‘Hecklers Welcome’ Challenges James Acaster to Embrace Even His Rowdiest Fans

It feels uncontroversial to say that, between the time COVID lockdowns were ordered and the time restrictions were lifted, a lot of us forgot how to behave in public. Customers are surly with cashiers. Passengers won’t follow instructions on planes. Audience members fail to remain quiet during live shows — or do they? If James Acaster’s new special, Hecklers Welcome, is anything to go by, maybe a comedy audience is only as obnoxious as the comic they’re seeing, even when said comic explicitly gives them license to pop off.

Acaster has been prominent in British comedy for around a decade and has already racked up a season of Taskmaster, his own panel show (Hypothetical), several podcasts (most notably Off Menu With Ed Gamble and James Acaster) and a few books, among many other credits. Hecklers Welcome, premiering on HBO November 23rd, is his third special. No one who performs live wants their show to be a lawless free-for-all, but Acaster seems to feel he has taken that notion to extremes. By his own admission, in text screens that preface Hecklers Welcome, he has “spent his entire career trying to meticulously control every single detail in every single show he’s ever done.” On this tour, he “has to accept whatever happens,” which could include audience members talking to each other, looking at their phones, not laughing or (of course) heckling.

Acaster has spoken about tough periods he’s experienced with his mental health, so it’s not a shock when nearly the first thing he says in Hecklers Welcome is that lockdown taught him that he doesn’t like doing comedy. “You know the reason none of you do stand-up comedy? (Beat) Same.” The desire to be onstage and the stress of actually doing it are warring impulses Acaster traces through pivotal moments, starting back in his very early life: The story of his grandmother’s primary-school visit to demonstrate her spinning wheel to his class, for example, will probably be an origin story you’ve never heard any other comic recount. 

So given the anxiety Acaster has experienced over his 16 years doing comedy professionally, it makes sense that he’s tried to manage crowds as much as possible. Many stories are about the absurdity of attempting it, as when an event for Roald Dahl Day found him sneering at the insufficiently attentive audience at a reading he was doing — for children. So it doesn’t take a psychologist, or Acaster’s own therapist (who gets name-checked several times), to understand why Acaster might think this is a good solution: If he can let go of the need to control every aspect of his shows — especially the hundreds of individual human beings who attend them — maybe he will rediscover the joy his need for dominance is choking out of the job.

People do, of course, heckle. But Acaster has cultivated a particular kind of fan with chunks like, famously, his attack on Ricky Gervais’s transphobic material.

So the harshest thing anyone in this crowd tries to throw at Acaster is to call him Kermit. “You’re right,” says Acaster, looking down at his outfit of a matching solid green hoodie and sweatpants. “I do look like Kermit the Frog.” “Would you like a heckle from up here?” another patron asks later. “I’d love the most polite person in the world to do it,” Acaster gamely replies. 

Toward the end of the set, after a story about being on a train car boarded by a group of very confrontational teen boys, an audience member yells a line that Acaster has to admit is a great callback to one of his opening bits, and the only reason he could have been mad about it is if he’d thought to make it his own tag, which she’d enthusiastically and accidentally stepped on. To be amused and not irate: that’s growth. (The screener didn’t come with any closed captions, including the lines yelled out by audience members who don’t have mics, so I couldn’t entirely make out what I gathered was an unexpectedly dark joke about suicide; I hope the actual aired version subtitles the heckles since, you know, they’re kind of a major feature of the special.)

Interstitial flashes hint at chaos that went on at some shows but wasn’t centered in the special’s final edit: someone in a Party Gator costume hyping up the crowd; Acaster’s performance space being flooded with plastic balls. But if these were intended to make Acaster’s audience rowdier — or rowdy at all — it doesn’t seem to have worked. Acaster may clearly remember every audience member who’s ever stared at him stone-faced, ruined a set by yelling at him or been a child insufficiently interested in TV personality James Acaster reading to him from George’s Marvelous Medicine. But based on the evidence of this particular special, Acaster’s fans are generally warm, respectful and surprisingly collaborative. 

In a comedy environment where the loudest, dumbest and most hateful voices tend to carry the furthest, Hecklers Welcome pushes back, as Acaster makes what could have been someone else’s provocative gimmick into an unexpectedly life-affirming hour that deftly sidesteps self-congratulation.