I hate to say it, but the biggest laugh in James Acaster’s new special, Hecklers Welcome, comes from a heckle. Obviously. The show opens with the British comic naming his house rules, which amount to allowing all forms of audience disruption (except if it's, you know, actually offensive). Anyone who knows Acaster—I know him from his very popular food podcast, Off Menu, which he co-hosts with fellow comedian Ed Gamble—knows he hates a heckle, so to build an entire show around it is kind of a big move. Being the pro writer that he is, the start of the show is a rundown of the various formative heckles of his career, the first of which arrived very early on during what he calls the worst gig he’s ever done. "Does your mother know you're up this late?" was the trigger, to which a young Acaster apparently responded that his mother was dead (she wasn't)—and that she had died really recently. Which silenced the heckler, obviously. As well as the rest of the audience, for the entire show.
Fast-forward about 30 minutes into this latest special, and the punchline to another Acaster joke is a guy yelling to a bunch of bullies that their parents don't love them. To which one audience member pipes up: "My parents are dead!" Acaster is so impressed by the callback that he says: "Lovely to have a heckler in here who appreciates structure." But then a few moments later, another audience member adds: "... by suicide." Acaster asks his name (it's Richard, because this is England). Then Acaster says, completely deadpan: "Richard, what is wrong with you, mate?"
That's what gets the biggest laugh of the night.
To be fair to the audience, Hecklers Welcome isn't Acaster’s best work. From the title and the setup, you expect there will be quite a bit of intervention, and maybe that was what he was expecting, too. But there isn't a ton. "Come on, Kermit," someone yells at the start about his green sweatsuit. I imagine the producers chose the best interactions from a number of tour dates, so it says a lot that even those can't quite float the concept. Acaster's energy and rhythm are all right, but the material is just not quite there—it neither really hangs together nor is it that funny. There is a good bit where he talks about the tonal shift of his shows—from wholesome to maniacal—when he was heckled in the past. He also introduces the theme of the little boy inside him that he's trying to protect on stage, his explanation for why he hates hecklers (there's a nice return to this at the end, a cute little valentine to his partner in which he says they get along because all of their younger selves protect each other). But the show is mostly jokes that don't quite hit—including an extended one about a pet dog named Minney he got as a kid that his dad named after some other little kid, Steve Minney. I wonder if Acaster not only thought he would have more to work with by opening the floor to his hecklers, but was also a little thrown off by this relational change to his audience. I'm not sure, but I know he's usually a lot better than this (check out his previous special, Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999, for one example).
I think this special in particular didn't land for me because of the NUMBER of crowd work clips that have started to proliferate in my Instagram feed. I get served a lot of sketches, which I love, but the standup clips have become a chore because all of this crowd work, which is often not very good. It's terrible when every single person you know would probably have a better comeback than the professional comedian you are watching. Jessy Kirson, for instance, riffs with a girl in the audience who is liberal and is there with her conservative parents. The punchline is Kirson telling the parents the girl is trans (she isn't); Jeff Arcuri, meanwhile, is surprised by his own timing when he asks the audience if they have hairy backs (I don't know) and one guy goes: "I'm Indian, I'm hairy," to which Arcuri replies, "You're Indian, you're hairy. I'm Italian, I'm Jeff." I mean, at least he cracks himself up; Phil Hanley does another one in which there's a whole back-and-forth about an audience member thinking he referred to her as a guy and then he clarifies it was the guy next to her and then he asks him how long he's been dating her and he says it's his sister and Hanley says—yeah, you probably guessed it—"How long you been dating your sister?"
I can't do any more, it's killing me just to write them down. People have got to be laughing at this stuff because it's an audience member getting teased in front of them, right? But I'm not there, so I don't have that investment in the room, which makes it all kind of BRUTAL to watch. It also feels like these comics are leaning so hard on crowd work because they don't have much else to offer. But judging by the ubiquity and popularity of these clips, I apparently have this all wrong—I've fallen into the same prejudiced trap that keeps getting older comics.
Matt Rife, that bro-y comedian who sells out arenas and looks like he was manufactured by a Chad machine, became TikTok famous about six years ago off his crowd work—I mean, fine, he's quick, but the recurring Nazi punchlines also seem a little OVERLY available to him—and explains that these clips allow you to promote your gig online without ruining it for anyone who actually pays to come. "What I love about crowd work is it doesn't burn anything, and it's new for every single show," Rife told Forbes earlier this year. "It's exciting for me. And I take great pride in that because so many comedians don't switch up their set at all." Despite crowd work being leveraged in the past by older comics like Todd Barry, who in 2014 released The Crowd Work Tour, Isobel Lewis at The Guardian connects the recent surge to the front-facing comedy that proliferated during lockdown. Newer comedians also say they are expected to produce content incessantly, and releasing audience interactions allows them to do that without burning material or burning out. Saturday Night Live writer and comic Vanessa Jackson also theorized to The New York Times that the response to crowd work is generational: "The younger crowds, I think, enjoy authentic content more than something that's crafted."
Clearly it's come back around again where someone like Acaster actually crafts it into a show (he's not the only one: Andrew Schulz, Ian Bagg, Moshe Kasher and Judah Friedlander have also released crowd work specials over the past bunch of years). I get the impression that if any of Acaster's audience interactions had been clipped into my Instagram feed, I would have been a lot less likely to watch his special. And maybe there's a part of him that knows that, because he's been there himself. Toward the end of the set, Acaster says: "If you haven't enjoyed the show tonight, take some consolation in knowing that it used to be a lot worse." I mean, that's funny.
