The history of heckling is long and distinguished. Arthur Smith looks at the ups and downs of the spontaneous audience critique  

One of my worst moments of last year occurred in a theatre at Lytham St Anne’s. I’d been on stage for about 20 minutes and things were going OK but not brilliantly. Lots of laughs but not as many and not as loud as usual. I said the line, “We need to address the elephant in the room.” My plan was to reference Nelly the Elephant, why she went off with a Trumpety Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump and how the problems in America were therefore all Nelly’s fault. But after I said the opening line a man in the audience stood up and said, “I’ll tell you what the elephant in the room is – this show is shit!” He then stormed out of the theatre leaving me no chance to answer his brutal heckle.

Heckling has a long and colourful history that stretches across politics, theatre and comedy. In ancient Greece and Rome, public life was participatory and loud. Citizens gathered in open forums, theatres, and assemblies where performers, politicians, and philosophers shared space with highly interactive crowds. Audiences routinely shouted praise or scorn, and performers were expected to respond quickly and cleverly. There is no record of Aristophanes’ heckler put downs but we can be sure they were pretty good.

Later in the rowdy playhouses of Elizabethan England, audiences were famously vocal, cheering heroes and booing villains. Shakespeare’s Globe, for instance, was filled with groundlings who had no hesitation in shouting at actors. By the 19th and early 20th centuries, music halls and vaudeville theatres featured performers who developed reputations not only for their acts but for their ability to spar with hecklers. This period established a kind of unwritten code: if audiences heckled, performers were allowed – and even expected – to fire back.

My early encounters with hecklers occurred in a comedy club called the Tunnel Palladium, run by the notorious ex-jailbird Malcolm Hardee. Under Malcolm’s influence the Tunnel became the arena where London’s top hecklers gathered every Sunday to slaughter open spots and established acts alike. Some punters even met up beforehand in a kind of heckling seminar and one night, when I was performing, a voice in the dark interrupted me with a Latin phrase that turned out to mean “show us your tits”. The word “notorious” soon attached itself to the Tunnel which is now remembered as Alternative Comedy’s equivalent to the previous generation’s Glasgow Empire – a place for confrontation, raucousness, multiple comedy pile-ups and deaths. It was not uncommon for the acts to be booed off with such efficiency that the whole show was over in 20 minutes, an occasion that was greeted by the regulars as a great success.

Mostly hecklers are easy to deal with. They’re usually drunker than the comedian, who has the stage, the microphone and the lights on their side. There are standard put downs known to most comics, like “What a shame when cousins marry,” “Yes, I remember when I had my first pint” or “How many times do I have to flush before you go away?” Skilled comedians use heckling moments as opportunities to showcase improvisation, timing, and dominance of the room. Videos of comedians dismantling hecklers are all over social media.

One of the toughest heckles I had to deal with was when a man put his hand up and said, “Excuse me.” “Yes?” I responded, gearing myself up for some verbal assault. “I think you are very nice,” the man said. Not what I was expecting at all.

Very occasionally hecklers can end up as heroes. One time when I was MC-ing a gig, a bunch of blokes on a stag night had been relentlessly heckling the acts all evening. After the last comedian came off I challenged them. “You think you’re great – let’s see how you find it on stage,” and I started singing “a whim-awey, a whim-awey…” from the hit single “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”. The hecklers walked onto the stage joining in the whim-aweys surprisingly well. Then the most aggressive heckler of the night started singing, “In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight” and to everyone’s amazement he had a beautiful voice. It turned out the stags knew each other because they were all in a choir. The audience were stunned and ecstatic and I concluded heckling can lead to strange and wonderful places, so do shout out next time I see you in an audience.

This article is from Idler #108.

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