Billy Connolly bits and pieces

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It’s no joke being heckled
Steve Punt
6th February 2012

Stand-up comics are supposed to be prepared for the moment when the darkness beyond the foot-lights suddenly develops a voice and a heckler yells something at the stage. It is the point when the theatre holds its collective breath and waits to see how the comic will react.

Sometimes the put-down is slick, funny and fatal for the heckler, who will not dare to open their mouth again. But if the comic stalls and loses their thread, or the put-down falls flat, the crowd will smell blood and the heckling will get worse. That’s why stand-ups fear the drunken heckle — and practise their responses.


I still get flashbacks to a 1991 Christmas disco at Guy’s Hospital in London where, along with my comedy writing partner Hugh Dennis — star of the BBC comedy Outnumbered — I was supposed to be entertaining a thousand medical students.

The dancefloor was heaving, the music was thumping and the last thing any of them wanted to do was listen to half-an-hour of verbal comedy, especially with nowhere to sit. Almost as soon as the music was turned off and we had begun, our routine began to flounder, at which point several future NHS consultants started to hurl distinctly non-Hippocratic oaths towards the stage.

‘Where’s the fucking music?’ came the cries, while a smirking DJ stood ready and waiting to take over again if mob rule prevailed. ‘Where’s Jasper?’ someone shouted (we used to do sketches on Jasper Carrott’s TV shows at the time). Since Hugh’s appearance in Outnumbered, its more likely to be: ‘Where are the kids?’

So I sympathise with veteran stand-up comedian Billy Connolly who recently responded to a restive audience in a way that most lesser comics wouldn’t dare. Faced with persistent heckling from crowds in Blackpool and Scarborough, Connolly simply walked off. Heckling a headline act in a big theatre is comparatively rare. Most comics experience heckling early in their careers, in comedy clubs and pub rooms, where audiences don’t know who they’re coming to see.

Young, inexperienced comics are far more likely to be heckled than older, more famous ones — Connolly’s treatment was unusual, to say the least. Heckling is nothing new. Shakespeare was familiar with it, and we still use the Elizabethan word ‘bearpit’ to describe a boisterous venue today.

As a comic you must know your enemy, and over the years Hugh and I have made several observations about the psychology of the heckler. The first is that the quality of the heckle — and thus the wit you must summon to deflect it — falls as units of alcohol consumed by the audience rises. During our days at the Comedy Store in London — where Rob Brydon, Paul Merton, Jimmy Carr and Sandi Toksvig cut their teeth — there were two shows: one at 8pm and one at midnight. At 8pm, any heckling would be sharp, liable to wound and — importantly — composed of identifiable words. By midnight the heckling was not only witless, but characterised by a slurred series of noises, which detracted from its effectiveness.

Having said that, one of the most brutal heckles I ever heard was delivered at 1am, at the Fringe Club in Edinburgh. Some friends of mine were doing a sketch on stage when a voice shouted: ‘Get off! You’re c**p and you know it!’ Not, on the face of it, very sophisticated, but there was something about the ‘and you know it’ that was a killer. It plays heavily on the insecurity most performers feel. The only heckle that ever really hurts is the one you suspect might be true.

Most hecklers are male. You need to imagine David Attenborough’s voice at this point: ‘The male of the species feels threatened when challenged by a rival wittier male. He feels the need to reassert his dominance within the social group. This is done by bellowing “gggerrofyerubbish” at the top of his voice.’

This reminds his friends that the real Oscar Wilde in the room is not the overpaid bozo on stage, but the lager-swilling junior manager sitting at their table. There are precautions that a comedian can take to ward off the threat of heckling. Careful timing of the interval stops the audience heading for the loo (one of the activities Connolly had objected to), and a theatre bar should never be open during the performance — a by-product of the idea that comedy gigs are rock n roll. Other than that, you just have to be funny.

Young comics still respond to incoherent shouts by smiling and saying: ‘Ah, I remember when I had my first beer’ — a line popularised by U.S. comedian Steve Martin in 1979, but probably ancient even then. Jasper Carrott used to respond to hecklers with the words, ‘Sit back in your chair and I’ll plug it in’, which would shut up a shouter very effectively. Jack Dee would stare hard at the heckler in that sardonic way of his and then say deadpan to the rest of the audience: ‘Well, it’s a night out for him, isn’t it?’ Once this had got a laugh, he would add the lethal punchline: ‘For his family, it’s a night off.’

My favourite, though, was one I heard in a small and rough-edged comedy club in South-East London where a persistent heckler was disposed of by Radio 4’s News Quiz panellist Jeremy Hardy with: ‘It’s all right. I don’t respond to hecklers. I just have them followed home and their houses burned down.’

