How to Deal With Hecklers

BY NICK FLANAGAN

Before getting into comedy, I didn’t have a problem with hecklers; in fact I kind of understood them. Why shouldn’t I be able to express my distaste to somebody putting their ‘essence’ all up in my face? Oh yeah, it’s because 95% of the time, heckles are inaudible, awkward and crappier than the crappiest thing being done onstage—including actual crapping. Unless you have a deep-rooted need to be the ‘bad boy’ of the supper club, don’t do it. Because I’m from Canada, I began life with the self-confidence of an armless guy who has entered a bowling competition, and who has also never bowled before. This lack of confidence has been trouble when “gaggin’ out” at gigs, as hecklers can smell my fear merely by noting my awful, self-hating posture. Luckily, I have learned some ways to deal with the Statler and Waldorfs of the world. What, exactly? I’m not sure, but at the moment these very important things come to mind: BE QUICK I really wish you didn’t have to be in the moment while doing comedy and could just ‘go away’ and do some taxes in your head while entertaining people with memorized hilarity, but the truth is you need to be prepared to address anything from a loud fart to a seizure. You don’t have to say something awesome, or even something funny, or even something in English. Just approximate a retorty cadence. A heckler’s dream is to leave you, the “hecklee”, unable to respond with anything but a despairing wail and wet eyes. At a show, someone once yelled “Don’t quit your day job”, to which I replied “It’s night.” The result: an underserved (and fabricated for this story) standing ovation. EXPECT THE WORST This rule especially applies if you are saying the worst things. If you have a joke about slavery being the greatest thing America ever created, and there’s a slave in the audience, you might be in trouble. Once in Vancouver I decided to try out my Robert Pickton jokes which resulted in a room full of unicycling yogis dumping a snowfall of boos on my head. Then someone grabbed the notebook from my hand and smacked me with it. Finally, an angry crowd member spit on me, and his west coast mouth goo landed on my right hand. I looked at him and asked why he did that, putting the mic in front of his face. As he started to answer, I took the mic away and wiped the spit on his face (see rule #1). I also learned from that show that nothing good can come of a 23-year-old me making jokes about a tragedy in the place that it happened. It’s also important not to inflict tragedy on the audience. Just because they’re not laughing, it doesn’t mean you have the right to track down all of their names, murder their families and then write parody songs about their surviving family members. DON’T GET ATTACKED Remember when your substitute teacher got punched in the face by the tough kid and it inspired the rest of the class to also beat the shit out of him? The same rule applies to comedians. If an audience member hits you, fuggedaboutit. How can a crowd respect someone they just saw get physically punked? They will begin to laugh at you, not with you— every comics’ worst nightmare. I once unwisely opened up for my own stupid band. To make matters worse, I had laryngitis and wheezed several inaudible humorous sentences before being cut short by an ex-marine tackling me to the ground in a successful attempt to stop my set. Moral of story: everything is Gulf War Syndrome’s fault; or at the least it’s the abstract concept of the military that is to blame. BE MEAN Being heckled is like having garbage water forcibly poured in your mouth while Anton LaVey and ALF punch you in the stomach, so don’t hold back on these animals. I just saw Anthony Jeselnik wish cancer on an audience member who said maybe one word to him. Jeselnik was carried out of the club on a throne and then given the world’s biggest sack of money. Then a statue of him was erected. It’s covered in birdshit now and, like everything, it will eventually crumble into dust, but as a short-term example of popularity, statues are pretty cool. I remember a heckler once told me he’d rather die than listen to the rest of my jokes—this was like a giftwrapped word present, “Please, go ahead and die. Kill yourself in front of all of us. No better occurrence could come out of this night than your death.” That shut him up. Note: wishing death on someone from a comedy stage doesn’t actually count as wishing real death on someone for realsies. POST-SHOW CONFRONTATION The one thing worse than a heckler is somebody so angry that they stay after the show only to chastise you. The worst part is at first it’s exciting that they want to talk—maybe they’re a fan? Then they will say things like ‘rape is never funny’ and ‘I’m Chinese. Why did you have to go there?’ Even if you reply with something like ‘chinese food is like getting mouth raped by sodium,’ it won’t keep you from feeling like a flummoxed lummox. One fisted-ballsack later and you’re just an ashamed rodeo clown. Bottom line: if you can afford it, do all your comedy in a chauffeured Popemobile while carrying a visibly holstered gun.