Jeff Simon: From Carlin to Letterman, comedians have always lived with the loathing

At the age of 75 and with the Man Mountain Dean beard with which renounced decorous celebrity years ago, Letterman hosted an evening with some emergent comedians at the "Netflix Is a Joke" festival in Los Angeles.

Four days earlier, at an earlier concert in the same festival, a disturbed fellow named Isaiah Lee bull-charged controversial standup comic Dave Chappelle and knocked him over while he was attempting to do his act.

Lee was hustled backstage, thrashed a bit and Chappelle was almost immediately joined onstage for moral support by Chris Rock and Jamie Foxx. Rock, understandably, made a little Will Smith joke, referring to the literally unprecedented Oscar moment when Smith smacked Rock's left cheek with an open-hand and launched expletives at Rock while warning the comic to never again let the name of his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, pass through his performing lips

As we watched that mind-boggling moment on Oscar night we didn't completely get it. Not immediately.

Standup comics did – right away. Kathy Griffin – whose wayward and gruesome photo joke on Donald Trump inspired death threats – responded to Smith's smack heard 'round the world by saying "now we have to worry about who's going to be the next Will Smith in comedy clubs and theaters."

Isaiah Lee for one. That's what Letterman was getting at. As the evening's emcee at one point, he pretended to be startled and told the audience, "I thought I saw a guy coming up here. Let me just say this: When the show is finished, I will be in the lobby and if anybody is wanting to beat me up, by God, come out." Then he looked at the audience and asked, "How many of you would like to hit me right now?"

Exactly.

Standup comics have been living with that kind of audience seething ever since the art form came to exist. Make jokes to any group anywhere and someone of choleric temperament may well want to give you a smack.

In the old days of nightclubs and theaters, comedians had guaranteed putdown lines for hecklers. Sometimes they were so funny, they became the whole act. Before Don Rickles ever became an "insult comic," Jack E. Leonard would bounce onstage and blurt out "Good evening, opponents."

When a heckler piped up, he would be likely to respond with absurd lines like "Why don't you put your glasses on backward and walk into yourself?"

Will Smith took the occasion of one of the highest rated annual TV shows to break all the rules. He didn't heckle the offending comic; he walked up to him and smacked him.

Smith knew jolly well that he was the odds-on favorite to win a Best Actor Oscar a few minutes later. So he took the occasion to mark the triumph by releasing a lot of pent-up fury at a comic with a history of using his wife as a convenient prop for his standup act.

No more heckling for Smith. Only a real open-hand smack on the cheek would do for a certain Oscar winner.

Which, as Griffin said, seemed to liberate every hostile, seething jerk in the audience to consider doing the same thing if a comedian offended HIM.

Some comics – the most pointed ones – know that seething audience members are always out there. Those comics can become downright eloquent putting down hecklers, even if they're not Rickles. But then, some comics can do a good deal of real seething themselves. I once interviewed Pat Cooper, who responded to one of my innocent well-phrased questions by asking me, "College boy, aren't you?" and then, literally, growling at me for the next 30 seconds.

Joan Rivers was no growler but she was a legendary heckler-squasher. Offended audience members were so common for comedian Lenny Bruce that he invented the name for them: "walkouts."

Will Smith, drowning in feelings of entitlement on Oscar night, proceeded to change the rules.

Isaiah Lee responded by bringing a knife to a Dave Chappelle comedy set at the Hollywood Bowl, of all places.

Rickles and "Fat Jack" Leonard – as fellow comedians always called him – followed up Milton Berle's "ladies and germs" hostility by making a comedian's edge into their whole acts.

Letterman, with nicely rounded mid-Western resentments from being from Indianapolis, took it brilliantly to late-night television. When the subject was politics, he apologized to nobody.

Johnny Carson pretended to be even-handed. Letterman, for the younger SNL audience, wasn't going to keep that fiction going when modern history provided a president who could never correctly pronounce the word "nuclear."

In his final book, "Last Words," George Carlin admitted that it was the presidency of Ronald Reagan that pushed his own act into blatant politics rather than silent seething.

Carlin is very much in season again, all these years after his death. On Feb. 20, HBO will begin showing "George Carlin's American Dream" a documentary put together by standup scholar Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio.

You'll see, on the show, Jerry Seinfeld admit to wanting to BE Carlin. Stephen Colbert, calls Carlin, "The Beatles of Comedy."

In an America where actors react to their certain Oscars by smacking comedians around, a Carlin doc reminds us, yet again, that comedy is, without question, the bravest pursuit in all of show business.

So much so that some besieged countries find their Churchillian guardians of courage in wartime among the TV comedians they've elected to major office.

Consider Rock's total equanimity after being publicly smacked on one of the major television shows of the year. His response to Smith's fury was to keep himself completely in check. And Chappelle's surprisingly bland response to the audience on being bull-charged was as arresting as the charge itself.

Maybe we should all be learning a lot more from our veteran standup comics.