Dealing with a heckler in Tokyo!
Good hecklers versus bad hecklers…
Dealing with hecklers — an audience member who interrupts or yells out during a comedy set — is part of the occupational hazard of being a standup comedian. Having had experience working in improv tour guiding on The Ride, I really like incorporating audience interaction into my sets. But it can be risky because a too “enthusiastic” (or… drunk) audience member can hijack a set really quickly.
During my set, I have a few key moments where I try to elicit a response to some questions to pull in the crowd. One thing that originally surprised me about the Tokyo comedy scene was that it was harder to get the audience to participate, even to things like “yes/no” questions, compared to a US audience.
Typically, when we have folks visiting from the nearby US military bases, they’re some of the rowdier and more interactive audience members we get. As such, and given that I’m a military spouse, I can usually work really well with this crowd.
For example, in the video to the right, I’ve been interacting with this audience member and she gives me the perfect tee up for a joke. This is the kind of interaction that be perfect for in-the-moment spontaneity that can even go viral on social media.
When Hecklers go wild…
So I have to admit, a couple of weeks back when I encountered a really wild heckler at Tokyo Comedy Bar, I was really surprised! It had been awhile to flex this particular comedy muscle and it ended up being a fun, but a bit of an exhausting challenge.
There are a few approaches to disarm a heckler, and given that sometimes these can provide really unique moments, I try not to completely shut them down right off the bat. Now in this case… maybe I should’ve. In the video of the interaction, I’ve put together a few different methods I used in this case.
Strategies to diffuse a heckler
My first indication that things were off should’ve been that she came for my pronunciation. But, given that there was a chance that this could be funny, you see I start to go with it. Unfortunately, that runway let her take a bit of control and so I push back a little to point out what she said wasn’t that funny.
In the next phase once she declared where she was from, I tried to position her behavior through the lens of the audience as a neutral arbiter that her yelling out wasn’t additive to the show.
Then things got a bit more aggressive, with her just hitting back at everything I said. At this point, I met that energy with the disapproving silence of a middle school substitute teacher and then in effect, telling her to cut it out.
In conclusion, there was just the world-weary sigh and addressing to the rest of the audience that things had gotten a bit out of hand. From there, I threw in a few more jokes and then wrapped up my set.
Dealing with hecklers is never easy, but fortunately this interaction stayed fairly calm as nothing they said was offensive — it just wasn’t funny!
Have you ever seen a heckler at a comedy show? How’d the comedian handle it? Check out the video and let me know how you think I did!