Hello friends.
On Tuesday 6th of this month, I went to see James Acaster live for the second time.
If Acaster’s recorded comedy specials were put on a scale, they would range from full on whimsy (Repertoire, 2017) all the way to “peak bleak” (Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999, 2020). On the “bleak-whimsy” scale, I would probably put his new show Hecklers Welcome somewhere near the halfway mark. As Acaster himself points out towards the end of the second half, quite a few of the routines are rather “low stakes”. This seems an especially perceptive analysis when you compare the material here with Cold Lasagne, in which a significant portion of the show revolves around breakups with exes, an agent and even a therapist, all of which feel cataclysmic.
However, just because the stakes are lowered from his last show does not in turn mean that Hecklers Welcome approaches the playfulness of Repertoire. There is no overarching conceit on which Acaster pins the show (pretending to be an undercover cop, a jury member &c.) and so what whimsy we get is in the individual jokes rather than the whole show being a fictionalised flight of fancy. I find this approach makes for more satisfying comedy shows from Acaster, because the fictional elements were often veiling (somewhat thinly) the personal experiences that they were really about. It was entertaining to hear Acaster talk about his supposed Albanian wife back in 2017, but it’s more interesting to hear about his real life. For a while now I’ve found that, while Repertoire is structurally magnificent, I rarely laugh when I rewatch it. Instead, I more often feel comforted, my brain tickled by the call-backs, the jokes that traverse episodes and especially Acaster’s signature phrasings. Not so with Cold Lasagne where, let off the leash somewhat and no longer hemmed in by playing a character, Acaster shines in a more personal, acerbic, biting and ultimately funnier persona.
With this in mind, I’m delighted to say that Hecklers Welcome showcases Acaster at his funniest yet. The show’s central premise is a set of “house rules”: hecklers are indeed “welcome” and can do as they please (with Acaster forbidden from shouting them down). This makes for a certain looseness in the material even when there are relatively few hecklers—as was the case at the Liverpool gig that I went to. In turn, Acaster’s demeanour comes over as more laid back, perhaps even more content. Right down to the choice of wardrobe (green and pink tracksuits, one for each half), the persona was very relaxed when compared with Cold Lasagne. Acaster has crafted the atmosphere to suit the material masterfully.
If Hecklers Welcome has one great strength, aside from being incredibly funny, sharp &c. &c., then it is Acaster’s honesty throughout. From the show’s beginning, he admits that the covid lockdowns taught him one very important lesson: he doesn’t like doing stand-up comedy. Nor is this an exaggeration or joke; Acaster is open about the peaks in his anxiety levels which he experiences when touring. However, the only thing worse for him than being on stage is being a member of the audience. He confesses to a compulsion towards participation in any and all forms of performance that stretches back to his earliest years. Then, when he became a stand-up, he was told by a well-meaning barman that excitement and anxiety are actually biologically identical emotions and which one you feel depends on your attitude. This hooked Acaster in and for years he thought he was “excited” to perform, but it is in fact, in his words, “a lie”. So, here we have a performer comfortable enough with his audiences and persona to admit that he doesn’t enjoy many of the aspects of what he does.
Such unapologetic honesty pervades almost every routine from then on. A sizeable chunk of the show, a show which is largely comedy about comedy, features Acaster owning up to his past behaviour toward audience members. The most perplexing and frustrating of these experiences for Acaster himself was a series of “gigs” in which he read Roald Dahl’s book George’s Marvellous Medicine to successive groups of children in a castle. Acaster was piqued—enraged wouldn’t be too strong a word—by their silent (bored?) reactions to his “material”. He had convinced himself that, as Dahl’s book had opened his eyes to comedy when it was read to him as a child, so he was going to “change these kids’ lives” with his rendition. It wasn’t until the car ride home—after he had delivered his final performance to soul-crushing silence—that fellow comedian Charlotte Ritchie (who’d been reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in the turret below) suggested that maybe if the kids were silent whilst James had been reading, it was because they were really engrossed in the story and loving the performance…
If personal honesty separates this show from Repertoire’s hijinks, then vulnerability is perhaps the defining feature of all of Acaster’s specials. Early in the show, Acaster says that he is “brave” for doing stand-up (not brave like a fireman or a soldier, but “a lifeguard, sure”). Undoubtedly, stand-up takes a level of bravery, but I can think of many comedians who are entirely wanting in valour in their choice of subject matter. Acaster is different in that he never belittles the vulnerable or self-aggrandizes, opting instead to share foibles and vulnerabilities. There are more references to tears in this show than, it seemed to me, in any of his other specials. He spoke about times he has cried in front of audiences—as both a child and grown up—and, in one of the more whimsical anecdotes, of how he cried the hardest he has ever cried when he found out Jesus was dead. It’s not that these routines are self-deprecatory exactly, but they are told with a sincerity that highlights the childlike aspects of his behaviour to beguiling effect.
The other night, I watched The Fabelmans (2022) which is, to all intents and purposes, a film about film. As alluded to earlier, Acaster’s show shares a metatextuality with Spielberg’s movie: it is comedy about comedy. While Spielberg’s film was entertaining, it seemed to have relatively little to say about the medium it was purporting to examine. Hecklers Welcome, on the other hand, really does enrich and enlighten its audience about comedy. It isn’t just that Acaster examines the form in comedic ways, it’s also that the house rules land improvisation front and centre. The most I laughed during the whole performance came from the way Acaster handled a heckle in which somebody mooed like a cow (for reasons that make sense in the context of the show). Responses such as this gave the long sections of “comedy about comedy” room to breathe. Amongst all the inward-facing jokes and the jokes which referred back to comedy itself, these little routines were magical glimpses into the improvisational and comedic processes which lay behind so much of what the show was about. It was as if we had been watching a skilled carpenter talk at length about how to make a table and then suddenly pick up the tools.
I will end by discussing my favourite aspect of Hecklers Welcome, a returning motif which combines virtually all of the show’s aforementioned qualities. Personal, vulnerable and insightful, the subject is so potent that its final return is the way in which Acaster ends the show. Here’s the setup: when Acaster was in nursery school, his grandmother brought in a spinning wheel for the children to try out. When he wasn’t picked for a turn, a decision of hers which he describes as obviously sensible, he burst into tears. Panicked, she eventually relented and so, through his sobs, James spun some wool in front of his entire class. This was his “first time on stage” and, as his therapist pointed out, every time he now performs it’s not just him up there—that boy accompanies him as well. His need to “protect the boy” has thus coloured many aspects of his reactions to hecklers.
By itself, this was already an insight into Acaster’s struggles that stirred therapeutic and moving effects within me. But here’s the kicker. Acaster goes on to use the concept of past selves when defining what makes for a loving relationship. The final lines of the show weren’t actually a joke, but a heartfelt tribute to his girlfriend who not only loves him now, but whose girlhood self also loves that boy. I didn’t expect to ever tear up at the end of a comedy show, but the sentiment was so beautifully expressed that I couldn’t help myself. It is only now, as I write this, that I realise that I felt something similar when watching Past Lives (2023). In that film, the central character Nora tells her friend Hae Sung that she bequeathed her childhood self when she emigrated from Korea to Canada, that she left it behind for him. They hadn’t seen each other for over twenty years. Love, it seems, is not of an age, but for a lifetime.