Mick Hartley

A depressing review of a comedy gig from Dominic Cavendish in the Telegraph:

Sunday night’s performance by American stand-up Reginald D Hunter of his new Edinburgh Festival set ranks without doubt as the most unpleasant comedy gig I’ve ever attended. This came down to five minutes midway in when a theatre full of people erupted in vocal animosity at an Israeli couple who had briefly heckled Hunter.

Hunter, 55, had made a crude point, rather than an especially sophisticated gag, where he said a Channel 5 documentary containing a scene about an abusive wife herself accusing her husband of abuse made him think, “My God, it’s like being married to Israel.” There was audience laughter in response, but not from the couple on the front row, who shouted “not funny”.

The pair, who said they were from Israel, then endured their fellow audience members shouting expletives (“f— off” among them), and telling them to go – with slow-hand claps, boos and cries of “genocidal maniac”, “you’re not welcome” and “free Palestine” part of the toxic mix.

In the past I’ve had time for Hunter, a free-thinking outsider, who has lived in the UK since 1997. Amid a climate of censoriousness and offence-taking, his determination to tackle difficult subjects, without mincing his words, has usefully tested limits and galvanised debate. He’s no stranger to controversy: he was accused of anti-Semitism at the 2006 Fringe for Holocaust material and has attracted ire for alleged misogyny and his use of the ‘n word’, whether in show-titles, shows or a furore-attracting hosting of the Professional Footballers’ Association gala dinner in 2013.

But here he gave an object lesson in how not to pick on people in the front row. Instead of tolerating the couple’s joint heckle, he doubled down with a sinister air of beaming bellicosity: “I’ve been waiting for you all summer, where the f— you been?” He continued: “You can say it’s not funny to you, but if you say it to a room full of people who laughed, you look foolish.”

“Look at you making everyone love Israel even more,” he jeered, after the woman remonstrated with the audience.

“That tells me that I still got voltage,” he purred, with satisfaction, after the pair left, slowly (it turned out that the man was disabled, not that this caused a flicker of restraint in the host, who openly laughed at them). He then related a remark that his female partner had made at the time of the Holocaust controversy about accessing the Jewish Chronicle’s website: “Typical f—ing Jews, they won’t tell you anything unless you subscribe.” “It’s just a joke,” he added.

Added, from the JC:

Speaking to the JC, the Jewish man who wished to remain anonymous, said, “It was just a heckle because it wasn’t funny, it was poor, he was nervous and sweaty. He put on a bad set. When he told this joke about an abusive husband leaving the house but it was really the husband being abused by the wife, I just said: ‘That’s not funny’ and then he really started.”

So Hunter's line, “That tells me that I still got voltage", sounds like the whole episode was a welcome interruption for him – playing up to the audience antisemitism to rescue a gig that wasn't going well. Nasty. And a shame, because, like the Telegraph reviewer, I've usually found Hunter to be worthwhile. His BBC US road trip Songs of the South – a three-part look at the music of the Deep South – was great.

The real horror here though is surely the audience reaction. A "baying mob", said the Jewish man. Grim. Very grim.