The hecklers from hell
Things have been going quite well for me recently. Well, besides having my TV show cancelled, things have been going great. Admittedly, that’s a pretty big exception, but I’ve just sold out a show in Gore. Things are going great!
There’s no way to say it without sounding facetious, but my tour of the deep south is really fun. After one show I got offered a threesome, which I had to politely decline.
The next night I was offered some pills. I had no idea what they were. Just ‘‘pills’’ wrapped in clingfilm.
There are two reasons I’m on this tour: 1) I need a job; and 2) I wanted to test the theory that it’s actually easier to sell tickets in small towns because there’s so little happening there.
This isn’t an insult, it’s part of the reason people love small-town life.
Every so often people want a night out and, for most places in New Zealand, that means two options: The Irish Rovers, or one of the 57 varieties of this act. The Original Irish Rovers, The Real Irish Rovers, The Real Original Irish Rovers . . . Of Ireland! Or a Bee Gees tribute night.
Full disrespect to the Rovers and the Bee Gees, there’s a real gap in the market and I worked it perfectly! I sold out every night of my appropriately named ‘‘Some places in the central North Island and most of the South Island Tour 2019’’.
Invercargill, Gore, Timaru, I loved them all.
I did not, however, love Oamaru. It was the worst gig of the year.
Now I don’t want to beat up on Oamaru, but I’m going to beat up on Oamaru. It has left me with no other choice.
The first red flag was screaming over my intro. Not One Direction, fangirl screaming. Just a couple of adult women screaming. I wasn’t sure if it was meth, but I didn’t want to find out.
As soon as I got on stage, I realised the crowd was a lot more drunk than usual. I got heckled a lot.
This is not uncommon for a rowdy weekend gig, but these hecklers were different. They weren’t trying to be funny, or even insult me, they just wanted to argue.
I told a joke about how they can’t even pronounce the name of their own town properly, and it got genuinely hostile as people tried to bitterly argue the point. And this was supposed to be the easy bit.
Local material almost always goes well. It’s the comedian’s equivalent of a touring band saying, ‘‘we’ve toured the whole world, and we have to say that (insert your town here) is the best crowd we’ve ever played’’.
I’d opened a can of worms but it wasn’t time to panic. I was forced to activate Plan C – greatest gits.
I did some of my most reliable old material and, finally, I had the crowd laughing like normal. Phew! If that hadn’t worked, Plan D was mime.
But I relaxed too soon. I segued to a normally reliable bit about road workers. I was subverting the classic comedy trope that they’re lazy and useless, taking the stance that they’re amazing.
Somehow this backfired badly. I hadn’t even got to a joke yet and some passionate road workers piped up to defend themselves from my . . . compliments? Only, these hecklers were then heckled by a new one calling them ‘‘lazy pricks’’.
I was no longer the comic, I was the referee. It was a genuinely tense moment as six burly road workers threatened to fight this annoying man, whom I later found out was a painter. (Ironically, another line of work often maligned for being lazy.)
‘‘We risk our lives every day,’’ the road worker yelled. It was truly bizarre. No-one was questioning that statement. If I’d been watching it on TV it would have been hilarious. But it was my show and it was falling apart.
The next 45 minutes were the biggest struggle of my life. I like to think I’m pretty resilient but once they interrupted my final routine I lost it.
I genuinely stormed the crowd. I wanted to kick out the idiots who had made the show so difficult. Of course, I couldn’t find them. I was forced to finish the set and get the hell out of Oamaru.