Slings and Arrows : Increasingly, Everyone From Politicians to Police Faces That Annoying Animal Known as the Heckler

When the loudmouth in the bleachers sarcastically invited Albert Belle to “a keg party,” the Cleveland Indians outfielder and recovering alcoholic rifled a baseball into the fan’s chest.

White House hopeful Jerry Brown’s majestic moment came in New Hampshire, when he tried to out-yell a guy in an animal suit who kept chanting “Vermin for President” during Brown’s speech.

Comedian Michael Dugan’s skirmish happened in the parking lot of a Santa Monica nightclub. An irate crowd member Dugan had tried to silence earlier in the evening slammed the comic’s face into a Porsche.

More and more often, it seems, people from politicians to police find themselves tangling with that human Molotov cocktail known as the heckler.

And making up the rules as they go along.

“It’s theater of the absurd,” says Stuart Fischoff, a media psychologist at Cal State Los Angeles. “You walk a razor’s edge.”

The result is a free-for-all of dueling wits, projectiles and the not-so-gentle art of the put-down.

Stand-up comics endure some of the most intense--and bizarre--heckling.

Mix jokes with booze and “you never know what’s going to happen,” says comedian Carrie Snow, whose tormentors have included a Seattle man who crawled onstage barking like a dog and then chased her around on all fours. (She had him ejected from the club.)

The first line of defense is wit. An “Isn’t it sad when cousins marry?” or “When your IQ gets to 80, sell” muzzles most pests.

“Very often the person only has the courage to make one comment,” Fischoff says. “That’s their orgasmic moment and then they’re exhausted.”

But things can escalate in weird ways. Comedian Steve Smith shot down a woman heckler, only to have her husband angrily storm the stage--using a walker to get there.

Other hecklers retaliate verbally, either to show off or to recover from a humiliating put-down. It’s a losing proposition for both sides, Fischoff says: Against the performer’s jokes, “the heckler proceeds to psychologically dismember himself, first losing an arm, then lopping off a leg . . . until, at the end of this bloody exchange, he slinks back to his bourbon and branch water.”

But the comedian who “murders the heckler with words” also pays a price, Fischoff says: “He can be seen as mean and lose the audience.”

Sometimes, audience members police hecklers--especially if they paid a steep cover charge.

But that theory didn’t work for veteran comic Gary Mule Deer at a deserted Christmas Eve gig in Reno: The heckler was the audience. “I offered to buy him dinner, pay his hotel bill, get him tickets to any other show in town . . . but he wouldn’t shut up,” says Mule Deer, whose contract obligated him to stay onstage a full hour.

Even more infuriating, perhaps, is the taunter who turns out to be a big fan. “Quite a few people heckle because they think we want it,” laments comedian Dennis Wolfberg. “They’ll come over after the show and congratulate you on how brilliantly and masterfully you annihilated them.”

A few hecklers operate like assassins, comic Richard Jeni says: “They’re too drunk or too mean to care that you’re making a fool of them, (and they) keep coming at you no matter what. . . . Under those circumstances, it’s necessary to have a large man named Bruno explain proper nightclub behavior to them.”

Meet Scott Morgosh: semi-professional heckler.

The 33-year-old stockbroker has harassed public figures since high school, confining his efforts to sports stars--and to games his wife doesn’t attend.

“She’s embarrassed and thinks heckling is something only New Yorkers do,” he says. Sure enough, the Carlsbad resident is an Empire State transplant.

But he insists that heckling for the home team is a time-honored ballpark tradition on the order of the National Anthem, hot dogs and ice cold beer. Emphasis on the beer. Morgosh allows that “there’s probably a correlation” between the numbers of drinks and taunts.

He also finds pleasure in winning a laugh from the crowd or in ruffling the concentration of a notorious athlete. Certain players--such as Dallas soccer star Tatu, who throws his shirt into the stands after scoring a goal--do things to make themselves stand out, he says: “It’s almost like they want to be heckled.”

Extravagant lifestyles and multimillion-dollar contracts also “provoke anger among fans,” Morgosh says.

Psychologist Fischoff agrees: “Sports has lost its sacred mantle. It’s taken on a much more mercenary quality.”

Many players and coaches, however, say heckling has gotten out of hand, turning unusually profane and personal. A few have reacted with fury. Two summers ago, Luis Polonia of the California Angels slapped an Oakland fan who had badgered him about his misdemeanor conviction for sex with an underage girl.

Morgosh agrees that personal insults, racial slurs and four-letter words are uncalled-for. But that doesn’t mean athletes should expect warm fuzzies, he says: “Yelling ‘your mother wears army boots’ just doesn’t cut it anymore.”

Adds Fischoff: “There’s no reason to think athletics should be immune from the sleaze we find in the rest of society.”

He says players should deal with it by detaching themselves from their public images, a less extreme version of a mental trick used by concentration camp survivors to shield their minds from the effects of physical abuse. “Deflect the slings and arrows (of the heckler) away from the core self onto the public self,” he advises.

Or at least fake it, Morgosh says: “The worst thing an athlete can do is to acknowledge a heckler. That only eggs them on.”

Indeed, a few days after Cleveland outfielder Belle zinged a ball into the “keg party” mocker, other fans showed up in the bleachers wearing shirts with bull’s-eyes on the front.

Police are another magnet for taunts and jeers.

For some time, the word has been out “that you can hurl epithets at a cop and the cop mostly isn’t going to do anything about it,” says Peter Gruenberg, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist and former deputy sheriff. “It’s a free ride (for) all the things you wanted to yell at your old man but couldn’t get away with.”

Police are supposed to ignore verbal abuse, Gruenberg says, and part of their training includes “getting hassled and called names and racial epithets” to immunize them from what they’ll hear on the job.

“I think society has changed,” he says. “When I was a kid, in the 1940s and ‘50s, you wouldn’t dare yell (a four-letter word) at a cop.” Now when people shout obscenities, many officers wave.

Don’t take it personally, police are told; hecklers are “yelling at the uniform, not at you.”

But in the wake of the recent L. A. riots, Gruenberg wonders if overlooking taunts is such a good idea. “If you’d asked me (before the riots), I’d have said without qualification” to ignore heckling, he says.

“Now, I don’t know. Maybe heckling leads to sticks and stones.”

And then there’s the “noblest” species of tormentor, the heckler whom Fischoff says is “genuinely outraged at something” and has no way to be heard unless “he or she disrupts the political pageant.”

To grapple with the political heckler, candidates try everything from reverse psychology to all-out retreat. “You’re always shifting tactics because the one thing you can’t do is lose,” Fischoff says.

Former Sen. Ed Muskie, who ran for vice president in 1968 and sought the Democratic presidential nod in 1972, had a reputation for “calling (hecklers) up to the stage in front of big crowds and then forcing the poor bastards to debate with him in a blaze of TV lights,” journalist Hunter Thompson wrote.

Not a bad strategy, says psychiatrist Mark Goulston of Los Angeles. Hecklers often have nothing to offer besides complaints. Hand them a microphone, ask for solutions and they’re goners, he says.

But many of today’s hecklers aren’t so easily subdued. When Democrat Michael Dukakis swung through Southern California during his 1988 presidential quest, he was shadowed by a gang of college students wearing prison garb and shouting: “Thanks for the weekend, Mike,” a reference to the controversial prison furlough program in then-Gov. Dukakis’ home state of Massachusetts.

Even if Dukakis had addressed the hecklers, it’s doubtful they would have shut up. Their costumes--including plastic balls and chains--and transportation were paid for by the Republican Party, says Phil Pournelle of Del Mar, one of the demonstrators.

This year’s presidential contenders have also faced some rough-and-tumble encounters.

Democrats Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown descended into Heckler Hell in New York, where they were besieged by AIDS activists, fringe candidates and snarling voters. Clinton couldn’t even walk down the street without passers-by baiting him over the latest allegations of scandal in the press: “Do you pardon all drug dealers or just the ones who contribute to your campaign?” a pedestrian sneered as the Arkansas governor strode past in silence.

Ordinarily, Clinton doesn’t ignore hecklers, says press secretary Dee Dee Myers, because it leaves the charge or complaint “hanging out there unanswered.”

When someone raises a “legitimate issue,” he “asks questions about what they think and tries to find some common ground,” she says. But the drug-deal interrogator was “not a person looking for a rational answer. You have to make that judgment on the spot.”

Brown followed similar instincts. Walking down Broadway past a noisy throng of anti-abortion demonstrators, the former California governor jettisoned his usual policy of trying to talk with hecklers, recalls press secretary Ileana Wachtel:

“There was no room for dialogue there. It was just relentless shouting of their point.”

George Bush, meanwhile, seems to benefit from the awe surrounding the presidency, says press secretary Torie Clarke: “People . . . tend to be very respectful.”

The few who have heckled recently were brushed off with a bit of reverse psychology. When AIDS activists yelled at Bush in New Hampshire, he quickly agreed with their sentiments: “It’s a terrible problem. . . . I’m doing everything I can to end it.” Clarke says the hecklers “quieted right down.”

Clinton ran into a more unruly AIDS group at a Manhattan fund-raiser. He tried to talk about his concern for the epidemic, but when one protester accused him of “dying of ambition,” the Arkansas governor snapped: “If I were dying of ambition, I wouldn’t have stood up and put up with all this crap I’ve put up with over the past six months. I’m sick and tired of people who don’t know me making those snotty-nosed remarks.”

Few stations televised the rest of the exchange, but Myers says people who saw it all supported Clinton “standing up for himself. . . . It was a very human response.”

Several comedians observing the candidate-versus-heckler battles say the politicians ought to hire a few gag writers to devise some good put-downs.

But psychiatrist Goulston says that would be disastrous: If Clinton had used a comic rejoinder to stifle the AIDS heckler, “it would be misinterpreted badly.” People might think he was “trivializing the issue of AIDS” instead of attacking the heckler.

In that case, jokes comedian Mule Deer, “maybe Clinton should start inhaling (marijuana) once in a while. Then the heckling wouldn’t bother him as much.”