Heckler
Encyclopedia
Hecklers are often known to shout disparaging comments at a performance or event, or interrupts set-piece speeches, for example at a political meeting, with intent to disturb its performers or participants.
Origin
The term originates from the textile trade, where to heckle was to tease or comb out flaxFlax
Flax is a member of the genus Linum in the family Linaceae. It is native to the region extending from the eastern Mediterranean to India and was probably first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent...
or hemp
Hemp
Hemp is mostly used as a name for low tetrahydrocannabinol strains of the plant Cannabis sativa, of fiber and/or oilseed varieties. In modern times, hemp has been used for industrial purposes including paper, textiles, biodegradable plastics, construction, health food and fuel with modest...
fibres. The additional meaning, to interrupt speakers with awkward or embarrassing questions, was added in Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
, and specifically perhaps in early nineteenth century Dundee
Dundee
Dundee is the fourth-largest city in Scotland and the 39th most populous settlement in the United Kingdom. It lies within the eastern central Lowlands on the north bank of the Firth of Tay, which feeds into the North Sea...
, a famously radical town where the hecklers who combed the flax had established a reputation as the most radical and belligerent element in the workforce. In the heckling factory, one heckler would read out the day's news while the others worked, to the accompaniment of interruptions and furious debate.
Heckling was a major part of the vaudeville
Vaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...
theater. Sometimes it was incorporated into the play. Milton Berle
Milton Berle
Milton Berlinger , better known as Milton Berle, was an American comedian and actor. As the manic host of NBC's Texaco Star Theater , in 1948 he was the first major star of U.S. television and as such became known as Uncle Miltie and Mr...
's weekly TV variety series in the 1960s featured a heckler named Sidney Spritzer (German/Yiddish for "Squirter") played by Borscht Belt
Borscht Belt
Borscht Belt, or Jewish Alps, is a colloquial term for the mostly defunct summer resorts of the Catskill Mountains in parts of Sullivan, Orange and Ulster counties in upstate New York that were a popular vacation spot for New York City Jews from the 1920s through the 1960s.-Name:The name comes from...
comic Irving Benson
Irving Benson
Irving Benson is an American actor and comedian. He is one of the last survivors of the vaudeville era.Having enjoyed a long and successful run on the east coast American Burlesque circuit, Irv Benson travelled west to play Las Vegas for the first time in 1957, with the Minsky Follies show...
. In the 1970s and 1980s, The Muppet Show, which was also built around a vaudeville theme, featured two hecklers, Statler & Waldorf
Statler & Waldorf
Statler and Waldorf are a pair of Muppet characters. They are two ornery, disagreeable old men who first appeared in the television series The Muppet Show heckling the rest of the cast from their balcony seats. They appeared in every episode of the show, except for one...
(two old men named after famous hotels). Heckles are now particularly likely to be heard at comedy performances, to unsettle or compete with the performer.
Politics
Politicians speaking before live audiences have less latitude to deal with hecklers. Legally, such conduct may constitute protected free speech. Strategically, coarse or belittling retorts to hecklers entails personal risk disproportionate to any gain. Some politicians, however, have been known to improvise a relevant and witty response despite these pitfalls. One acknowledged expert at this was Harold WilsonHarold Wilson
James Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, KG, OBE, FRS, FSS, PC was a British Labour Member of Parliament, Leader of the Labour Party. He was twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the 1960s and 1970s, winning four general elections, including a minority government after the...
, British Prime Minister in the 1960s:
- Heckler: (interrupting a passage in a Wilson speech about Labour's spending plans) What about VietnamVietnam WarThe Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
? - Wilson: The government has no plans to increase public expenditure in Vietnam.
- Heckler: Rubbish!
- Wilson: I'll come to your special interest in a minute, sir.
At a UK General Election hustings, Nancy Astor was heckled like this:
- Heckler: How many toes has a pig?
- Nancy Astor: (not missing a beat) Take your shoes off and count them.
In an era when it was common for rotten fruit and vegetables to be thrown at speakers, Australian Prime Minister Ben Chifley
Ben Chifley
Joseph Benedict Chifley , Australian politician, was the 16th Prime Minister of Australia. He took over the Australian Labor Party leadership and Prime Ministership after the death of John Curtin in 1945, and went on to retain government at the 1946 election, before being defeated at the 1949...
once exhorted his audience to lend him their ears, paraphrasing Mark Antony
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears is the first line of a famous and often-quoted speech by Mark Antony in the play Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare. It is taken from Act III, scene II.- Setting :...
