ENGLISH HECKLERS IN NEW ZEALAND – MAY 2005

I have had a great run so far at the New Zealand comedy festival in Auckland. The Classic on Queen Street is one of my favourite five spaces to perform worldwide. It’s a converted porn cinema, there’s table service but it’s genuinely unobtrusive, and it has the kind of faded glamour you can’t manufacture. Pretty much all the shows here have enabled me to do what I do best – take people on funny journeys into spaces they wouldn’t have expected to arrive at in a stand-up comedy set. When there have been heckles or interruptions they’ve been playful, witty, supportive, - things you could have fun with -, or just genuinely confused people, who want to understand, asking questions, with whom you could also have some fun. When there was heckling it normally had the feel of a lively debate, or a flirtation. Nobody was humiliated or hurt, onstage or off.

I like to watch the crowd come in. I play a CD of a long Evan Parker sax solo while they do. I figure if people can’t put up with that then they will probably not be able to put up with me. About one in ten times someone will come up to the sound desk and ask to have the fucking horrible music turned off. The people that do this are always subsequently the people in the audience without the patience to enjoy my set. Tonight an English man in a red football shirt took a table with a party of ten to fifteen other men and started shouting from his seat for the music to be turned off. I identified him as the alpha male of that group and realised the evening would probably stand or fall on his approval. The kind of people that go to comedy in a big party usually need their laughter to be approved of by one particular member, and the sort of person who is that member of such a group will usually feel that I am threatening to their status as the clown/leader of that group and will try to undermine me. Since I came back to stand-up I have largely been playing to people on my wavelength, and I was never a Comedy Store or Jongleurs act, so I rarely encounter this mentality.

Sure enough, within a few minutes I realised the show was sabotaged. The man began jumping into crucial little spaces between feedlines and punchlines with his own attempts at pay-offs that were not as funny as mine, and usually reactionary in nature, but which nevertheless slowed the momentum of the show. I said to him that I had identified him as the alpha male of his group even before the show started, and realised that as clown/leader of his pack I knew he would subsequently be obliged to undermine me. Even this bald statement would not silence him. He and his pack were here for the Lions tour. The Lions are an English rugby team. Things in the set that I consider in playful bad taste were so enthusiastically gobbled up by the English sport fans that I felt their meaning and intent changed, and I felt ashamed to say them. Towards the end I use the word ‘fingering’ in a set up towards something else. At the arrival of the word ‘fingering’ came the shout, “Now you’re getting somewhere.” I explained that this section was my least favorite of the show, and the fact that it seemed to have struck a chord with the rugby fans showed we really were on different wavelengths.

Usually I can silence hecklers with relentless logic, but what I was doing was so far away from what the sport fans expected from comedy, that they didn’t even realise that, to all intents and purposes, they had been defeated, and so their barrage of witless inanity continued. Of course afterwards, they all want to buy you drinks, and genuinely seem to feel their interruptions have done you some kind of favour. One said his favorite comic was Eddie Izzard, which I accommodated, but when they expected me to engage in an enthusiastic debate about how brilliant Peter Kaye was I made my excuses and left. They didn’t even know what they had done. They thought they had helped me to be more like a proper comedian.

It’s funny and sad that my only disastrous show here in Auckland should be as a result of the kind of English people I never usually encounter in England actually coming to my show, but when I went back to the flat later I began to feel depressed, not about the show going badly, but about the existence of such people, and what it means for the world. I tried to offer an audience something different, something they wont have seen, but the English rugby fans were trying to defeat the world of new experiences, and make it into a shape they already understood, rather than to embrace it for what it is, or enjoy its difference. This is why British holiday resorts in Spain are full of British-style pubs and Fish and Chip shops. This is why there aren’t any Spanish locals on Spanish beaches making a killing selling delicious Spanish-style food.

Privately, the debate continues amongst comedians, “what is Daniel Kitson doing?” Why, many wonder, does he do The Stand when he could do the big room at Assembly? Why does he insist on shaking off half the following he has established every couple of years by doing a sensitive story show? Why doesn’t he have a nice haircut? Surely he could afford it now. But Kitson once told me, that after his Perrier nomination, he was doing a run at the Soho theatre. Sitting in a toilet cubicle one night he overheard some of his audience standing at the urinals talking, didn’t like how they sounded, didn’t like them, and realised he would have to begin a process of refining his fanbase.

In the mid-90’s I was on television, and was of the mistaken belief that this represented a logical end-point in comedy. Returning to stand-up recently after four years off, the actual numbers game seems much simpler. I need about 7000 fans. If each of them gave me about £5 a year after tax, agent’s commission and travel expenses, I would be making a fine living, and probably never having to deal with sports fans coming to my shows. There is no need for that 7000 strong audience to include English rugby fans. If I can find some way of operating at such a level whereby they never find me, I could have the most wonderful life.

Why are sports fans at comedy anyway? In the 80’s when I was a teenager, scum and morons and thugs had sport to get excited about. And the nice people and nerds and geeks had comedy and pop music and books and computers. Then, in the 90’s, Baddiel and Skinner let the thugs have our comedy. And then Oasis and The Happy Mondays let the thugs have our music. Now there are lads at indie rock gigs and lads at comedy. Where is our space? What belongs to us? Where is our private place? I propose that we reclaim it, with fiercely strange comedy that will scare them away.

Scott, who runs the Classic and promotes me here, said I was wrong about the heckler being the Alpha Male of the sport fan group. He said the Alpha male would have money, cars, women and be silent. The heckler was a kind of delta male, the jester to the king Alpha Male. He would spend his life in orbit of power, trailing it, circling it, but never achieving it. This is of course true. But it didn’t give me any pleasure. It just made me even more sad to think that a perfectly serviceable show had been sabotaged as just yet another act in the drama of some inadequate’s quiet, or in this case not so quiet, desperation. We can be the sounding board for their strengths, and bring out the best in the public. We are also the blank canvas upon which they write their despair and sadness, in big black letters, a foot high. What a wretched night.