Behind the jeers

Why do they heckle? It's a way to get into the game

Woe to the Fighting Camel who wears intricately cut, extra-mutton choppy sideburns. "Hey, Quinn," shouts Reed Johnson, an N.C. State baseball fan who takes pride in his heckling of the opposition. "The '90s called. They want their sideburns back."

To his credit, Campbell University pitcher Quinn LeSage never acknowledges the continuous heckles, even as the Wolfpack bats knock him out of the game on a recent Saturday in Raleigh. That's not to say he can't hear the razzing from Johnson and his buddies. At Doak Field the fans are close, and Johnson and company sit just above the opponent's dugout. It would be impossible for him not to.

And that, Johnson says later, is why they heckle. The guys do their homework, digging around the Internet to find personal details about the objects of their verbal scorn.

"When you hear your girlfriend's name yelled out when you're trying to pitch, it's got to be nerve-wracking," says Johnson, who hopes the razzing gives N.C. State an advantage on the field.

Although its origins can be traced to the first guy who had one too many, heckling recently has taken a more visible role in our culture. From Michael Richards' career train wreck to the proliferation of Internet message boards built around anonymous heckling, the deed is receiving more attention, which in turn creates more heckling. Comedian Jamie Kennedy is looking for a distributor for his new documentary, "Heckler," in which he invites his Internet hecklers to face-to-face chats.

Most people who attend a ball game or a comedy show sit quietly with their friends and/or beverages, eyes toward the participants and lips together. Then there are people like Reed Johnson and his friends. Heckling, says Johnson, a 21-year-old N.C. State student, is the epitome of fan interaction.

"It's like sitting around and telling your friends jokes, but there's a lot of people there."

Giving something back

Sometimes, when jokes are what the audience paid to hear, heckling can get you heckled in return.

Kier, a one-named comedian appearing this weekend at Goodnights in Raleigh, will engage in what he calls verbal jujitsu, if necessary.

He divides hecklers into a couple of categories. There's the guy (and it's almost always a guy) who thinks he's funny and should be on stage. Then there's the audience member who isn't necessarily trying to compete with the comedy, but rather has a controlling nature and feels compelled to chime in.

Recently at a private gig in Atlanta, a woman in the audience kept talking during the pauses in Kier's jokes, just before the punchline. "I told her, these jokes are never going to work if you say something every time I leave a space there." Then he asked her name, and she told him.

Then came his heckle: "You've got control issues, don't you?"

And the audience, filled with people who knew her, roared. "I'm a psychologist," Kier told her. "I'm here to identify the problems."

Kier, 49, estimates that he gets heckled during about 75 percent of his performances. Much of that is benign and nondisruptive. But maybe a third of those hecklers are out to do battle, and then maybe 10 percent of those people are in need of behavior modification. He handles these people with fake sincerity, telling them that he's trying to help. I'm not saying I want you to be quiet, he says, but these people have paid good money to see me perform.

"I've seen almost every one of my shows. I don't care."

It usually shuts them up.

After years of being heckled, Kier said he would never heckle someone else. If a comedian heckled another comedian?