Adam Carolla Tells His Craziest Stories About Being Heckled
Adam Carolla was on the Ranker Podcast and during the episode, and ahead of his live show at Moore Theater in Seattle on April 23 (you can buy tickets here), Adam told some great stories about some crazy incidents.
Over the years, he's encountered a few hecklers during his live shows. While the moments are few and far between, that doesn't mean that when it does happen, that it isn't annoying and distracting. Every comedian has to face unruly crowdmembers from time to time, but it's how you respond to the hecklers that becomes part of the show. Hopefully Adam won't have to face hecklers when he returns to Seattle, one of his favorite cities on April 23.The Man Show Audience Member Who Wouldn't Put His Keys Away
From Carolla, "We were doing a Man Show episode once and we used to serve beer to the audience, which was good, but it has its downside as well, like this one time a guy would not shut up in the front row. Jimmy Kimmel just literally walked off the stage and got the guy in a headlock during the shooting (of the show). He just couldn't take it. You don't realize, like you know in life when you're trying to answer a text and your kid and your friend is bugging you and you're perturbed and are like, 'Just give me a second here.'
When you're up on-stage and you're trying to go through a monologue or read some cue cards or something and somebody is just chatting and jingling their keys. . .it's insanely distracting! And you get insanely angry. You're trying to hit your mark, you know you're being filmed, and you're trying to do all this timing that you rehearsed and everything, then somebody is just jingling those keys off to the side.
Nobody else in the place hears it, but you lock in on it like a laser beam and you're thinking that you want to kill them. You're simultaneously telling jokes and wanting to kill this person. At a certain point, you just go off. That's it. And you spin off like Jimmy did."The Crazy Drunk Chick at Cobb's Comedy Club
"This is another one where a drunk chick went insane and she was eventually wrestled out of the place to the sidewalk. . . where she bit the bouncer in the calf. I remember she was rolling around on the sidewalk and she literally almost flew out into the street and was almost hit by a bus.
Everyone thinks that there's like this movie heckle and they're used to watching Eddie Murphy doing his heckling up on stage in the Nutty Professor or something. Most of the heckles are 'Where'd ya get your boots?' or the person won't stop talking, like what happened to Louis C.K. Most heckles are incoherent drunk people talking too loud or talking to you like you're alone in a room with them. She wouldn't even shut up. There's a difference between heckling and interrupting. We mistake it with an interruption and a thought. It's usually just interruption.
Oh and the chick's boyfriend ended up standing in my dressing room 20 minutes later. That was awesome. He was like, 'They arrested my girlfriend and they're taking her to precinct,' and I was like, "I know.' He said, 'She didn't do anything!' and I was like 'I was on-stage while she was heckling me for 20 minutes and then I saw her physically fight the security guard and cops out on the sidewalk and bite one of them on the calf.' So I'd say she was involved in some degree."The Angry Couple in Ventura County
"We were in Ventura, CA doing a show and we had a couple heckling, and I think it was a crazy woman of color and her boyfriend, who was not, but he was crazy, but not of color. She was going berzerk and she was blacked out, pardon the pun, and out of her mind. At a certain point, I think I just said to her as I've said to many people in many stages and many situations in life, 'Look, you can sit down right now, stop what you're doing, and we can just move on with our lives and this show. Or you can keep doing what you're doing and be forcibly removed from this club by security.' That moment was that window.
This is something I'm very interested in terms of the human condition. Like, at a certain point, when you go, 'You know what we gotta do? We gotta go and punch that cop's horse.' Alright, so I'm drunk, but I have a choice: not punch the cop's horse and continue to sit here or punch the cop's horse and end up on my face with zip ties and a boot on the back of my neck. So many people make the wrong choice.
I literally said to her that she was standing on that edge here and looking off, and she didn't have to step off. We're on terra firma - I think that may have been her name. You could simply sit back down in your chair and we can forget this happened and we can move on. She was having none of it.
She was torn out of the place."