 |
| © The Jim Henson Company |
Gavin Stephens is working through his set when he asks if anyone remembers the Kenny Loggins song, Danger Zone.
“Footloose!” comes the cry from the front-row table. He laughs and the crowd laughs - not because it’s funny, but because it’s incredibly wrong.
Not long later the woman blurts something else out; too incoherent to be made out from the back of the room. Stephens finally throws back, “Who put the tourette’s lady in the front row?”
Win.
The crowd bursts into applause and the woman and her friends look at each other confused and shrug as if they don’t know why everyone else is so relieved. Not long after, they stumble out of the club, leaving a quiet, empty table in the front row.
This is just one of the many variations of the infamous heckler, the frequently irritating, sometimes rude, often drunk, unsuspecting thorn in the comedian’s side. A tour around YouTube will take you to numerous videos from big name and lesser known comedians alike dealing with their shadowed critics in the crowd.
Nothing seems consistent on when or how someone will get heckled. Sometimes, like the ‘80s pop culture-challenged ladies, it’s mainly annoying, but other times it’s more insulting and directed at the comic.
Larry Horowitz who teaches stand-up at Humber College and has been working as a comedian for over 30 years, has met with all sorts of hecklers and said it’s really not possible to narrow them down into one category.
They could be a loud group challenging you, they could be fairly innocent and think they are just helping out the show or they could just be trying to impress their friends.
“The experiences are so varied, there is no way to define it as any one thing,” he said.
Horowitz said one of the most common occurrences are the people who think they’ve actually done a good deed and helped the comedian out.
“Frequently someone will come up to you after the show and say something like, ‘Hi! It’s me! I’m the guy you were insulting and cutting up from the stage. Wasn’t I a big help? Didn’t I make the show funnier?’ You really feel like saying, ‘No, you stopped me from doing my prepared program,’” he said. “You have to be polite so you end up saying, ‘Oh as long as you had fun!’ and just let them walk away.”
Psychiatrist Dr. Mark Berber agrees that this is usually the case and that fairly often the person is just having fun, not realizing it may be throwing the comic off.
“They are there to see a show and are just having a good time and want to be a part of it,” he said.
In the documentary Heckler, Jamie Kennedy interviews two guys who heckled him earlier that night. After asking them numerous times as to why they heckled, the two basically say they felt like they had been ripped off and didn’t find him funny.
One summed it all up with, “I would’ve rather sat through a Creed concert.”
Kennedy appears stunned and eventually insults them and tells them he hopes they get stomach cancer.
Toronto comedian Bob Banks said that while it’s fun watching a heckler get put in his or her place, he likes taking a different approach when he can.
“You can make jokes with them and get as many people on your side as when you make jokes at them,” he said. “Then that person doesn’t go away crushed... That person paid money to come out and enjoy you.”
Banks said he doesn’t want to send anyone home with a bad taste in their mouth or push them to the point of tears (which he has seen happen), if he doesn’t have to.
However, the show must go on and sometimes you just have to throw one back.
“At the same time, some people really ask for it; so I understand,” he said. “If someone pushes for it, a good burn is deserved.”
-Leslie Marciniak
Posted in: Hecklers
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment