I loved this.
I usually think hecklers are awful, and that we should never encourage heckling, but good comedians know what to do with these people. Good venues, like the comedy cellar, know how to deal with this, and they did the right thing.
But congrats to this lady. When places like this let Louis C.K. step on in un-announced, you don’t have much choice but to sit through it. (He is pretty good at that) So, I feel like heckling was a fine option here. The Comedy Cellar has to stop letting Louis on un-announced to workshop material, it isn’t fair to people that genuinely don’t want to see him perform.
From the way she tells it, he jokes about the bad year he had, which is a bit odd, considering the bad year he had was 100% his own damn fault.
“My boyfriend and I were just dead silent. But the rest of the crowd is—it’s thunderous applause, they are loving it, they laugh at all of his jokes,” Randall said. “As I’m sitting there, my heart’s racing. I am seething mad that this, at that point, had ruined my night. I was pissed off that I had to sit there and see someone that I don’t support have a platform like that.”
At some point, Randall said, C.K.'s set took a sexual turn: He started joking about “putting thermometers up your asshole” and “eight-year-old girls thinking about having sex.” He paused to check his notes, the room fell silent, and—after growing “more and more enraged” at C.K.—Randall decided she had to say something.
“I am four feet away from him, and I yell: ‘Get your dick out!’” Randall said. “He looks at me and makes direct eye contact and says, ‘What?’ And I say: ‘Get your fucking dick out.’”
So good.
Still, Randall said, it’d be nice to have a little more of a heads-up before an alleged sexual abuser takes the stage. When a comedian like C.K. plays a surprise gig at the Cellar, Randall said, folks like her can find themselves subjected to “nonconsensual performances”—forced to play audience to someone they don’t want to support.
“If Louis C.K. wants to keep performing, if he wants to give people notice, that’s his right as a human being. Be my guest,” Randall said. “But I want him to know—and that’s why I said what I did—you might take this platform, but it is not going to be a platform that is unobstructed. People are going to say what they have to say to make it hard.”
Exactly. Guy is free to perform for whoever will show up.
Venues are whipping out the big red-headed dick to an unsuspecting audience. Isn’t exactly what got Louis C.K. in trouble in the first place?