On April Fool’s Day, something happened that should have been a prank but wasn’t. A video surfaced on YouTube of a female comedian on stage at the PIT in NYC, getting treated to a barage of yelling, name calling and heckling at for almost 7 minutes. When I first watched it, I was apalled for a few different reasons. First of all, the video is just plain to watch. And secondly, I knew everyone in that room. Almost every one of the hateful voices in the video were friends of mine. This was taking place in my own back yard, yet I wasn’t there that night.
“Did she deserve this?” I asked everyone. Most of them, who were there, said yes. Apparently, she had sat in the audience, before getting up to perform, and ruined the sets of multiple comedians with loud talking and obnoxious heckling. Yet, I couldn’t make myself believe that. I hate that kind of negativity and cannot justify dishing out that kind of torture for any reason. So, though I didn’t know her, I reached out to the comic in question on Facebook and invited her to the show/open mic that I produce called The World’s Tiniest to apologize publicly. We also filmed it and posted it as a response to the original video (which has been taken down but had almost 70,000 views). I felt it was important that she be given an opportunity to say she was sorry, if she wanted to, and thought it would bring the whole fiasco to a positive conclusion.
What the video doesn’t show is that the evening was an absolute success. About 30 – 40 comics came out, everything was water under the bridge (actually, more like large quantities of beer under the bridge) and the postive energy in the room was palpable.
I have to say, although I thought this whole thing was terrible and I’m glad it reached a happy end, the debate it sparked within the comedy community was almost worth it. Hopefully, we can move on now, but for more info, the story was featured on several insider comedy blogs and websites, many worth reading. Here are a few links:
Huffington Post: Heckler Gets Destroyed – Open Mic Gets Nasty
The FW: Rude Heckler Takes The Stage, Gets Heckled By Other Comedians
