In the cut throuat world of rock, things don't always go to plan, in contrast, stand-up comedy usually goes hand in hand with the heckles and audience participation. Lets first look at the way Richard Herring skillfully deals with a hostile member of the audience at a comedy gig...
And the man was right, stabbing is no joke, even if someone gets stabbed in the cock it isn't funny, only after time has healed mental and physical wounds would someone be able to laugh about a situation like that. But Herring dealt with it well in spite of being riled.
Chad Poodleman Kroeger from amazing and emotive post grunge act Nickelback didn't fare so well against a portuguese crowd inexplicably bored by 'Rock Star' which is incidentally and unrelatedly used in a sofa advert for DFS. None of richard Herrings jokes are used in a DFS advert.
Rock stars have a lot more difficulty dealing with rowdy, unresponsive and downright hostile crowds. and it seems the bigger you get commercially the easier it gets to storm off stage.
However, lets take it one stage further World leaders have been known to fail even more substantially in dealing with hostile crowds and hecklers in the audience, lets look at this heckle on president JFK by Lee harvey Oswald...
Okay, you could say that there is a big difference between being heckled by words, than by missiles, and even from their being heckled by a man with a sniper rifle, but they are all intended to hurt, so really there is no difference at all. To be fair to Kennedy he didn't storm off stage but his head did pretty much explode, which isn't the best way to deal with a heckler.
Recently Kings of Leon stormed off stage after Pigeons shat all over them at a gig. Morrissey stormed off at a festival in california earlier in the year after smelling meat cooking at a hotdog stand. These are issues not even caused by the audience and yet stages get stormed off by these primadonas. Yes I have run out of sympathy for the Kings of Leon, I sometimes swim in birdshit for fun and I have never stormed out of my own living room because someone in the kitchen was cooking hotdogs. I have standards which I expect Morrissey and Kings of Leon to be up to. in short they can shape up or fuck the fuck off out of here.
on the other hand there is Justin Bieber, by leaping to the defence of pop rodent and pre-pubescant autotunesmith Justin Bieber, my street cred lies in tatters but partly I am doing this because I will ultimately have easier access to video footage of him getting a bottle bounced off his floppy haired head. This aside, Bieber finished the gig, not stomping off stage in a strop. Maybe he is young and inexperienced and will become jaded enough to do so one day... maybe he thinks too much of his fans to do so. Don't get me wrong I think he's shit and a cunt and I wish it was a buttlet instead of a bottle but fuck he handles it well... maybe he needs to work on his heckler putdowns, maybe he needs to become a standup where he only has to deal with drunk people throwing words instead of insane 14 year olds jacked up on teen hormones throwing bottles... but here you go.
People on any kind of stage whether a gig stage, a comedy club stage or even the world stage all have to deal with occupational hazards like hecklers. I got a papercut from some stationary today you don't see anyone writing blogs about that, mainly because its boring. whereas an argument, a physical assault and a murder are much more fun to read about.
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