There are three types of hecklers:
The ones who haven't been to a comedy show before, are either drunk or have seen too many crowd work videos in their algorithm, and are "trying to help."
The ones who are actually being shitty to you, the performer, who you must handle until the club steps in, either by roasting the ever-loving shit out of them or by performing acts of comedic judo that reveal their idiocy.
The ones who are volatile, volcanic, and violent. These, in particular, become the stuff of legend if caught on tape.
It’s a cold Sunday night in Toluca Lake, where I’m doing a show in the attic of an Irish pub. Audience-wise, it's light, which means I’m in “say stuff into the void” mode. I’m doing a 20 minute set, so my loose plan is to close with the ten-minute chunk that I’m currently focused on honing, and, with the first ten, verbally stir some back-burner bits to see if anything new develops.
There’s a drunk guy mumbling in the back, but he’s so far away from the stage that he only occasionally registers. About 8 minutes in, someone shushes him. This has the opposite effect.
About 10 minutes in, as I’m about to finish a bit about my family, he shouts, “go buzz off!” This comes out of nowhere, feels like a non-sequitur.
“What?” I reply. Not wanting to tank the energy in an already-tough room, I first try to breeze past it and tie his words into the bit. “Are you being me, to my parents?”
But I can’t just keep things pushing. “I don’t know what the fuck is up with this guy. Are you okay?” A woman chimes in and says she’s asked him to stop talking. I thank her, but turn back on the guy. My voice drips with “bless your heart” energy: “I hope you’re doing okay. I’d say have a drink, but maybe don’t have a drink. That may be a bad idea.”
The handful of audience members laugh, while this guy reveals his actual complaint: "this guy's talking shit about BASEBALL PLAYERS!"
I had not been talking shit about baseball players. I remind the man of this, trying to walk the tightrope of diffusing the situation while trying to be funny – “Did you come up here to talk shit about me talking shit about baseball players?” comes out of my mouth – then, when he’s quieted down, return to the plan.
As I go into the planned chunk, he says “fuck you, asshole,” and is immediately swarmed by the show’s producers, who tell him to go outside. Voices are raised, threats are made, doors are opened. “What happened to the tough guy over here?” he chirps as the producers try to boot him from the room.
When something like this happens, you are no longer the most interesting thing happening in the room, and it’s best to remember that. Your role shifts from comic to color commentator. As these guys argue, I chime in occasionally – “I’m going to clean off my glasses just to watch this,” “Merry Christmas,” etc. – until the heckler appears to calm down long enough to grab his stuff. The producers close the back door.
“You’re lucky I don’t destroy that guy,” the heckler says.
I’m at a loss. My cleverness meter is on E. “Oh, man!” is all I can come up with, and luckily, that still gets some laughs.
“You FUCKED with the WRONG PERSON up in here, BUDDY!” The heckler, for reasons I still can’t really comprehend, is still furious at me.
Now, my tone is in “telling a toddler how proud I am that they used the potty right for the first time” territory: “Oh, damn, it sounds like somebody fucked with the wrong person.”
“Well, your fuckin’ BACKUP didn’t do JACK SHIT!” He enunciates with the precision of a man who is trying to prove he’s not drunk.
The heckler grabs his stuff and says to the handful of audience members, “enjoy your fuckin’ show.”
I can’t help myself. “Very polite!”
The heckler goes back to getting kicked out, lobbing more unintelligible threats at me and the producers. I’m doing the only thing that feels right: laughing and shaking my head. “Now, that’s why I stopped drinking.”
The crowd pops. The room is reset. I can get back to work.
Way back in 2013, I wrote about my first experience with an antagonistic heckler for the comedy journal I was keeping that year.
I start the next bit. “I saw a guy wearing an Ed Hardy shirt pushing around a stroller.” The crowd laughs. A couple up front gasps a little, then makes eyes to stage left. Sitting right at the front of the bar, barely two feet away, is a giant man in an Ed Hardy shirt. But why stop? This joke isn’t about him.
