“You remind me of my cat. You’re as fat as she is.” That is the line, as the woman in the front row put it in her lawsuit. It ended up costing a 22-year-old comic NIS 10,000. The penalty came from a judge in an actual courtroom, who decided that a piece of crowd work was defamation – no club fine, no booker quietly dropping him off the bill.<\/p>\n
The comic is Vova Tamarkin, and the gig was a Russian-language stand-up show in Bat Yam, on the coast just south of Tel Aviv. The ruling came out of Tel Aviv magistrates’ court, reported by Chortle on 20 August. According to the claim, Tamarkin also told her: “Soon a man will come on stage who weighs as much as you. He has been involved in boxing fights for eight years.” He denied saying any of it. The judge is named in VINnews’ report as Tzipora Ohana-Kafash. Chortle transliterates it Ohana-Kapash, which is the sort of thing that makes googling a court ruling in a second alphabet a joy.<\/p>\n
The headline number is NIS 10,000, which Chortle converts to roughly £2,500 and VINnews to about $3,000. That total includes NIS 4,000 towards her legal costs, so the damages proper are the smaller half of it. Neither report mentions an appeal, so as things stand on 21 August that is the end of it.<\/p>\n
The bit working comics should actually read is the arithmetic. She sought NIS 50,000 and the court knocked it down to a fifth of that. VINnews reports the judge weighed the fact that the woman had deliberately chosen to sit in the front row. That made it more likely the comedian would interact with her. Sitting in the front row, in other words, is worth something in mitigation. Roughly forty thousand shekels’ worth, on this occasion.<\/p>\n
On the facts themselves the judge went with her account. VINnews reports the judge found the woman’s testimony credible and Tamarkin’s less reliable. That matters, because part of his defence was that she had pinned lines said by other comics on the bill onto him. Anyone who has stood at the back of a four-act club night knows how plausible that mix-up is. It is also impossible to prove eighteen months later, when nobody filmed the first half and the MC has since moved to Berlin.<\/p>\n
For scale: at the $500 opener rate logged in the new Comedy Fee Tracker<\/a>, that is six paid nights. Six nights to cover a $3,000 award, before you have eaten anything. The other comedy courtroom story of the year went the other way, mind. Learnmore Jonasi saw off a $27m claim over a Lion King joke, so the running score is not one-sided.<\/p>\n Yes, and in this case one was, successfully. The caveat is enormous. This is a magistrates’ court in Israel applying Israeli defamation law, and it binds precisely nothing in a Glasgow basement or a Brooklyn back room. Nobody in the UK should read it as a rule change. It is a judge putting a number on the thing every act does on autopilot when the room is cold and the crowd is small.<\/p>\n Tamarkin’s argument was the one every comic would make, and it is not a stupid one. People who buy tickets to stand-up know the genre involves provocation and jokes at the expense of the audience. The judge’s answer, in the wording Chortle carries, drew a line rather than rejecting the principle:<\/p>\n Language used in stand-up performances is, to put it mildly, not clean, and participants who attend such performances should be aware of that. However, humiliation that goes beyond the boundaries of that unclean language should be avoided.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That is Judge Tzipora Ohana-Kapash as quoted by Chortle in its 20 August report. Read it twice and you notice it does two jobs at once: it concedes that a comedy club is not a library, then says the specific target and insult still have to land somewhere south of humiliation. Where exactly, the ruling does not say, because rulings never do. It found the weight material – the boxer line and the cat – fell the wrong side of it.<\/p>\n Here is the thing I keep turning over. Every house-rules page I can find is pointed at the punter. The Comedy Cabaret in Bristol states it flatly: “We have a strict policy of no heckling\/talking whilst the acts are on stage.” The Stand’s clubs go further and ban stag and hen parties along with talking during the performance, to stop the room disrupting the material. Those are good rules. They exist because a talker ruins a show for a hundred people who paid to hear someone else. Venues do get held to account for what happens in their rooms, as the Banshee Labyrinth was when it admitted it discriminated against Philip Simon<\/a>.<\/p>\n None of them, though, say anything about what the person holding the microphone may say back. That asymmetry is invisible right up until the moment somebody takes a comic to court. Then it is the only thing anyone wants to know. If you want a sense of how close the front row gets, look at the 1,401 comedy shows on this year’s Fringe programme<\/a>. A good third of them are in rooms where the front row’s knees are under the performer’s feet. The tech desk is close enough to hear the punchline before the mic does. In that space crowd work happens whether you planned it or not, and somebody’s phone lights up two feet from your shins while you’re mid-sentence.<\/p>\n My own view, and it is a view rather than a finding: the thing to worry about is the recording. Ten years ago the show ended and the exchange with row one evaporated with it. Now a set gets filmed by three phones and a house camera. A line that dies in the room can be re-litigated by strangers a year later, with timestamps. A judge preferring one witness’s memory over another’s is a much smaller problem for a comic. A clip removes the need for memory entirely, along with the bit where the MC swears blind it was the other guy on the bill.<\/p>\n Tamarkin, for his part, has taken the loss with a certain professionalism. Chortle quotes him saying: “Although the court’s decision has left a bad taste in my mouth, this whole affair has given my stand-up career a serious boost, and that is, of course, something I can’t help but be happy about.” He is 22, and the most widely reported thing about his act is now a cat comparison he says he never made. Bat Yam’s Russian-language circuit has just acquired its first case law. Somewhere in Bat Yam a promoter is working out whether a comic who comes with his own court ruling is a better booking or a worse one.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nCan a comedian be sued for crowd work?<\/h2>\n
The Stand bans stag dos, and nobody has written a rule for the person holding the mic<\/h2>\n
Sources<\/h2>\n
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