Eric Morecambe was once asked which was the worst audience, and replied: ‘The one that hasn’t paid to see you.’ He was right, of course, and this can make corporate events tricky: if people are there to see who’s won the Ringbinder Salesman of the Year Award, they don’t necessarily want a long introduction of jokes tied to office stationery.

Sometimes fame itself invites heckling. There is a tale told on the comedy circuit about Michael Douglas’s younger brother Joel, a movie producer who did stand-up in his spare time. During a gig at a British club he found himself being heckled. ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ he asked. ‘I’m Kirk Douglas’s son!’ At which point an audience member stood up and cried: ‘No! I’m Kirk Douglas’s son!’ followed by a dozen others, all paying homage to Douglas Snr’s famous scene in the 1960 film Spartacus.

There is, sadly, no proof that this is other than a joke in itself, but it shows that the best hecklers can go down in the history books. Comics still tell the story of Bernie and Mike Winters who were popular from the 1950s to the 1970s. One night in Glasgow, Bernie opened the show. After five minutes, his brother appeared. ‘Oh God!’ cried a voice. ‘There’s two of them!’

Perhaps it’s not surprising that people have an urge to heckle in the boozy atmosphere of a comedy club. After all, the central forum of our democracy, the House of Commons, is just one great wood-panelled heckling shed. MPs shout critical comments all the time, generally in response to rehearsed put-downs.

David Cameron got into hot water when he told Labour MP Angela Eagle to ‘calm down, dear’ — a misjudged reference to Michael Winner’s line in a TV ad. Generations of politicians, heckled by constituents during campaign speeches, have had to develop thick hides.

On the election trail in 1983, Michael Foot was promising the moon to a crowd in South Wales when a voice cried: ‘But this is all just words, isn’t it!’ Foot snapped back: ‘What did you expect — algebra?’By walking out of the bearpit, was Billy Connolly behaving like a petulant superstar — ‘a diva’ as one disgruntled audience member put it — or was he rightly standing up for some degree of public etiquette?

The Britain’s Got Talent culture of instant judgment, based on a three-minute soundbite, works heavily against comics who rely on a slow build-up. The trend for heavily-edited panel shows which trade in relentless quips does not really prepare an audience for the ebb and flow of a two-hour comedy show where verbal tapestries can be woven to much greater complexity than TV allows.

But why a comic of Connolly’s experience would walk off, I don’t know. Maybe he’s just extra tetchy at the moment. If Scotland becomes independent, he’ll be the national treasure of a much smaller country.

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Billy Connolly - A Life in Pictures
A new doc from BBC Scotland

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Billy Connolly - 2013-01-08 - Craig Ferguson

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'I feel like I'm going out of my mind'
Billy Connolly admits to 'terrifying' memory loss during his stand-up shows
22nd April 2013

Everyone knows how important the punchline is to a comedian, so one can understand Billy Connolly's frustration when he forgets it onstage. The Scottish funny man has admitted to forgetting his jokes midway through performances, and he says it's nerve-wracking. The 70-year old said: “This is fucking terrifying. I feel like I’m going out of my mind"

During gigs, Billy constantly needs to be reminded of what he is talking about, and his wife Pamela Stephenson blames it on excessive boozing at the infancy of his career. His show at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast, was the most recent example of his failed memory as the Daily Record reports that his repertoire was marred by a few forgetful moments where he asked the audience what he was talking about.

Each time Billy tries to brush over the gaff by starting a new story or apparently curse at his act by saying: 'This is fucking awful. I can’t remember what I was saying. I get wee gaps and just stop.' Like a true comedian, Billy recalled a funny story about memory loss and the former U.S. President Ronald Reagan. The ex Commander-in-Chief suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and the Scotsman remembered a time when Reagan was entertaining a group of people at a charity function. Mid-story, the former president stopped for several seconds with everyone hanging on his last word until he remembered his story again. He just carried on as if nothing had happened.” But then the comedian fell into a similar pattern on stage,' Billy said.

One audience member told the Daily Record: 'He’s a comedy hero and it was obvious from the audience on Saturday night that they’d forgive him just about anything and that includes his memory loss. It didn’t do anything to affect the show and people seemed very sympathetic when he had those attacks on stage and the audience just wanted him to keep going,' Peter Sullivan commented. 'They sort of carried him to the next joke and punchline. It was brilliant.'

Rather than lose patience with the ageing comedian, the audience cheered him on, as any die hard fan would. Billy's tour continues across Ireland until May 7th.

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Billy Connolly - 2014-02-20 - Opie and Anthony

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Billy Connolly's Big Send Off

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Billy Connolly - Who Do You Think You Are?

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