How to Handle a Heckler Without Losing the Whole Room

Sally Holloway spent over a decade on the circuit braced for one particular shout out of the dark. When she added it up for Chortle in 2011, the total was smaller than the dread: “The latter was near the top of my list of heckling worries but actually only happened twice in 11 years.” The shout was “Show us your tits”. Twice, in eleven years of gigs.

The heckle you brace for and the heckle you actually get are rarely the same animal, and the real gig-ruiner is far duller than the nightmare version. It’s a bloke whispering to his girlfriend during your set-up so she barks a laugh in the wrong place, or a table who think the show is a conversation with occasional silences. Milo McCabe, writing for Chortle in 2012, named the one that gets under his skin most precisely: the punter who’s been challenged on his whisper and answers with the word “Carry on”. As McCabe put it, “‘Carry on’ is the one that gets me the most.”

What do you say to a heckler?

Ask them to say it again. That’s the single most reliable opening move, and it’s the one thing the comedy teachers and the working comperes actually agree on. Chris Head wrote a director’s guide to stand-up and teaches new acts. He puts it in capitals in his heckling lesson, and the capitals are his, not mine: “GET THEM TO REPEAT IT.” His reasoning is purely mechanical. They may not repeat it, in which case you say you must be hearing things and carry on. If they do, it lands weaker the second time. It turns every head in the room away from you and towards them. And, crucially, it buys you the two or three seconds in which your brain might actually produce something.

Holloway arrives at the same place from the performing side: “The best way to buy time is to learn to repeat whatever the heckler has said.” She adds a detail I think is underrated. Once you’ve started speaking, it’s much easier to keep speaking than to stand there frozen with a microphone and a face. Four seconds of that silence feels like a fortnight from behind the mic stand, and looks like one from row three. If nothing funny arrives, she suggests you simply describe the heckle out loud. Was it pedantic? Was it gibberish? Naming the category is itself a laugh, and it often kicks you into an improvised run you didn’t plan.

Paul F. Tompkins learned the patience half of this the hard way. In an old Q and A thread quoted by the Funny How newsletter, he described it like this: “What took me forever to learn was that you have to give these people enough rope to either hang themselves or show that they are not actually a threat.” He’s clear about why the waiting pays, even though it costs a new act a few seconds of stage time they feel in their chest: “Talking to them lets the audience know what they’re all about, so if you need to take them out, you will definitely have the audience on your side.”

Sally Holloway’s list of everything people might shout at her

Before any of that works, you need lines in the bank. Holloway’s method was to sit down and honestly inventory her own vulnerabilities. Hers, as she lists them, were “my frizzy hair, lanky demeanour and black clothes”. Add men shouting that they fancied her or, more often, that they didn’t. Then she wrote jokes for each one: “Having made the list I then sat and wrote jokes just to deal with them. These jokes became my personal armoury.”

The payoff is the part I’d tattoo on a new act. Those jokes outperformed her actual material. They read as improvised: “They always got bigger laughs than some of my usual gags, because they looked like they were adlibbed – even other acts were fooled until I explained in the dressing room that they were my ‘reserve’ jokes.” Other comics thought she was ad-libbing, when she was reciting. If you’re building your first proper set, this is the same discipline as writing a tight five that survives a rough room, just aimed at the seats instead of the stage.

Her compering armoury included a pre-written response to being heckled the second she walked on. It ran: “Ladies and gentlemen. Normally it can take me up to 15 minutes to find the wanker in the room. But not tonight, Look there he is, he’s having a little shout…” She reckons she used it in one in ten of her compering gigs, which is a strike rate that justifies the writing time on its own. Comperes carry a bigger version of this problem all night, which is its own job with its own rules.

Head suggests learning two or three standard put-downs as well. He notes that they’re treated differently from material: “unlike material there is an unwritten agreement among comics that put-downs are common currency that all are welcome to draw on”. He credits compere Geoff Whiting with a couple aimed at drunks, including “This is what happens when you drink on an empty… head.” Holloway’s own favourites were “that was a hit and run heckle” for the one-liner merchant and “Are you happy with that or do you want to go for a whole sentence.” for the mumbler. Both writers make the same practical warning. If you’re relying on stock lines you have to watch every act on before you, or you’ll deliver the room’s second-favourite version of a line it already heard at 8.40.

Stuart’s mates enjoy it, the hen party closes ranks

The identical put-down produces opposite results depending on who the heckler came with, and McCabe’s Chortle piece is the clearest thing I’ve read on that. Put down a stag do and the group is delighted with you: “You’ve made Stuart look like a bell end. Well done. Ha ha.” Put down a hen party the same way and you’ve made an enemy of the table. In his words: “With hen parties, you have to be very careful while responding to their interruptions…most times, especially if you get a big laugh from your riposte, the result is a group of women bonding together to defend the poor defenceless lady from the horrible comic.”

He’s equally good on the whispering alpha male, and his recommendation isn’t a kill shot at all: “In my experience, a persistent alpha male heckler can often be brought into line by some kind of inclusion, acknowledgement or smile…” A nod costs you nothing and takes about a second and a half.

