Apple's iPad pitch: The awesome 3-minute version

Steve Jobs' performances can be pretty funny when you reduce them to their buzzwords

Image: Apple Inc.

The Reduced Shakespeare Company showed that you can turn a tragedy like Hamlet into knee-slapping comedy if you take out the extra words.

An enterprising video editor (and body painter) named Neil Curtis has done just that with Apple's (AAPL) Jan. 27 iPad event, and the result is 2 minutes and 54 seconds of pure comedic hype. (See the video below the fold.)

Curtis' work fits into a long tradition of compressed Apple videos. We've visited some of these in the past. (See Boiling Apple down to its adjectives.) All Things Digital's Peter Kafka has collected a couple more and posted them here.

These exercises reveal one of the secrets of Jobs' legendary presentation style: keep repeating the same carefully chosen adjectives and superlatives until the desired hypnotic effect has been achieved.

The key words this time: magical, wonderful, incredible, amazing, awesome, big, bigger, better, best, great, huge, terrific, tremendous, ambitious, gorgeous, beautiful, phenomenal, unbelievable, unbeatable, remarkable, revolutionary, extraordinary, super high quality, super responsive, super precise, easy, easily, simple and fun.

Video below, with thanks to Mashable for bringing it to our attention.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]