Comedy is subjective, so someone in the audience probably won't get it. What can you do when an attention-starved, drunken, or otherwise unenlightened heckler tries to ruin your flow? Back Stage asked the pros for a few options for dealing with hecklers that won't land you in rehab.
Carlos Mencia
"Me personally, I get happy. Because I love defending my comedy. I love defending my jokes. I love the fact that people are stupid to take what we do with such seriousness. It's unbelievable to me that when a comedian goes on stage and does a joke where we pretend to be mad or pretend to be happy, or we use emotional places to go to that are normal for any actor or any performer, people are like, 'Wow, he was really mad' or 'He was really this.' But they don't do that to anything else. Like, somebody will leave my show and go, 'I didn't agree with what he said.' It was a fucking joke. How do you disagree with a joke? It's like saying, 'Knock, knock,' 'I'm not going to answer the door.' You never want to lose the audience. You never want the audience to think that you're an asshole, so you always have to kind of come back. It's kind of like you scare them, and then you go, 'Come on, I'm right here.' "
Lisa Lampanelli
"Heckled? Are you kidding me? I'm an insult comic! Heckling me is like taunting the biggest guy in prison: It always ends with someone getting ripped a new ass. I'm the queen of mean, bitches! I'm prepared. I come back at you with more lines than a coke whore on Mötley Crüe's tour bus. If you don't believe me, try kicking a pit bull in the ass and see what happens. Go ahead. Try."
Brad Williams
"I don't get heckled too often, and it's not because I may not have a night where I'm not very good. It's because people don't really want to heckle a dwarf. They don't really want that on their conscience. When it happens, what I do is firmly establish that that kind of behavior won't be tolerated, so you kind of got to insult them a little bit. You have to fight back. At the same time, you have to do it in a way that's still respectful and still funny. As long as it's funny, it's okay. If you pull a Kramer...yeah, that's not funny. "The worst heckler I ever had was a guy [while] I was doing a show, and this was at a place where they were playing pool in the background. He wasn't paying attention the whole show, and he heard one joke that made him mad, and he threatened to beat me up with a pool cue. I pretty much insulted him and yelled at him and said, like, 'Really, you're going to beat me up? You want to go to prison for beating up a dwarf? That's going to be your thing? When everyone is talking about what they're in for -- smuggling drugs, carjacking, murder -- [and] it gets to you: "I kicked the shit out of a midget." That's not going to be too macho.' And then I told him, 'I don't know what's more pathetic: the fact that you want to beat me up or the fact you feel you need a weapon to do so.' When that happened he laughed himself, and I kept the audience on my side."
Marc Maron
"Some hecklers want to destroy the show and make it all about them. They are the enemy. Some hecklers just want to talk to you. They are annoying. Decide what you are dealing with, and act accordingly. If it is the enemy, it must be destroyed quickly and efficiently. I usually try to hurt them on a deep psychological level if I can find a way in. 'Why do we all have to pay for what your parents didn't do?' Then go from there. If it is a friendly heckler that just wants to talk to you, I tell them nicely to shut their fucking mouth."
Paula Poundstone
"I handle hecklers the way Yukon Cornelius handled the Abominable Snowman. I capture them, pull their teeth, and tame them. Sometimes they're just misunderstood. They just need love."
Rusty Dooley
"When you're a professional comedian, you learn how to gauge if someone is being really abrasive or if they're just trying to have fun or if they're desperate for attention. There's just so many dynamics to why someone would want to heckle in the first place. You have to be able to read into that right away. Some comics are good at that. Some aren't. And I'm really good at it. One I really like is teaching someone how to heckle -- like, reverse it on them. When someone shouts something out, say, 'That wasn't even clever. If you're going to heckle, at least do a good job at it. Like, this is always a home run: When the Canadian's on stage, just yell, "Next!" That always gets us all messed up. See, buddy, that's a real simple line. That's basic heckling. If you were really good, you would have already pointed out that my hair is falling out, my teeth are yellow -- there's a hundred of them I could give you, buddy.' And then the crowd starts laughing."