. Immediately, a large cabbage
Cabbage
Cabbage is a popular cultivar of the species Brassica oleracea Linne of the Family Brassicaceae and is a leafy green vegetable...
landed on the stage. Chifley replied "I said your ears, Sir, not your head".
In 1992, then-Presidential candidate Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
was interrupted by Bob Rafsky, a member of the AIDS activism group ACT UP, who accused him of "dying of ambition to be president" during a rally. After becoming visibly agitated, Clinton took the microphone off the stand, pointed to the heckler and directly responded to him by saying, "[...] I have treated you and all of the other people who have interrupted my rallies with a hell of a lot more respect than you treated me. And it's time to start thinking about that!" Clinton was then met with raucous applause.
Audience control
One modern political approach to discourage heckling is to ensure that major events are given before a "tame" audience of sympathizers, or conducted to allow restrictions on who may remain on the premises (see also, astroturfingAstroturfing
Astroturfing is a form of advocacy in support of a political, organizational, or corporate agenda, designed to give the appearance of a "grassroots" movement. The goal of such campaigns is to disguise the efforts of a political and/or commercial entity as an independent public reaction to some...
). The downside is this may make heckling incidents even more newsworthy. This happened to Tony Blair
Tony Blair
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007...
during a photo op
Photo op
A photo op , short for photograph opportunity , is an opportunity to take a memorable and effective photograph of a politician, a celebrity, or a notable event...
visit to a hospital during the 2001 general election campaign, and again in 2003 during a speech.
In 2004, American Vice President Dick Cheney
Dick Cheney
Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney served as the 46th Vice President of the United States , under George W. Bush....
was interrupted mid-speech by Perry Patterson, a middle-aged mother in a pre-screened rally audience. After various supportive outbursts that were permitted ("Four more years," "Go Bush!"), Patterson uttered "No, no, no, no" and was removed from the speech area and told to leave. She refused, and was arrested for criminal trespass
Trespass
Trespass is an area of tort law broadly divided into three groups: trespass to the person, trespass to chattels and trespass to land.Trespass to the person, historically involved six separate trespasses: threats, assault, battery, wounding, mayhem, and maiming...
.
Later, in 2005, Cheney received some heckling that was broadcast during his trip to New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was a powerful Atlantic hurricane. It is the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. Among recorded Atlantic hurricanes, it was the sixth strongest overall...
ravaged the area. The heckling occurred during a press conference in Gulfport
Gulfport, Mississippi
Gulfport is the second largest city in Mississippi after the state capital Jackson. It is the larger of the two principal cities of the Gulfport-Biloxi, Mississippi Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is included in the Gulfport-Biloxi-Pascagoula, Mississippi Combined Statistical Area. As of the...
, Mississippi, in an area that was cordoned off for public safety reasons, and then further secured for the press conference. Nevertheless, emergency room physician Ben Marble got close enough to the proceedings and could be heard yelling, "Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney." Cheney laughed it off and continued speaking. The heckle was a reference to Cheney's use of the phrase the previous year, when during a heated exchange with Senator Patrick Joseph Leahy
Patrick Leahy
Patrick Joseph Leahy is the senior United States Senator from Vermont and member of the Democratic Party. He is the first and only elected Democratic United States Senator in Vermont's history. He is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Leahy is the second most senior U.S. Senator,...
, Vermont, he said "go fuck yourself" on the floor of the senate.
On 15 October 2005 the Scotsman reported "Iranian ambassador Dr Seyed Mohammed Hossein Adeli... speaking at the annual Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament conference... During his speech to the CND several people were told to leave the room following protests at Iran's human rights record. Several protesters shouted: "Fascists," at the ambassador and the organisers of the conference. Walter Wolfgang, the 82-year-old peace campaigner who was forced out of the Labour Party conference last month, was in the audience."
On Thursday, 20 April 2006, a heckler from the Falun Gong
Falun Gong
Falun Gong is a spiritual discipline first introduced in China in 1992 by its founder, Li Hongzhi, through public lectures. It combines the practice of meditation and slow-moving qigong exercises with the moral philosophy...
spiritual movement entered the US White House
White House
The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...
grounds as a reporter and interrupted a formal arrival ceremony for Chinese President
President of the People's Republic of China
The President of the People's Republic of China is a ceremonial office and a part of State organs under the National People's Congress and it is the head of state of the People's Republic of China . The office was created by the 1982 Constitution...
Hu Jintao
Hu Jintao
Hu Jintao is the current Paramount Leader of the People's Republic of China. He has held the titles of General Secretary of the Communist Party of China since 2002, President of the People's Republic of China since 2003, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission since 2004, succeeding Jiang...
