Hecklers Quotes

[To the heckler who said, 'If you were my wife I'd poison you':] No, you wouldn't. I'd do it myself.

You can spend your time on stage pleasing the heckler in the back, or you can devote it to the audience that came to hear you perform.

Humor heals the heckler.

I don't get many hecklers now but answering them is an art form in itself.

I'll get to the force field of this hostility, why it's there, why the rage is in any of us, why the trash takes place, whether or not it's between me and a couple of hecklers in the audience or between this country and another nation, the rage

There have been some very extreme hecklers in audiences whose bile was so hateful and so meant that it would be a bit frightening to think that all I'm doing is jokes and yet someone hates me that much.

I think a theater show is a pure version of me doing my material. The theater crowd is a bit more polite, there really aren't hecklers, and there are a lot of people there to see me, and they're excited about the jokes and hanging out with me for a show.

I always find a couple of hecklers... I'll kinda look at them, stare at 'em, and let them know I can't be stopped.

There are two kinds of hecklers: the destructive and constructive hecklers.

I love hecklers. They remind you that you are a comedian.

If Mandela were a comedian, I bet he would never get mad at a heckler, he'd give him or her a hug.

I loathe hecklers. I haven't got a good syllable to say. When you come out of the club circuit and into the concert hall, they should be gone. There's an element of manners that should tell you that the ticket is dear and it's a different venue.

I just stopped liking basketball. And then you dribbling down the court and having the owner like cuss at you and call you an idiot. I didn't even look forward to coming to the games, and if the owner [Donald Sterling] came to the game, I definitely was not gonna have a good game because it was just like, how do you play when the main heckler in the gym is the owner of the team, and he's telling you how much he hates you and calling out your name?

On stage it's just a wild setting - we have a big screen - hecklers, I'm fighting. It's entertainment, but I want to pierce [the audience's] souls and have them think about what I have to say.

I got into a brawl one night in a saloon in Greenwich Village. Elia Kazan, a great director, saw me put out a couple of hecklers and figures there was some Big Daddy in me, just lyin' dormant. And out it came. People still do call me Big Daddy, but to me, inside, I'm no Big Daddy at all.

I would say, as far as heckling, there's benign and there's malignant; like tumors man. Sometimes you get really nice hecklers. I'd say percentage-wise it's only about 10 to 20 percent the whole year.

I talk kinda slow, especially for the Northeast, so it was a way to beat [would-be hecklers] to the punch.

When hecklers stand up, I get a mental jump for joy. It gives me something to get my teeth into - and the audiences love it.

One day while Lloyd George was making a political speech before a big crowd, a heckler yelled, "Wait a minute, Mr. George. Isn't it true your grandfather used to peddle tinware around here in an oxcart hauled by a donkey?" Lloyd George replied, "I digress just a moment and thank the gentlemen for calling that to my attention. It is true, my dear old grandfather used to peddle tinware with an old cart and a donkey. As a matter of fact, after this meeting is over, if my friend will come with me, I will show him that old cart, but I never knew until this minute what became of the ass."

My timing is so precise, a heckler would have to make an appointment just to get a word in.

Even if you get a joke right you've done it a thousand times and sometimes there's times where it just doesn't work or someone doesn't agree with you. And I want to show that. I have had more hecklers because that's part of comedy is arguments, you know?

In the old days, that was my ad-lib for hecklers in the joints I worked. It stuck with me. I hardly say it now, say, to fans, even though people do send me hockey pucks.

I think my comedy, the put-downs I do to hecklers, are the accumulated bitterness of years of people feeling that it's perfectly acceptable to make a comment on your appearance when they don't even know you.

There's two types of hecklers. If someone says something really funny it's normally them heckling as part of the show. They're trying to add onto one of your jokes. If someone says something really funny, I've never seen a comedian abuse them, you always sort of tip your hat a little bit if they nail it.