Heckler: Rubbish! Wilson: I'll come to your special interest in a minute, sir. Heckler: ( interrupting a passage in a Wilson speech about Labour's spending plans) What about Vietnam? Wilson: The government has no plans to increase public expenditure in Vietnam. One acknowledged expert at this was Harold Wilson, British Prime Minister in the 1960s: Some politicians, however, have been known to improvise a relevant and witty response despite these pitfalls. Strategically, coarse or belittling retorts to hecklers entail personal risk disproportionate to any gain.
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Legally, such conduct may constitute protected free speech.
In the early 1930s, before becoming Premier of Ontario, Mitchell Hepburn stood on top of a manure spreader, apologizing to the crowd for speaking from a Tory platform, at which someone in the crowd shouted, "Well, wind 'er up Mitch, she's never carried a bigger load!" Politicians speaking before live audiences have less latitude to deal with hecklers. Heckles are now particularly likely to be heard at comedy performances, to unsettle or compete with the performer. In the 1970s and 1980s, The Muppet Show, which was also built around a vaudeville theme, featured two hecklers, Statler & Waldorf (two old men named after famous hotels).
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Milton Berle's weekly TV variety series in the 1960s featured a heckler named Sidney Spritzer (German/ Yiddish for ' squirter') played by Borscht Belt comic Irving Benson. Sometimes it was incorporated into the play. Heckling was a major part of the vaudeville theater.
In the heckling factory, one heckler would read out the day's news while the others worked, to the accompaniment of interruptions and furious debate. The additional meaning, to interrupt speakers with awkward or embarrassing questions, was added in Scotland, and specifically perhaps in early 19th century Dundee, a famously radical town where the hecklers who combed the flax had established a reputation as the most radical and belligerent element in the workforce. To heckle was to tease or comb out flax or hemp fibres. Although the word heckler, which originated from the textile trade, was first attested in the mid-15th century, the sense "person who harasses" was from 1885.