoe on and guess what happens..
Anyway - somewhere in this routine i want to produce a coke can from my shoe (see http://www.leirpoll.com/cokefromshoe.asp)
And then eventually catch the hat and produce a rabbit - probably a rabbit puppet, cos I'm a bit hesitant on a body load with a live rabbit. (although I'd rather do that than a body load with a dead one )

Making a hat jump away from you in conditions like a kid’s birthday party might be tricky. Even a simple set-up which relies on, say, carpet, or no carpet is going to be at risk.

The two methods I can think of are to kick it away yourself, under cover of bending down to pick it up or to use an ITR. You would stoop down to pick up the hat, your hand and foot nearest to the children covering the movement of your “far” leg, as you bring it forward to “balance”. I think kicking it is going to require a lot of practice (so you don’t crush the hat or kick it too far or not far enough), a tough hat and might not be very convincing. There might be ways of weighting the hat to make it look more like jumps, but it’s only a bowler hat, not one of James Bond’s cars.

Looping some IT round the legs of your table sounds more reliable to me, but I’ve no real experience of using that.

When speaking of animating a bowler---out of all of these posts--it is hard to believe that nobody has advised to watch some old Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton movies! The things they did with their unprepared hats was spectacular. OF course, we are talking about Keaton and Chaplin, but it should at least be a nice jumping off point for ideas.

Really, any comic magician should at least study these guys to some degree. If you are not familiar with their work, check some of it out. You'll thank me.