Bons mots & Barbs

Kirk Baird

Friday, Feb. 25, 2000 | 9:22 a.m.

Comic comebacks

Here are some put-downs from various comedians, aimed toward hecklers:

Heckling. For comedians, it's a sort of rite of passage.

From the loudmouth in the front row who's had one too many to the person who simply wants to elicit a laugh to impress a date, hecklers are something all comedians have faced at one point or another, no matter how successful they've become.

And how they choose to handle the often unsolicited and usually unwanted comments can determine whether the comedian makes it through the rest of his or her set in a chorus of laughs or boos.

Take Harry Basil, for example. A prop comedian for more than a decade who routinely opens for Rodney Dangerfield, he's heard just about everything a heckler can dish out and is prepared. On this particular night at the Comedy Stop at the Tropicana hotel-casino, Basil was winding down his set, which the audience had been very responsive to so far, when he wondered how much time was left.

One man yelled out, five minutes; then a woman countered with 25. Basil quickly winged his response: "Geez, I wish my wife felt like five minutes was 25 minutes to her." "She does," chimed in a man with a Southern accent from the back of the room. His retort drew big laughs from the crowd. Basil seized the moment. With the precision of a comic who's been down this road before, Basil locked and unloaded on the heckler: "I wanted to time your wife, but the clock in the trailer was broken." The audience roared even louder, and the man fell silent, his ego presumably smarting from the verbal jab.

In the back-stage dressing room, fellow comedian Kevin Downey Jr., who was also on the bill, took note of the line. "Always go for the white trash joke," he said.

Downey was right. The rest of Basil's routine went fine, with nary a peep from anyone.

When Basil emerged back stage he was still reveling in his victory of one-upmanship. "Did you hear that?" he asked. Later, as he was changing from his on-stage comedy wardrobe, Basil said that often he is appreciative of hecklers. "Some nights heckling is fun. It makes it fun for you."

Certainly -- if you emerge the winner. But there are cases when things don't go so well.

Take Downey (no relation to the Downey acting clan, incidentally), for example. Downey calls himself a heckler magnet because of his big hair, an odd, puffy concoction, courtesy of hairspray, that gives him an uncanny resemblance to Jughead from the Archie comics. One night Downey was performing at a comedy club in Manhattan, and seated in the audience was a group of what he called "professional hecklers" who had eaten all the previous comics alive and had clearly performed a hostile takeover of the place.

Downey, however, refused to go down without a fight. He armed himself back stage with as much anti-heckler rhetoric as he could think of, and dutifully marched on stage ready for the challenge. At first it worked, he said, with the table initially stunned at his verbally aggressive approach. But soon he began to run short of repellent, and the sharks began circling again, ready for a comedic feeding frenzy.

When they attacked, seconds later, it was brutal: "Does yo' mamma know how unfunny you are? I'll tell her tonight when I get home!" Ouch. "Why don't you quit comedy and do something you're good at, like getting me a drink!" Painful. "I hope your car works better than your jokes so you can get outta here!" Mayday.

Downey said that the master of ceremonies eventually came on stage and rescued what was left of him. "He gave me a big hug," Downey said.

Of course, it doesn't normally turn out that way. The infinitely more prepared comedian usually has few problems, if any, in squelching a patron uprising. Most times a comedian is able to quickly access a mental library of prepared put-downs or, if the opportunity presents itself, to see something in the would-be foil that provides good material -- essentially hanging 'em by their own rope. Like the time Downey was heckled by an overly large man wearing a Shamu T-shirt. "That just kinda wrote itself," he said.

One problem comedians are not really prepared for, however, is when hecklers try to escalate the exchange from verbal jabs to physical confrontations -- both on and off stage. Although Downey said that he's never been accosted after a performance, there was one situation in which a heckler he had picked on tried to rush the stage. Before he got there, though, three Marines near the stage tackled him.

Downey has comedian friends, however, who haven't been so fortunate as to have a table of military personnel as bodyguards. He shared several stories of hecklers and stand-up comics coming to blows, including one poor soul playing a club in Detroit who began insulting a heckler and his girlfriend. Unfortunately for the comedian, the heckler in question turned out to be a gang-banger. The comedian's put-downs resulted in his receiving a broken nose.

And although that is an extreme case, the threat of violence is something that crosses a comedian's mind, depending on what the heckler does. This includes female stand-up comics as well.

Tina Giorgi said that although most people are respectful of female comedians, she takes the same chance on stage as her male counterparts. That includes a time when she was performing at a club and a drunken woman startled heckling her. After Giorgi lobbed some insults the heckler's way, the woman stood up, as if she meant to jump on stage and attack.

Giorgi said she didn't know what to do. "I can't fight. If I get hit, I'm going down."

Fortunately, the woman sat back down and everything returned to normal. "By and large women are notoriously faithful" to female comedians, Giorgi said.

And men are more tolerant of being insulted by women as well, she said.

Giorgi said she was playing a club in Long Island, N.Y., and there was a table of police officers who were being belligerent to the comedians, disrupting the act and otherwise irritating the audience. Because they were police, however, their comments were treated with kid gloves.

When she took the stage, she'd had enough, telling the cops, 'If you don't behave, I'm going to get out my plunger,' " a reference to the brutal assault of a Jamaican immigrant at the hands of New York City police officers. The response drew laughs, from both the police and the audience members, and ended the heckling.

