As the comments to this post indicates, it turns out that everyone has heard the Bono heckle before but no one could quite place it. Now, via the sitemeter, I discover that someone was recounting the incident in an article in the Guardian way back in the middle of August during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Though a few of the stories recounted have done the rounds many times before, you should check out the article as there are some choice heckles that I hadn't heard before. I especially liked the following:
David Baddiel was telling a story about a comedian floundering on stage, when someone shouted: "Nobody likes you. Surely you remember that from school."
Best political heckle I ever heard was probably the one from a meeting at the Bread and Roses pub in Clapham a few years back at the launch of the local Socialist Alliance. I think it was local Millie, Steve Nally, doing the sales pitch at the end of the meeting where he was doing his best to get attendees to both sign up and empty their pockets, and during one particular rhetorical flourish he declaimed: 'I can't promise you revolution . . . ', only to met with the rapid response of 'Oh, I'm leaving then'. from a voice at the back of the room. The room dissolved into laughter.
The best put down of a heckler I've ever read about was an SPGBer on the platform at Hyde Park who was heckled by one of the passing wits who took exception to the socialist argument that capitalism was based on the exploitation:
Heckler:"That's bullshit. I'm a self-made man."SPGBer:"Well, you obviously misread the instructions."
5 comments:
Those are some really classy heckles - the Baddiel one comes tops for me cos I hate the wanker!
I hate him more.
scientists on heckling: http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816.1976.tb01307.x
The hypothesis that responding to hecklers would produce more agreement with a speaker than not responding, stemmed from commodity theory (Brock, 1968). One hundred twenty-one introductory speech students participated in what they were told was a "speech workshop" (not a psychology experiment). Two types of responding to live hecklers were used: In one, the speaker responded in a calm, relevant manner; in the other, she responded in an upset, irrelevant manner. In a third condition, the speaker did not respond to the heckles. There were two additional conditions: One in which the speaker responded to interruptions, and a further control in which there were neither heckles nor interruptions. In these five conditions, the speaker either argued for or against the audience's position. Regardless of whether or not the speaker's position agreed with the audience's, upset-irrelevant responding decreased the speaker's persuasiveness over making no response, while calm-relevant responding tended to enhance persuasiveness. Finally, in agreement with all other empirical studies, it was clearly shown that heckling, whether responded to or not, did not improve the speaker's effectiveness.
Was that one of Pik Smeet's?
btw, I thought you might have commented on the Socialist Alliance meeting heckle. Remember, we were both at the meeting. ;-)
Billy Connolly once answered a heckler: "Do I come to your work & tell you how to sweep up?"
Post a Comment