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Sexual harassment isn’t heckling and it isn’t funny

Sexual harassment isn’t heckling and it isn’t funny

Stand-up comedian Jen Grant has criss-crossed the country, performing her comedy for rowdy crowds in every corner of Canada.

But it was at a corporate event at an Ontario country club where Grant was recently forced off stage near tears after a male audience member repeatedly sexually harassed her from the audience.

“What I experienced wasn’t heckling,” Grant tells Yahoo Canada News. “It was harassment. I’ve never experienced anything like that before.”

Like the City News reporter victimized by FHRITP, a mind-numbingly stupid prank that knuckle-draggers like to pull on female reporters while they’re live on air, Grant was at work.

The job earlier this month was entertaining the crowd at an awards dinner at the St. George’s Golf and Country Club in Toronto, organized by the Ontario Printing and Imaging Association. The audience was 80 per cent male.

The man was an employee of TC Transcontinental Printing, the largest printer in Canada. He’s been suspended pending an investigation of his behaviour.

Grant says she was only a few minutes into her routine when the man in his late 30s or early 40s interrupted the first time with sexual comments.

What Grant describes as “rapey” harassment continued. Sadly, it’s a word well-known in the female lexicon.

About half way into her planned 45-minute routine, she couldn’t continue.

“Ohhh, the things I would do to you,” she recalls him yelling from the crowd.

Under a corporate contract, Grant had agreed to keep the routine clean. No swearing. No “blue material.” Nothing political.

In 16 years in comedy she says she’s developed a thick skin but it was too much.

“It’s hard to put into words how I felt at that moment. Scared. Objectified. Threatened. Invalidated,” Grant writes in her blog.

One man in the crowd did tell the harasser that he’d crossed the line, but the damage was done.

She tried to continue but, near tears, she apologized and left the stage. The organizer apologized and a Transcontinental official called her twice the next day to apologize. A company spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Look through the line-up of any comedy festival or the annual industry awards list and it seems female comics are a relative rarity. It’s still largely man-land on the comedy stage.

Perhaps the only thing unique about Grant’s experience is that she spoke out and the harasser may face some consequences.

In the fall of 2012, stand-up comic Christina Walkinshaw was performing at Casino Niagara when a table of about 10 drunk men began chanting for her to take off her clothes. Those are not the words they used.

Under her contract, Walkinshaw was told profanity and “abrasive comebacks towards hecklers” were to be avoided.

She waited for management intervention that never came. Later, she was told, “I thought you liked it,” she wrote in an account of that night.

Walkinshaw finished her shows and was rebooked for another show the following summer, but it was cancelled. Her agent told her she was axed because of the incident with the crowd.

Walkinshaw didn’t immediately respond to an interview request but addressed Grant’s experience on her Facebook page.

“I don’t need to tell all you I know how Jen feels,” she writes. “There’s no HR [Human Resources] in comedy, and unfortunately, the occasional audience member decides he wants to strip of us our human rights. Please read her blog, and remember: If you want to be a scumbag like this, we will call you out.”

Grant says she hopes to send a message by speaking out. She’s been “overwhelmed” she says by messages of support from men and women, comedians and office workers.

She points out that the Hydro One employee who sexually harassed City News reporter Shauna Hunt lost his job.

“I hope it sets an example,” she says. “I hope that it deters men from doing it in the future.”