Of course, this is not always the case, even with a well known and loved comic. There are hecklers (hello Michael Richards), there are accusations of stealing jokes (Carlos Mencia), and sometimes there's just a bizarre spectacle that defies categorization.
I was at the Demetri Martin show in Hollywood the other night on what my friends feel might be his last tour at his peak (his new TV show just started, and that might be the beginning of the end, we hope not). Demetri brought his usual bag of tricks: his guitar, a keyboard, and a couple of large pads with his "findings". In a very pleasant surprise, his material was all brand new and he didn't plug his TV show verbally, he just wore a t-shirt with "show-biz" handwritten on it, very subtle and very charming. His material was high quality, we were in great seats (3rd row!), and there wasn't a heckler in the room.
Unfortunately for us, we had to experience something much worse than a heckler. I would think Demetri, as bright and quick witted as he is, would deftly handle a heckler and give us some high quality entertainment. Instead we were subjected to some major awkwardness that I'm not even sure someone as road-tested as Demetri Martin could handle.
There was a girl in the row in front of us who decided to speak up when Demetri decided to do a little bit of Q&A and she asked Demetri if he would deliver a letter to Jon Oliver on her behalf. For those of you who do not know who Jon Oliver is, he is a comedian who is also a "correspondent" on the Daily Show. Yes, they know each other, but Demetri is on a tour so it would be weird to depend on him to deliver something when he'll be traveling city to city for next month or so. So this was an odd request from an odd girl. This girl, who had rat's nest hair and a low-fi head band on, delivered to Demetri a 2 page, what looked like single spaced, typed letter. This raised plenty of questions in my mind.
1) Why would you give Demetri Martin a letter to give to someone else, especially someone not affiliated with the tour?
2) Why would you make a master plan that involves buying a ticket to see Demetri Martin, waiting in line early so you can get a good seat, instead of just buying a stamp and looking up a way to send this letter to Jon Oliver?
3) If you somehow knew that you were going to get this letter to Demetri to deliver to Jon Oliver, wouldn't you want to look presentable or at least sans rat's nest hair and crappy headband?
4) Do you not realize you're being extremely rude? Obviously not.
If some stranger asked me to give something to some person I was barely affiliated with, I'd be pretty upset. It'd be even more upsetting if it happened in the middle of my show, but fortunately for me, Demetri handled the situation the best he could without tearing the girl's self esteem apart and bringing her to tears. He asked permission to open the letter, pretended that the letter was about how awesome he was, and then awkwardly muttered "I'll give this to... someone..." It was a surreal and awkward experience, one that I'm sure Demetri wasn't even prepared for, because now that I look back, it would've been pretty awesome if he made a graph that depicted the amount of planning she put into this idea and the lack of common sense she had, rat's nest and all.
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