. Moments into Mr Hu's speech at the event, Wang Wenyi, perched on the top tier of the stands reserved for the press, began screaming in English and Chinese: "President
President of the United States
The President of the United States of America is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president leads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces....
Bush
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
stop him. Stop this visit. Stop the killing and torture." President Bush later apologised to his guest.
On 9 September 2009, Representative Joe Wilson
Joe Wilson (U.S. politician)
Addison Graves Wilson, Sr., most commonly known as Joe Wilson , is the U.S. Representative for , serving since 2001. He is a member of the Republican Party...
(R-SC) shouted "you lie!" at President Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
after President Obama stated that his health care plan would not subsidize coverage for illegal immigrants during a speech
Barack Obama speech to joint session of Congress, September 2009
United States President Barack Obama discussed his plan for health care reform in a speech delivered to a joint session of the 111th United States Congress on September 9, 2009 at 8:00 PM . The speech was delivered to Congress on the floor of the chamber of the United States House of...
he was making to a joint session of Congress. Wilson later apologized for his outburst.
Sport
Hecklers can also appear at sporting events, and usually (but not always) direct their taunts at a visiting team. Fans of the Philadelphia EaglesPhiladelphia Eagles
The Philadelphia Eagles are a professional American football team based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They are members of the East Division of the National Football Conference in the National Football League...
American football
American football
American football is a sport played between two teams of eleven with the objective of scoring points by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone. Known in the United States simply as football, it may also be referred to informally as gridiron football. The ball can be advanced by...
team are notorious for heckling; among the most infamous incidents were booing
Booing
Booing is an act of showing displeasure for someone or something, generally an entertainer, by loudly yelling boo! or making other noises of disparagement, such as hissing. People may make hand signs at the entertainer, such as the thumbs down sign...
a performer dressed as Santa Claus
Santa Claus
Santa Claus is a folklore figure in various cultures who distributes gifts to children, normally on Christmas Eve. Each name is a variation of Saint Nicholas, but refers to Santa Claus...
in a halftime show in 1968, and cheering at the career-ending injury of visiting team player Michael Irvin
Michael Irvin
Michael Jerome Irvin is a former American football player for the Dallas Cowboys, and actor. He is also a former broadcaster for ESPN's NFL Countdown and currently an analyst for NFL Network. Irvin was self-nicknamed "The Playmaker" due to his penchant for making big plays in big games during his...
in 1999. Often, sports heckling will also involve throwing objects onto the field; this has led most sports stadiums to ban glass containers and bottlecaps. Another famous heckler is Robert Szasz
Robert Szasz
Robert Szasz, also known as The Happy Heckler, is a real estate developer and has been a well-known heckler at Tampa Bay Rays baseball games for several seasons....
, who regularly attends Tampa Bay Rays
Tampa Bay Rays
The Tampa Bay Rays are a Major League Baseball team based in St. Petersburg, Florida. The Rays are a member of the Eastern Division of MLB's American League. Since their inception in , the club has played at Tropicana Field...
baseball games and is known for loudly heckling one opposing player per game or series. Former Yugoslav
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....
football star Dejan Savićević
Dejan Savicevic
Dejan Savićević , is a Montenegrin former football player and is the president of the Montenegrin FA....
is involved in an infamous incident with a heckler in which during an interview, a man on the street is heard shouting off-camera: "You're a piece of shit!" Dejan berated the man, and went on to finish the interview, without missing a beat.
In English and Scottish football, heckling and swearing from the stands is common, and football chant
Football chant
A football chant or terrace chant, is a song or chant sung at association football matches. They can be historic, dating back to the formation of the club, adaptations of popular songs, or spontaneous reactions to events on the pitch. They are one of the last remaining sources of an oral folk song...
s such as who ate all the pies?
Who Ate All the Pies?
"Who Ate All the Pies?" is a football chant sung by fans in Britain. It is usually sung to the tune of "Knees Up Mother Brown" and is aimed at overweight footballers, officials or opposing supporters.-Background and origin:...
are known throughout most stadia.
Australian sporting audiences are known for creative heckling. Perhaps the most famous is Yabba
Yabba
Stephen Harold Gascoigne, better known as Yabba, was an Australian sports fan, remembered as a heckler at Sydney Cricket Ground cricket and rugby league games in the early part of the 20th century...
who had a grandstand at the Sydney Cricket Ground
Sydney Cricket Ground
The Sydney Cricket Ground is a sports stadium in Sydney in Australia. It is used for Australian football, Test cricket, One Day International cricket, some rugby league and rugby union matches and is the home ground for the New South Wales Blues cricket team and the Sydney Swans of the Australian...
named after him, and now a statue.
