Bane of the stand-up comic
By SANDY GUTMAN. Having been a constant and relentless live performance comedian for almost 35 years in a culture which is never happy unless it is putting everything down, I think I know something about The Heckler.
You can have the best intentions in the world as you arrive on the stage, but as soon as you open your mouth, some idiot who needs the attention more than anyone else in the room will try and shout you down.
Their intention is to demolish and destroy your act and humiliate YOU. The only way to survive is to counterattack, quickly and decisively, and crush them to death.
This might sound harsh, but it is them or you. Once they open their mouths, they have crossed the red line.
If you give The Heckler an inch you might as well pack up and go home.
When I began as an entertainer in 1980, I was a frightened Jewish boy from the comfortable eastern suburbs of Sydney, the son of a Holocaust survivor, who really didn’t know what he was going to do with his life. And I still don’t.
At my first show at Sydney’s new Comedy Store, the spacious room was full of aggressive Aussie hecklers. They shouted at me in a vulgar collective voice, “Say something funny”, or “Make us laugh”, intimating that all of them were much funnier than I could ever be.
Gradually I learnt to give it back. I adopted an aggressive persona, put on a pair of dark Raybans, so no-one could see the terror in my eyes, and crippled the hecklers with a deep voice and fake fearlessness.
Once, at a big venue in Melbourne, the hecklers would just not shut up, so I asked the whole audience of 500 people to come on stage, and remarkably they did, and then I went down to where they were sitting and heckled them for the rest of my show. I didn’t get paid, but it was worth it!
I became the rock ’n’ roll comedian, appearing before the biggest bands in Australia such as INXS, Midnight Oil and Cold Chisel, right throughout the ’80s. Everyone feared me and would come to my shows to see how I would deal with The Idiots.
These days I am weary of The Heckler, but they still come to try to shut things down. Usually they end up falling on their swords because I am just too experienced now.
It is a cultural phenomenon, to do with disdain for authority figures, and is exemplified by people, such as Howard Sattler, who are disrespectful of powerful people like Julia Gillard because she is a woman who dared to be PM. What business is it of his whether Tim Mathieson is gay or not?
It is a deep insecurity that appears to have originated in the convict past, and is still evident in the present. I wish they would get over it, because it is at the root of the racism and xenophobia that exists just under the surface and needs to disappear. This is a great country and with tolerance and self-esteem, it could be even greater.
Comedian Austen Tayshus (Sandy Gutman) has performed his stand-up comedy shows in Australia and overseas for almost 35 years. He lives in Sydney.
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