H is for Heckling

I’ve just seen a poster for a comedy night, which included the warning ‘No heckling’. I don’t know if this was a joke, but it made me think…

At the comedy nights I’ve attended or watched on a screen, it seems to me that hecklers are almost always trying to add something to the show. They are breaking the ‘fourth wall’ betwixt performer and audience and giving the comedian something to respond to. A good heckle is gold dust to a decent comic. If the heckler is definitely not on the act’s side and is simply being boorish, the comedian can always use the microphone to drown out and humiliate the heckler, and most will have stock lines for precisely that purpose – “I remember MY first drink” etc.

Most comedians have tales of paying their dues in front of tough crowds early in their career, and recounting these experiences is a way of showing your pedigree. Often the repeated adversity ends up forming a style. I remember Ben Elton saying he originally started to speak fast so that the pissed hecklers couldn’t get a word in. It became his distinctive ‘motormouth’ style.

If I was in the comedy game, hecklers would terrify me, but they would force me to sharpen up my act. I recently did a talk about poetry and song lyrics on the Wirral. I presented it in a light-hearted way, and there were quite a lot of cheeky interruptions from the audience. I wasn’t expecting this, but I managed to bat them back and get some decent laughs. These are the moments that elevate performances above the routine; the unscripted jousting that can reach ecstatic heights in the hands of a comic like Johnny Vegas. That skill has usually been paid for with a lot of failure and humiliation.  

The aforementioned Elton began his stand-up career at Soho’s legendary Comedy Store club in the early 80s, a venue that also launched Rik Mayall, Alexie Sayle and French & Saunders. This was a tiny venue above a strip club where rookie performers would test out their material in front of drunken crowds until the early hours. From these seedy beginnings emerged an anarchic new comedy movement, united only by a belief that racism and sexism weren’t funny. For the above performers, this was a guiding principle that shaped their work, but I’m sure it would never have occurred to them to try and place rules on what their audience could say – not that it would have worked if they had. Jo Brand was another comic who started out at The Comedy Store. She has since explained that the sexist heckles she received in those days were a spur for her to create withering put-downs and develop the redoubtable persona that made her famous.

Humans have a natural inclination to want things to be easier; but we always forget that we need challenges. In all walks of life, people will tell you how adversity made them dig deep and find inner resources they didn’t know they had. Difficult audiences force performers to raise their game and develop resilience.

Heckling bans are a recent phenomenon, but artists themselves have always had to contend with people trying to shut them up. Until the late 60s, the government had a stranglehold on creative expression; with books, TV shows and films often being censored or banned. For around fifty years this repression of creative freedom has been almost absent, but self-censorship is creeping in when the slightest perceived insult can balloon into a scandal. In a world of trigger warnings, ‘safe spaces’ and polarized social media backlashes, we are now less likely to be surprised, challenged and exposed to a diversity of opinions, which is what the arts and humanities have always done.

In this atmosphere of hyper-sensitivity, it seems audiences are expected to rein themselves in too. The shock of having your flow interrupted is presumably just too traumatic for a comic to bear.

It hasn’t always been like this. At Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in the 16^th century, the cheap standing area in front of the stage would be occupied by the lower orders of society, known as the ‘groundlings’. This section of the audience was characterised by informality and regular interjections, to which the actors on stage would respond with ad-libs of their own. 19^th century music halls were similarly rowdy and exuberant places, where people from all stations in life would come together under the same roof and let their hair down. The best performers – comedians, monologuists and singers – could charm, engage and delight the rowdiest crowd (without amplification), and reduce them to silence or tears on occasions.

This is the performer’s job; to win over an audience, no matter what their character. An audience is a capricious organism; unpredictable and sometimes merciless, it is a microcosm of society itself, with a will to freedom. The wish to ban heckling is a typically bourgeois impulse; a belief that the crowd must be controlled, made to curtail their indecent ways and consume culture in the polite fashion of a privileged elite.

Politicians and comedians undoubtedly ply a similar trade when behind the mic, and both face challenges in engaging with an audience (unfortunately, politicians sometimes even attempt to tell jokes). I recall a few years ago at a Labour Party conference, Gordon Brown was interrupted by a lone heckler of advanced years, who was roughly ejected from the hall by security staff. The incident was shocking, and was widely criticised, but it illustrated the point (which everyone seemed to have forgotten) that party conferences had ceased to be active forums for debate. 

A person on a stage speaking into a microphone on a stage has unrivalled power, and the combination of oratory and charisma can have extraordinary psychological effects; but there will always be someone in the room that wants to challenge that primacy; to break the spell in a challenge to the power dynamic. This is actually the democratic impulse in its purest form. The heckler, whether a dissenting voice or an extrovert wit, asserts the right of those assembled to step out of passivity and participate.

Comedians, if they have anything substantive to say, are themselves hecklers of the uber-narratives that we are all subjected to; the messaging of governments, corporations, media and shifting social conventions that we are expected to listen to and abide by. Comedians can, even in an apolitical way, help to foster a culture of dissent. They understand the risks that lurk when people lose the ability to think for themselves and become a hypnotized mass. That’s why good comedians love a good heckler – they recognize one of their own.