Caught in the Act: It’s Mike Lawrence vs British Tourists and Mike Lawrence Wins
Each week, Amy will share one moment in New York Comedy that you need to know about. For her column debut, Amy shared a moment from The Bitter End. This week, Amy watched Mike Lawrence really handle some Brits at New York Comedy Club. Amy’s column appears every Thursday. Catch it to find out what you missed and why you shoulda been there.
Mike Lawrence Handles Hecklers at New York Comedy Club
Wow, Mike Lawrence can really effortlessly handle this crowd of British tourists… of course Mike Lawrence can effortless handle a crowd of British tourists.
You can’t expect much from a crowd the Monday after the long Thanksgiving weekend. Everyone’s exhausted from traveling and spending time with their family, and even if they stayed in the city, they probably went out Wednesday, Friday and Saturday night and just want to stay home and recuperate. So the folks that do turn up can be a bit of a grab bag, to put it nicely. So Mike Lawrence was facing a crowd filled almost entirely with British tourists who’d been hustled in by the street team on Monday night at New York Comedy Club. On the whole, they were actually pretty good laughers, but it’s always a gamble with foreign visitors when your act is full of pop cultural references like Mike’s is. But they warmed to him thanks to some early crowdwork and a bit about America being like Britain’s ex who never listened and now see where it got us.
But the real fun started when a couple down in front got a little chatty. They’d already been spoken to by other comics on the show, thanks to the girl’s loud, snorting laugh. So I guess that emboldened her boyfriend to feel like he could just converse with anyone on the stage at any point, yelling out an alternate punchline to Mike’s ‘isn’t PC ridiculous?’ Live Midget Tossing joke, “At least it’s better than dead midgets!” Without batting an eye, Mike said, “What? You’re going to rewrite my joke and make it about DEAD midgets? My joke was just a nice Hufflepuff bit of fun and you came and made it all Slytherin!”
It quieted the guy down for a bit without alienating him or the rest of the audience, but when he got chatty again a little later, Mike took the different tactic of just straight crowdworking him. When it came out that he had met his girlfriend at a gay bar, Mike went from simply managing the crowd to genuine interest, throwing out off-the-cuff jokes about the possible scenarios under which these two straight third wheels had found each other across the crowded bar that had the rest of the room howling and one girl even gasping out “oh my god!” in between peals of laughter. By that time, the guy must have realized he was far outmatched in the “trying to be funny” field and was just answering Mike’s questions honestly He ultimately conceded defeat and piped down for good after Mike asked, “Wait, was she a lesbian and you turned her?” All the guy could do was sheepishly laugh and say “God, no, look at me, how on earth could I ever do that?”
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