The failure mode McCabe owns up to is the one every act on a Saturday recognises. He spent several minutes demolishing a table of hecklers, feeling magnificent, until a woman on another table shouted “Is this all it’s going to be?” His verdict on himself: “I ended up dying on my arse because I’d concentrated my attention on them too long, thinking I was really clever.” The other eleven tables hadn’t bought tickets for a running feud with table nine. Crowd work has a legal edge to it now as well as an atmospheric one, as the comic fined 12,000 shekels in Tel Aviv over a front-row joke found out.

When the whole room agrees with the heckler

There’s one situation where none of the technique applies, and Head gets it from compere Barry Ferns, whom he interviewed for his book. The quote didn’t make the final draft; it’s on Head’s site instead, and it’s the best model of a comedy audience I know:

“I see audience members as individual neurons that together make up the brain of the audience. But they’re all individually firing in their own way. If you get one neuron that’s firing a little aggressively, you might need to find some way to get the other neurons to help bring it in line. … If the audience are really on the side of the heckler and the heckler is right in what they’re saying then the comic can’t do anything.”

Head’s gloss is blunt and correct. If someone shouts “you’re rubbish get off” and they’re expressing the room’s actual opinion, no put-down saves you: “It probably IS time to get off and lick your wounds.” Everything else in this piece assumes the gig is basically going well apart from one loud person. Once that assumption breaks you’re on damage limitation, and getting off at seven minutes is a decision most promoters would far rather you made than the one where you fight the room until the interval.

Andrew Doyle wrote for Chortle in 2012, after a drunk table talked through his Fringe hour and one of them eventually threw a pint of lager at him. He quoted Susan Calman on the myth that a professional should be able to win anywhere: “The old adage that a comedian should be able to handle any room is entirely wrong.” His comparison is theatre, where nobody expects a cast to absorb a stag do as part of the craft. Nobody has ever lobbed a pint at a matinee of An Inspector Calls.

Who’s actually meant to throw them out

On the big tours, the answer is security, on the comic’s say-so, and it’s become visible enough to make the news pages. Chortle reported in February 2025 under the headline “Peter Kay: I had no choice but to eject hecklers” after removals at his AO Arena show in Manchester. Six weeks later the same site ran “Rowdy hecklers mar Paul Chowdhry and John Bishop shows”. That piece covered a fight in the crowd at Chowdhry’s gig at the Cliffs Pavilion in Westcliff-on-Sea on Saturday 29 March, after which police confirmed an assault. It also covered a heckler ejected from Bishop’s show at the Princess Theatre in Torquay, once her partner had already been removed. Chowdhry’s statement afterwards began: “I do not condone violence in any form.”

In a pub room with 40 seats and a promoter doing the door, the tech and the raffle, there is no security. Head’s last-resort move is to make the room do the work: ask for a show of hands on whether the guy should shut up, which only functions if you’re sure the vote goes your way. What you should not do is Kai Humphries’ 2013 story, which he told on Chortle with admirable honesty about a heckler who’d been demolishing the newer acts all night: “When I got off stage the heckler tried to high-five me. I left him hanging and hit him in the dick.” Funny to read, career-limiting to repeat, and it’s the promoter who deals with the aftermath. Given what this job actually pays a year, doubling as a bouncer is not in the fee.

Three things new acts ask afterwards

Can I use another comedian’s put-down? Generally yes, with a check. Head describes stock put-downs as common currency among comics, and notes Rufus Hound has edited a book collecting a selection of them. Holloway’s advice if you hear a line you like is simply, “just ask them”, because they’ll tell you straight away whether it’s theirs or a standard.

What if the heckle is funnier than my joke? Give it to them. Head’s preferred response is to develop their gag and top it, and failing that, “a reliable response is to mime writing it down in a notebook and say something like: ‘Thanks, that’s going in the act.'” Every act I know has mimed that notebook at some point without owning a notebook. McCabe reaches the same conclusion about the rare genuinely hilarious whisper: give him the win, move on, your ego survives.

Do I go back and finish the joke I was interrupted in? Usually not. Head’s aside on this is that it’s better to abandon a gag that’s been heckled through, unless it’s structurally load-bearing, and just say “well that’s fucked up that gag” before moving on.

Sources

Most of this is homework, done sober, days before anybody shouts anything. Holloway used to run her put-downs on the train to the gig, out loud or under her breath, the way other people revise. Head sends his students home to write lines not just for a heckler but for the phone going off, the latecomers, the spilled pint, and the bloke walking across the front of the stage to the toilet. For a table talking, the standard is “This isn’t TV you know, I can hear you.” Write eight of those and keep them in the back of the notebook with the setlist. Then, the next time somebody shouts something at you in a function room in Stowmarket, you’ll have your second and a half of not needing to think, plus a spare line about the raffle, which in a function room in Stowmarket you will need.

About River Leanox

River Leanox edits Open Comedy's newsroom. Coverage runs across stand-up's full ecosystem: comics on the rise, club owners booking the rooms, festivals, specials, and the working-comic economics behind the laughs. Tips, corrections, and counter-arguments welcome at river@opencomedy.com.

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How to handle a heckler without losing the rest of the room