Frank Skinner Autobiography Read Online Free

mouthy by this stage, but I was having a good time. There was some heckling but, after being a bit scared of hecklers in my very early days, I was now almost encouraging their intervention. It got me thinking on my feet.
    There is something of a myth about heckling. It’s often suggested that every comedy club has a throng of hecklers making clever, witty remarks that the poor comic is scarcely able to compete with. In fact, I’ve been doing and watching stand-up comedy for fourteen years and in that time I might have heard three or four funny heckles. Mostly it’s drunks shouting ‘Fuck off’ or just making incomprehensible noises and then falling over.
    Perhaps the best heckle I ever received was at a club called the Red Rose in Finsbury Park, North London. There was a blind man, a regular punter, who was in one night just as I was beginning a twenty-minute set. About two minutes in, the blind man shouted, ‘Get off, you Brummie bastard. (Pause) Has he gone yet?’ I prided myself on being pretty quick with hecklers but a blind man is a tricky opponent. I considered engaging him in friendly conversation for a few minutes whilst, at the same time, holding my hands in double V-signs about six inches from his face, but I wasn’t sure the crowd would go with me on this. I decided against shouting, ‘Well, at least I can fucking see’, for the same reason. In the end I silenced him by trumping his ‘You can’t attack me because I’m disabled’ card by suggesting to him that he was only against me because I was Pakistani. He looked genuinely ashamed.
    Verbal jousting with the disabled is, generally speaking, thin ice for a stand-up. I once did a gig at a theatre in Cambridge and had cause, in an improvised moment, to start talking about those people you see who are bent over double with hunched backs and walk along staring at the ground. A man at the back shouted, ‘It’s called ankylotic spondylitis.’ Well, nobody likes a smart-Alec so I asked him how come he knew so much about it. ‘I’ve got it,’ he shouted in reply. An uneasy murmur started in the crowd. ‘Well . . . ,’ I began, fumbling for a way out of this comedy cul-de-sac, ‘ermm . . . well at least you’ll probably never stand in dog shit again.’ The crowd took a second or two to consider this and then, thank God, applauded. I’m not really sure why. Were they being heartless in taking my side against the woefully stooped heckler just because I’d bounced back with a cheeky response, or did they honestly feel that I had shown true compassion by identifying, for the man, a silver lining in his dark, dark cloud?
    I have to admit I don’t always find a happy way through these dark patches that sometimes occur during audience banter. I was performing at a club in Manchester and casually asked a guy if he had any kids. ‘Not alive,’ he said. I never like to just ignore an audience remark but this one floored me so I just carried on as if it hadn’t happened. Even Homer nods.
    So, it’s very late at the Comedy Store, I’m on stage, the crowd is lively and David Baddiel, still a stranger to me, is in the audience. Then came the heckle. Now, a lot of comics have set responses to heckles. These, as I’m sure you know, are called put-down lines. It’s not really an activity I approve of because the same put-down lines get shared around and I think it’s really important that a comic treats each heckle as an individual case. Otherwise every turn is doing ‘Don’t drink on an empty head’, ‘Isn’t it a shame when cousins marry?’ or ‘Do your gums bleed once a month?’ regardless of the heckle, and the spontaneity, the challenge of dealing with the unexpected, is lost. So, I’m still on stage at the Comedy Store and the heckle comes: ‘Don’t I remember you from medical