Beat me by 10 minutes. Jimmy Carr is pretty incredible at off-the-cuff insult and quick wit even when it isn’t asked for by him.
He doesn’t have a good reputation with other comics. The feeling is he has used shills in the audience to make these heckler gets owned videos. I have no way of knowing for sure if that’s true but I’ve heard it from several comics on various podcasts.
There are, most often by the comedians in question though. Cherry picking the moments you come off better in a Heckler interaction for respect is lame.
Bill Burr’s videos are quite interesting. His schtick is he is a straight white male who doesn’t mess around with white women and so lays into them in his act. He is with a black woman and will bring up race in his act.
This triggers people.
Bill Burr is an ass, admits as much, but then defends his opinion quite well and it has nothing to do with close minded beliefs. Rather, he spends a great deal of time with the African American community and you can tell.
After reading Silverman’s comments about hecklers (upthread), most notably that she characterized the heckling as “fun”, it occurs to me engaging a heckler is basically just improv. Comedians do improve, ya?
Comedians vary quite a bit on how well they handle these things (and I have seen lots of live comedy). But with comedy becoming more popular, the crowd is now generally on the side of the comedian - and not usually the heckler. Comedy radio often includes decent heckle responses. This was Rickles whole act. Seinfeld, Tompkins, Gardenswartz, Silverman and Schlesinger are pretty good at handling snarky comments from the crowd.
Years ago I went to see a local/national comedian with a group of friends, one of whom was the comedian’s brother. We arrived early and hung out with the comedian, who specifically asked me to buy him a drink at a very specific point in his act.
So, at that point I called over our waitress and asked to buy the comedian a drink. She approached the stage and told him, “that guy wants to buy you a drink, what do you want?”
And he erupted in a horrible diatribe about f*ggots in the audience hitting on him (he’s a huge, fat, ugly fuck). I was horribly embarrassed, but he went on and on. He eventually told the waitress he wanted nothing from me, and, indeed, he wanted to pay our tab. He got a ton of laughs. Meanwhile, I was shell shocked.
After the show, the owner of the venue came out to “talk” to us. He was pissed. He comped us, since he kinda had to. Turns out the comedian had been promised a big room. The venue split the room between two performers to maximize their profits, so our comedian sold out on a smaller than promised room. The comedian paid our tab as a “fuck you” to the venue.
I notice in my ‘facebook reel’ feed (tiktok) there is a whole algorithmic genre and agenda of up and coming comedians with specific live filmed encounters of them interacting with hecklers in the audiences or purposefully “engaging” audience members for improv bits, often at their expense. It seems almost inevitable that every semipopular comedian on the circuit, has a “best of heckling reel” to guarantee that they are “that comedian”, the kind that thinks on their feet and is “interactive” at their live intimate, “drunken audience” comedy club show. Almost egging on the hecklers, come one, come all…giving better than they get.
I miss Don Rickles.
Yeah, you would, ya hockey puck…
.
Which I claim was half my job as a teacher.
Tangent:
I did have some comebacks that were fun (like the back-and-forth for the whole semester with one football player for the college, who kept referring to getting cookies from my wife because she thought he was cute). But the best was the student who made a real mess of insulting me, messing up the grammar and the punch line, and everyone was laughing as hard as he was, and I just shook my head and said “And you were the fastest sperm…”
I saw Gilbert Gottfried in a small club. He was doing fine but he was in a small club in a small city on a Thursday and while the audience loved him, he wasn’t giving it his all until some idiot decided to start heckling. You could almost see him light up. He sliced the guy up, neatly stacked the pieces and diced them into millimeter cubes. By then, everybody was in hysterics.
I suppose drunken idiots gotta be drunken idiots, but while heckling a newbie lacking stage presence and confidence might ruin their night, heckling an established star with decades of experience will ruin your night. And that’s true for every star.
Well this is a good place for Patton Oswalt’s fucking stellar essay on heckling and rape culture.
Bill Burr is an asshole and he’s one of the few, maybe even the only asshole stand-up comedians I like. Because I think he is a thoughtful asshole. He’s frequently wrong, but I don’t get the impression his opinions are shallow. I love that Philly set @Tibby mentioned where he just unleashed on the crowd. I went to grad school in Philly and that is an only in Philly moment. It is a special kind of place…
I agree that Bill Burr is an ass, but he’s a lovable ass. He plays the clueless fool, but he’s sharp as a tack.
I believe the best stand-up comics are much brighter than they appear. Acting befuddled and clueless is their shtick and it’s a shtick I enjoy listening to. They are our modern-day philosophers in many ways.
Did you perchance do your grad work at UPenn? If so, we were practically neighbors in West Philly (though I was probably there a few decades before you). My undergrad was at the Phila. College of Pharmacy & Science (rebranded University of the Sciences in Philadelphia). I still miss those cheesesteaks and hoagies!
There is a big difference between dealing with hecklers and doing crowd work.
This is a pretty good documentary on the phenomena.
That’s exactly what I’m looking for. Thanks.
Also the comedian has the mic - in a large house, the heckler is only heard as an incoherent noise by most of the rest of the audience - I’ve seen comedians play on the incoherence angle by sort of mishearing them on purpose and then ridiculing the incoherent, misheard words
Holy shit! Is the comedian known for being ‘edgy’? What an absolute dick move.
Edgy and extremely politically incorrect. But he was funny.
I sure did. School of Social Policy and Practice. I loved every second. Philadelphia is one of the places I wanted to live after grad school, especially because at that point I had a network there. But alas we decided to move back closer to family. There’s something about the city which feels so authentic to me. Philadelphians do not put on airs. It’s not too crowded and there is always something interesting to do. Man, I’m getting nostalgic.
I’m a big fan of Frankie Boyle, but his comedy is so caustic that some fans will heckle him for the purposes of trying to get him to roast them from the stage. He comments on that in his standup, pointing out that they’re deliberately trying to get a rise out of him. I get the feeling that it bores him. Boyle is good at riffing on the front row in his audience, but his stuff is also scripted to within an inch of its life; like Carlin, he’s published books that are basically transcriptions of his routines. Saw him once in London, and found it largely, sadly,incomprehensible, but I think that was a combination of his thick burr and bad acoustics in the hall.