Years of honing her comic patter behind a bar helped and she quickly became established on the comedy circuit.

His patter — fast, outraged, informed and tinged with well-timed jokes — was a master class in old-school talk radio.

As he spoke, a steady rain pattered on the promenade facing Portland, just across the Columbia River.

Soon, though, his smooth and lyrical patter sold him on most Dodger fans, an old-school baseball guy with a poetic bent.

The joke-packed patter song, about three infants who are all suspects in the murder of their mother, was a source of narrative tension, since Martin’s character was extremely nervous about performing it in full.