By Ben John Smith (Contact Ben)

The stoner culture when I was growing up was all ways full of trippers. I don’t know if it’s a Melbourne thing, but everyone I knew that smoked would always “trip out” over things. Things like “that advertisement really tripped me out” or “this lentils base soup is tripping me out” or the famous and lasting “I’m tripping out.” Now this was all good any well, people taking extra time to trip over things, really get deep and dark with it, yeah, even the lentil soup base. 

That was until I read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. With Old Bull Lee, Crazy Moriarty and the desperate Sal, locked and loaded on the rails, Mexico bound, shadows and giants of a world that many might consider a hopeless existence. Dean fucking every bird he ever met, under that Jesus cultish shroud, poor Sal watching him stand in the rain like the child of a fatherless drunk . . . But the boys never tripped, nothing ever tripped them out. The giants always “grooved” over things. They dug the Jive Turkeys and vagabonds, the nomads and the bourbon hounds, everything was a groove to them, and meeting people was a chance to bask in another’s jive. You gotta understand people if you want to understand the big man. 

And it changed me.

And Heckler changed me.

The jesters and fools, the comedian has always both brightened and broken my heart. Cliché’ aside it’s the most honest and unbearingly human profession in the world, regardless. It's everything you loved when you were a child, the reason to pop fart sounds in class, getting drunk and swimming naked on a beach, John Goodman in The Big Lebowski. Humor is that single vulnerable gift of a person’s kind side, it’s given without need, purpose or agenda.  Humor can’t drive a man insane. Hope can, money can, people can.

Laughter is benevolent, a higher learning of understanding, a completely different “groove”.

The heckler however is the tripper, not just the hecklers but anyone who can’t understand the vibe. Reservation and insecurities are apt to be products of dusty sense of humor. The three pronged hat to resemble a donkey and tail of the jester of yore are not derogatory, they are a subtle “in” joke, something like “you don’t know how I see this world, king.” The clown society has taught us that, since the kindergarten of our childhoods, a Harlequin will expose the ugly truth, show you the wrong way, and so eloquently poise a fine laugh at the fruitfulness of it all. Heckler not just shows this, but it IS this.

It’s a Jamie Kennedy Documentary. The person, the human, the jive of Jamie Kennedy, and a million other truth- bent humorists. Now I’m not going to blow smoke, cause a lot of what Kennedy has done in the past hasn’t always appealed to my groove, but this documentary defiantly did, and for that I owe abundant gratitude. 

The film essentially breaks down various sections of the “heckler”, including daiquiri-drunk-female-loose mouths, executive “unqualified” newspaper dorks and of course, the Internet critics. From frame to frame, comedians reveal the worst heckles of their careers, in irrefutably personal, first person detail. A sword pulled for a heckle retort, a bar brawl between two hecklers, Jamie Kennedy copping a bottle in the face . . . Really raw and ridiculously over the top aggression from a selection of grooveless people, but people nonetheless. The heckler is kind of pigeonholed however but it was something that gave more resonance to that fact this whole wide world is damaged and insecure. Andrew Dice Clay feeling like a comeback hack from that wordless CNN bore, poor Michael “Kramer” Richards and his unnecessary backed-into-a-corner racist explosion, John Lovitz with the gap in his teeth (just like me), and the infamous Bill Hicks female devouring and holy dropped c bombs to the drunken waster.

Harland Williams always reminds me of the half-baked days, and him tripping in the jail cell. Jewel Kilcher is in there looking extra hot, especially her mind. David Cross, Rob Zombie, The Fonz . . . 

Nothing is more sublimely fitted for the point I’m making when Kennedy refuses to sleep with a groupie; see it, you’ll know what I mean. Or the guy at the end, just dancing to his own tune.

It reminds me of a time once, a few years back, when I first got the Internet. I stumbled on a video of an Amish kid on a shiny red bike surrounded by a pack of dudes videoing him on their mobile phones. At the start it seemed harmless enough, but then they starting swearing at him, calling him fat and kicking the tires of the bike he was so proud of. A few of the dudes started pushing him around and eventually one of the kids smashed a bottle across his head. The fat Amish kid didn’t really respond; he took a few pushes with his feet on the floor and peddled away.  Blood was kind of dripping down his head and he had a horrible look of shame and confusion on his face. One of the dudes said, “Wow, that kid takes a bottle like a champ.”

So that’s how it feels, Just sitting back, chillen, on a shiny new red bike . . . 

taking a bottle like a champ.