I keep talking until the guy turns to me. “You making jokes about me?” I say no, just your shirt, then ask if he has a kid. “Yes,” he grunts. I ask how old she is, but he shoots back with: “You look like you’re twelve.”
We’ve got ourselves an asshole, folks. I’ve never dealt with a heckler before, so I decide the best tactic is to treat him the way I treat shitty customers at work: by smiling and deflecting. “Oh, I know. I’m actually ten, so I’m glad I look old for my age.” Laughter from the crowd.
He keeps trying. “You look like a midget."
"Dude, midgets come up to, like, here on me.” I move my hand around my waist.
“How tall are you, five six?”
“Five ten, actually.” The crowd seems generally surprised.
“Yeah, on a good day.”
“Well, today is a good day. On bad days I’m four four.” More laughter. Now the crowd just wants to know if I’m really five ten - evidenced by the few people who exclaim that they don’t believe me - so I go off on a height tangent for a little bit. The heckler returns to the beer at hand. I continue through my set.
[…]
Later, as I’m walking back to my car with Parker, we run into Ed Hardy Man and his posse outside of the club. He tries again: “I just did your job for you.” I keep walking, “yeah, maybe you should get on stage sometime.”
He doesn’t like that I don’t care about his jabs. “You’re not funny!” he yells after me as I walk to the parking garage.
“Whatever,” I yell back, unfazed. I already won, dude. Deal with it. Some people just can’t take a joke.
It occurs to me near the end of my set that this drunk, antagonistic heckler, who was thrown out of the room via the back door, may still be outside, waiting for me. Maybe he wants to make sure I can’t talk any further shit about baseball players. I verbalize this thought. The audience laughs.
"It's okay," one of the producers shouts back to me. "He's gone!"
I find out a few minutes later that he’s not gone.
I walk down the back stairwell, through a little alley that doubles as the designated smoking area for the bar, and hear a slurred voice that sounds awfully familiar. Sure enough, as I round the corner out the back door, standing between me and the parking lot, is a lanky guy in a jean jacket who looks like he peaked in high school, as the star of his baseball team. He is wobbly on his feet and still agitated. "And there he is now," he mutters, "there's that guy. Trying to leave like a little bitch!"
I flash back to that experience in 2013, of being followed to a parking garage by a pissed-off heckler. I was younger, and feistier, still down to smiled and deflected. And, most importantly, I had a friend walking alongside me before we carpooled down to Hollywood.
This time, no such luck. I have no desire to engage again, away from the safety of the stage. I just ignore the dude, walking straight to my car. I ball up a fist inside my jacket pocket, just in case he decides to follow me to my car.
The heckler stays put. I sit in the front seat, check my mirror, rattle off a bunch of shitty insults I could hurl at him as I drive away in my brain before remembering that off stage, there's no need to engage, and then drive home. I laugh to myself. It’s a chuckle tinged with rage and frustration.
After a drive home where I feel an increasing sense of being pissed off, I call a fellow performer in recovery and tell him what happened.
"How do you feel?" he asks.
I pause, trying to put the feeling into words. "I don't know if this is too dramatic, but violated."
He replies emphatically. "I get it!"
What every "comedian DESTROYS heckler!!!" video doesn't capture is that adrenaline surge that immediately comes when the disruption begins. Time slows down, the way it might for a baseball player at bat or a boxer in the ring, as you assess what to do next.
They don’t capture the anxiety of being on high alert for the rest of the night, no matter how well you handle the heckler. You have seen the "fight or flight" fork in the road, and chosen to fight. You forget how hard it can be to unclench.
They don’t capture that hecklers don't go away, no matter how good you are at handling them. They just show up over and over again, in different places with different faces.
They don’t capture the simple truth that you will not always have something insanely funny to say, and that you might be faced with the fear that maybe you're not cut out for this any more. That maybe because you didn't have an interaction that's worth feeding to the gaping maw of the internet, this one time, that you should give up the whole enterprise.
They don’t capture that these thoughts pass. That you will not think these things forever. If you’re lucky, you'll barely think these things the next day.