CHAPTER 114

Andy de la Tour: You’re actually told, you’re under instruction, if you heckle you get thrown out, and it’s quite aggressive that. Well, okay, but my experience of New York comedy by that time was that nobody heckles anyway. This is the most well-behaved audiences I’ve ever been to. That’s one of the things people asked me when I came back, about it somehow being really, really difficult. The audiences were, I would say exclusively, every single space that I went to and the ones that I played were fantastically well behaved. Nobody heckled and shouted and stuff. Just nobody did that. You know, it was great. It’s as it should be I suppose, but there was no sort of real danger. But I was also very … I’m remembering now. I was very disappointed by some of the stuff. That was a general observation about the stand-up in New York, but it’s probably true of the stand-up in Britain, is that it’s very mainstream, you know, it’s become very, very mainstream. I mean, not overtly reactionary and racist, although some of it was and I was shocked by that. I think I mention that in the book.

Author: You do, and I wanted to ask you about that.

Andy: When I mention racist stereotypes, I was quite … As I’m talking now it’s coming back to me. I was quite shocked about this whole thing about Mexicans and all that stuff. I thought, ‘Oh, here we go.’ We don’t have ‘lazy Mexicans’ in the UK. So this vein of humour seemed to be acceptable. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s the situation is it now?’ That the, as it were, so-called alternative scene has become the mainstream like it has in Britain of course years ago. So this stuff is now totally okay, to go on about this stuff and nobody would heckle? I was surprised. I mean, there was one particular comedian, I think he was the compere, who was coming out with this stuff, and I didn’t heckle, but I tell you, I came bloody close to it. I came bloody close to it because I thought, ‘This is really out of order this stuff.’ Which is interesting because that touches into what you’re talking about, what’s allowable and what’s not allowable. Well, one of the points I’ve made to people in the past, and I believe this, is that no-platforming comics to me is not acceptable, but if you don’t like what they say, then heckle. Exercise your right to free speech to interrupt their right to free speech and see how they handle it.

Author: Well they get thrown out at the Comedy Cellar.

Andy: Well I think there’s a really important distinction between that, because I think a comic should be allowed to say what he or she wants to say on stage. And that would include Bernard Manning. But their right to say that doesn’t take away the right of an audience to respond to that if they don’t like it. So to me, that’s where I think free speech works. And in the stand-up comedy scene that’s how it works. I don’t think any comic should be banned. I don’t think a comic should be blacklisted. I mean, for example, to go off the subject a bit, although it isn’t really, the whole alternative comedy scene in the early Eighties arose out of a cultural reaction against the likes of Bernard Manning and co. That was a reaction against that kind of comedy. And the way you deal with that kind of comedy is you create your own. You create your own mores, you create your own comedy style, you create your own comedy in all the sense that means, but that’s not calling for people to be banned or blacklisted because they’re racist, you know. You answer it by dealing with it. You say, ‘This guy says this stuff, it isn’t funny, but what we do is funny and we’ll win the audience, and we’ll win a bigger audience.’

[After twenty-eight minutes]

Andy: Don’t stand up in a public space and mouth off about something, it doesn’t matter what your politics are, and then have a hissy fit if people answer back and say, ‘Well you’re not supposed to do that, you’re just supposed to pay and listen.’ You’re up there showing off, you are, you’re up there showing off, because you’re up there telling the world, ‘This is what I think and this is worth listening to.’ So if somebody in the audience thinks, ‘This is actually not worth listening to, blah blah blah,’ then you have to deal with that. So if you’re going to come out with material which you know is controversial, because most stand-up comedians, even if they’re right-wing, are not complete idiots, if you’re going to come up with stuff which you know is controversial, and somebody stands up and says something, then you have to have an answer to that. You have to deal with that. That’s their right and so you have to deal with it. And if you’re very good you deal with it and you come out on top because you have the microphone of course. So if people come out with some stuff and some person stands up and says, ‘You’re a racist’, then that person gets thrown out, it’s completely out of order in my book, completely out of order.