Let Them Eat Cake

Lewis Black is touring.



This not Lewis Black. This is John Bowman, the opener, and said Mr. Bowman kicked ass. While holding and vaguely strumming a ukulele.

He looks teeny and far away, but I'll have you know that I was a mere eight rows from his utterly foul language. No, really, someone yelled at him to use "civility" because he spoke some grown up words.

I have never before been to any performance with hecklers, and then I was. And, oh, it's even worse than you think. It's horrible. All you want to do is get out of your seat and find the person yelling at the performer (as if they were in their living room in their gray underpants with the stuffed ferret on the coffee table), and throttle them. And even when it stops, you spend the entire rest of the performance waiting for it to start again.

I thought people whispering behind me in a movie theater made me crazy. This was stroke-inducing.

I watched (on YouTube) comics being heckled and how they responded. The most vicious was perhaps Joe Rogan (not known, in general, for classy behavior, but he did stop short of going all Michael Richards), but how can you fault a performer who responds however they want towards some stranger who is hiding in the dark, trying to ruin their act?



Hecklers should be thrown out by venue staff, unless it's a response to something said by Borat.

When Lewis Black has a microphone and gets upset (and he gets upset often), the sound of his voice - the one or two carefully chosen words used for punctuation and effect - goes directly from his vocal cords into the very center of your brain, where there is a small empty space the size of a walnut. And then the noise, it slams itself around in there like a furious, hungover, rabid weasel, until you begin to bleed internally.

But not in a bad way.