Ant
"Some comics think it's a necessary evil. When I get heckled, inside my heart starts to flutter because I love hecklers. Because it's my chance to prove to the audience that I'm not only funny with my material but I'm a naturally funny person and that stage is mine. It shows the audience that I own it. It's mine. You're in my world, and no one's going to take the spotlight."
Suzanne Whang
"If I'm performing as myself, then I can just call them a racist. Isn't that great? When you're Asian you can just play that: 'What are you, racist?' And then they cry and they leave. Sure, just play the race card. I also host this show on the Home & Garden network called House Hunters, and they can be like, 'Suzanne Whang from House Hunters made me cry, so I left. It was horrible.' So basically it's all about race. Sometimes people want to pick at me, and they're horrified. They accuse me of trying to perpetuate racism, which I find hilarious. 'Yeah, I've grown up with racism my whole life, and my mission as an artist is to make it worse for myself, really.' That's just ridiculous. It's funny. If we can't laugh at it, let's just all jump off a building. You know what I mean? This is a satire. It's called 'Point the flashlight at it, and let's look at it and laugh.'
"But you know what? I welcome heckling. I invite it. It's a part of being a standup comedian. People like [David] Letterman or [Johnny] Carson, they were even funnier when a joke would bomb. They knew how to turn that into gold. In Letterman's case, he would just keep saying the joke over and over and over again, and eventually it's so ridiculous that people [would] start laughing when it was initially not funny."
René Hicks
"I've always had a three-pronged approach. First, I'll acknowledge the heckler and kind of say, 'What, what is it?' I can [be] quite comfortable extemporaneously, so I try to give them that 1.5 seconds of fame -- not 15 minutes, 1.5 seconds. They're drunk; they don't know the difference between the math. Now if they do it again, I say to the audience, 'Now, we acknowledged these people, okay? Everybody paid the same amount of money, right? Now, I don't know; perhaps they think it's their show. Who do you want to hear: them or me?' That way the audience knows there's a problem. Even if they're in a section where they don't necessarily hear it, they know it, because sometimes if you go off on a heckler and one part of the audience doesn't know, it gets uncomfortable. So I let the whole audience know we have an asshole shithead in our midst. I put out the asshole-shithead alert: 'Whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop!' I want the audience to know what I'm going to do on the third time. The third time, I'm going to rip them buck-naked."
Marina Franklin
"For the most part, if you're a funny person and you're in the moment and you're listening, whatever you say is going to squash whatever the heckler is going to say. I personally don't plan a response, because you don't know what the heckler is going to say. Some people do. Some comedians have a planned response to hecklers. They have a couple of situations that they've been in over and over again, and so they have something that they say back. I don't. That's not my thing. My thing is, if someone heckles me and I'm in the moment and they sound like a crackhead, I'm going to tell them, 'All right, the reason you didn't get that joke is because you're doing too much crack.' "
Josh Blue
"It depends on where I am in the show. If it starts out early, you can't be too mean, because you don't want the audience to think you're mean. If it's a persistent heckler, I'll just shut them down. I like to take the context of my show -- depending on where I am, I'll use some things from my act and put it on them. When I was a kid, I used to ride on the short bus for disabled people, and I have a joke about that. If someone heckles me after that point, the best line ever is, 'Is that bus here?' It just shuts them down completely, and the crowd goes nuts. "I remember one time I did a college show, and I walked on stage, and before I even started, some guy yells, 'You suck!' I was like, 'That's pretty classy, heckling a cripple. Your parents raised you well there, son.' But then I found out that he didn't know that I had cerebral palsy, so he thought I was just being a jerk. I walked on stage, and he thought I was making fun of people with cerebral palsy, so he thought he was doing the right thing. I guess we were both jerks in the end."
Darren Carter
"The best way to deal with a heckler -- and this is what I did in 1997 -- I married her. It's my wife, Genie. I met her at the Improv in 1997, but actually we've been married for nine years; it will be 10 years in August. It sucks because she usually heckles me when I'm off the stage and on the car ride home. And then if they give you too much attention, then you get 'em pregnant."
Reporting by Nicole Porter