The sport of cricket
Cricket
Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the...
is particularly notorious for heckling between the teams themselves, which is known as sledging
Sledging (cricket)
Sledging is a term used in cricket to describe the practice whereby some players seek to gain an advantage by insulting or verbally intimidating the opposing player. The purpose is to try to weaken the opponent's concentration, thereby causing him to make mistakes or underperform...
.
At the NBA Drafts of recent years, many fans have gone with heckling ESPN
ESPN
Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, commonly known as ESPN, is an American global cable television network focusing on sports-related programming including live and pre-taped event telecasts, sports talk shows, and other original programming....
NBA analyst and host of, Quite Frankly with Stephen A. Smith
Quite Frankly with Stephen A. Smith
Quite Frankly with Stephen A. Smith was a nightly one-hour television show on ESPN2 hosted by Philadelphia Inquirer columnist and ESPN reporter Stephen A. Smith. The show premiered on August 1, 2005. It was cancelled on January 11, 2007 because of low ratings. Smith called the cancellation a...
, Stephen A. Smith
Stephen A. Smith
-Early years:Smith was raised in the Hollis neighborhood of the New York City borough of Queens. He lived with his parents and four older sisters.He attended Winston-Salem State University, a historically black university in Winston-Salem, North Carolina...
. Most notably, The Stephen A. Smith Heckling Society of Gentlemen heckles him with a sock puppet dubbed as Stephen A. himself.
Tennis fans are also fairly noted for heckling. Some may call out during a service point to distract either player. Another common heckle from tennis fans is cheering after a service fault, which is considered to be rude and unsporting.
In 2009, then Toronto Blue Jays
Toronto Blue Jays
The Toronto Blue Jays are a professional baseball team located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The Blue Jays are a member of the Eastern Division of Major League Baseball 's American League ....
outfielder Alex Rios
Alex Ríos
Alexis Israel "Alex" Ríos is a Puerto Rican-American Major League Baseball outfielder who plays for the Chicago White Sox. He bats and throws right-handed.-Professional career:...
was a victim of a heckling incident outside after a fund-raising event. The incident occurred after Rios declined to sign an autograph for a young fan, the same day he went 0 for 5 with 5 strikeouts in a game against the Los Angeles Angels. An older man yelled "The way you played today Alex, you should be lucky someone wants your autograph." Rios then replied with "Who gives a fuck," repeating it until being ushered into a vehicle. Rios did apologize the next day, but was eventually placed on waivers and claimed by the Chicago White Sox
Chicago White Sox
The Chicago White Sox are a Major League Baseball team located in Chicago, Illinois.The White Sox play in the American League's Central Division. Since , the White Sox have played in U.S. Cellular Field, which was originally called New Comiskey Park and nicknamed The Cell by local fans...
later that year.
Music
One of the most famous heckles of music history occurred at a Bob Dylan concert at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966. During a quiet moment in between songs, an audience member shouts very loudly and clearly, "Judas!" referencing Dylan's so called betrayal of folk music by "going electric." Dylan replied: "I don't believe you, you're a liar!" before telling his band to "Play it fucking loud!" They play an acidic version of "Like a Rolling Stone". This incident was captured on tape and the full concert was released as volume four of Dylan's Live Bootleg Series.Comedy
Many stand-up comedians devise a strategy for quashing such outbursts, usually by having a store of retorts on hand. The idea is to get the audience laughing at the interruption.See also
- ApplauseApplauseApplause is primarily the expression of approval by the act of clapping, or striking the palms of the hands together, in order to create noise. Audiences are usually expected to applaud after a performance, such as a musical concert, speech, or play...
- Audience Participation
- BooingBooingBooing is an act of showing displeasure for someone or something, generally an entertainer, by loudly yelling boo! or making other noises of disparagement, such as hissing. People may make hand signs at the entertainer, such as the thumbs down sign...
- Mystery Science Theater 3000Mystery Science Theater 3000Mystery Science Theater 3000 is an American cult television comedy series created by Joel Hodgson and produced by Best Brains, Inc., that ran from 1988 to 1999....
, a TV show built on humorous heckling. - Troll (Internet)Troll (Internet)In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response...
External links
- "Blair's Heckler States His Case" – BBC NewsBBC NewsBBC News is the department of the British Broadcasting Corporation responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs. The department is the world's largest broadcast news organisation and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online...
- "Why do people heckle?" – BBC News
- White, Michael. "A brief history of heckling", The GuardianThe GuardianThe Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, 28 April 2006.