"If I'd been a guy, (the police officers) would've killed me," she said.

On top

Rita Rudner, who performs at the Las Vegas Hilton hotel-casino through March 11, said that since she's become established in the comedy scene she rarely encounters hecklers anymore. Still, Rudner vividly recalls her first heckler. It was her first time on stage, she said, and she had devised a set she thought was funny. As part of her routine, she talked to the audience, soliciting responses to various questions such as "What do you do?" Then an audience member returned the favor, and asked Rudner what she did for a living. She froze.

"I didn't know what to say. I felt like saying, 'I'm on stage for the first time. Can you come back when I'm more experienced?' "

As a general rule, Rudner said she prefers to stay away from insulting hecklers and simply works harder to make the audience laugh more. "It's very hard for someone to yell something when the (audience) is laughing," she said.

Paula Poundstone, who performs at Sunset Station on Saturday, has a different approach to hecklers.

Her act involves audience participation, she said, so she welcomes comments -- up to a point. Then there's the "nutcase" who tries to be a part of the show and goes beyond a couple of remarks. Poundstone says that she'll generally banter with them for a bit before putting them in their place.

And when a heckler is really far gone, achieving a level beyond annoyance, instead of engaging in more banter with them or taking their abuse, Poundstone simply has security remove them. "They made the mistake of thinking I'm a substitute teacher," she said. "I don't need to be clever."

For those who may think that her hecklers are a plant, a prop of sorts the comedian can use to get a laugh or a reaction, a la Andy Kaufman, Poundstone laughs. "That's right, we worked on it for weeks," she said. "Me and the idiot travel together."

With some comedians, however, heckling is the act. That's certainly the case with Don Rickles, who has made a career out of going after the audience, without provocation. Tangling with the acerbic Rickles, who declined to be interviewed for this story, would be to place your ego in harm's way; sort of like stepping into the lion's cage with only a squirt gun for protection.

The same could be said of heckling Dangerfield, who's performing at the MGM for a week beginning March 9. Dangerfield said that at this point in his life people rarely heckle him, which is something he's happy with. That's not to suggest he isn't prepared for it.

Dangerfield said he has plenty of material ready for hecklers, such as this gem: "If you keep this up, I'll come to where you work ... and take your shovel away."

Basil acknowledged Dangerfield as a master at handling hecklers, with an encyclopedia of jokes to cull from, the product of years of stand-up comedy.

"He's got a lot of lines," Basil said.

An odd relationship

Pete Barbutti, a local comedian, has an interesting philosophy on hecklers. He said he views the heckler, the comedian and the audience as three separate entities. The object, he said, is to make the heckler the enemy without losing the respect of the audience. For that, he has a formula:

The first time a heckler remarks about something, Barbutti said he's not sure if it's the only thing they'll say. So the comedian sends the heckler a notice to show he's aware of their presence.

"I'll say, 'Yo! Hold it down!' Something easy," he said.

If the heckler continues, Barbutti moves on to phase two, which is to be more direct without being overly insulting. This runs from the innocuous, "We have a policy here that whomever heckles buys the house a round of drinks" to the more cutting, "Sir, could you hold it down until the end of the show because it's customary for the animal acts to go on last."

If that doesn't work, Barbutti said he moves to phase three.

"Then you have the permission of the audience to raise the level of intensity of the reaction because then (the heckler is) disturbing them and hanging up the show they paid to see," he said. "From here you start to get crueler."

For example: "You don't have to be here tonight. You can be out on the street trying to lure little boys into your car."

It's important to handle a heckler as you would in creating music, Barbutti said. "Start with a crescendo" of insults, "and get rougher and rougher."

Your own mess

Of course, that formula falls by the wayside if the comedian is to blame for the heckling. This is usually the result of either jokes falling flat, an ill-prepared or nervous comic, an unresponsive or hostile audience or, in the case of Basil, something that went painfully wrong -- literally.

Basil was a newcomer to the comedy ranks, performing for only his second week. He was at a club in Salt Lake City, he said, and his set was winding down. He pulled out a hard hat, which was part of the act, and placed it on his head. He then referred to Superglue, a reference to the commercial in which a construction worker is glued to the top of a girder by his hard hat and hangs in mid-air to show the glue's super strength.

As luck would have it, a member of the audience had some Superglue and tossed it on stage. Then someone in the audience started yelling for him to use it.

"It was just a throwaway bit," Basil said.

Now he was forced to change directions and go with it. So, the comedian went to a bald man near the stage and pretended to pour the Superglue on his head. Unbeknownst to Basil, the tube had a small hole in it and leaked a few drops onto the top of the man's head.

"The guy said 'What!' and put his finger on his head," Basil said. "His finger became stuck to his head."

At this point, Basil said the guy began screaming and cursing, his finger still firmly attached to his scalp. Basil tried to remain calm and asked if anyone in the audience had nail polish remover. No one did. Eventually, the bald man was forced to yank his finger free from his head, Basil said, leaving a piece of flesh attached. All this while Basil was still on stage.

"I'd only been a comic for two weeks and I thought my career was over," he said. "This all happened because of a heckler's dare."

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