My Biz: Golf Hecklers brings comics to the course

Veteran entertainment agent and manager Jeff Johnson was surfing online video when he hit upon a new venue for his clients: harassing golfers at corporate outings and charity benefits.

“I know all the comedians and saw some heckling online, and I thought ‘I’ve got the resources to pull this off,’” Johnson said one recent morning. “I’ve got the people who are good at it.”

Johnson, 63, of Fairfax, operated Penguin’s Comedy Club, hosting national acts and nurturing local talent in downtown Cedar Rapids from 1989 until closed by COVID in 2020. Now booking 10 to 15 shows a year at other local venues under the Penguin’s Presents banner, he launched Golf Hecklers last summer with help from client Doug Thompson of Cedar Rapids.

“I’ve worked with him a long time, and I knew he’d be really good at it, so I reached out to him and I said, ‘what do you think about this idea?’” Johnson said. “He said, ‘We could do that.’ So, he’s a main part of it.”

Stationed along the course, Johnson’s hecklers hurl good-natured abuse at golfers as they attempt to putt or tee off. The Hecklers bring a sound system for music and sound effects, and Thompson photographs and shoots video for the event’s organizers.

“It takes a certain kind of comic to do it,” Johnson said. “You can’t just throw anybody out there, because it has to be respectful. You can’t go off the rails with it as much as you’d like to. We’re pretty good about keeping things on the straight and narrow.”

An early awkward moment demonstrated the importance of advance preparation.

“We had one guy who paid for a heckle, and he said, ‘Ask him how come he quit his job last week,’ and he’d gotten fired,” Johnson said. “We said it, and he got upset. So, we learned a lesson, we’ve got to be a little careful about certain things. We err on the side of caution, and we film everything we do.”

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The Hecklers charge about $2,000 for a local event. For charity benefits, golfers may pay hecklers to harass other members of their foursome, or even take shot for them.

“We have a list of things we do to get donations for them, so they’ll pay for the event or offset the costs,” Johnson said. “Most of the ones we do have a sponsor, so there’s somebody that sponsors the entertainment portion of the fundraiser.”

The Hecklers have gone national.

“We did a show in California, at Dana Point, that was $8,000,” Johnson said. “We flew two people out, we had to rent a tent, a generator, a sound system, we had two hotel rooms for two nights, we had a rental car. That’s a lot of expense. We’ve got one next weekend in Virginia, so we’ve got a couple of comics based out of New York who are going to do it. We’re keeping the prices lower by not flying somebody out.”