Stand-up comics assess how Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich handle hecklers.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla.—These are boom times for hecklers. Republican members of Congress have scaled back public town hall meetings, chastened by the screams that embarrassed the old Democratic Congress. Powerful Democrats, meanwhile, get “mic-checked” by Occupy protesters. And three of the four remaining Republican presidential candidates—Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich—are constantly on alert for hecklers. (Nobody seems to heckle Ron Paul; perhaps it’s unconstitutional.)

Handle a heckler well, and you collect prizes. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie started to go Don Rickles on people who acted out at his events—voilà, instant national stardom. Handle a heckler poorly, and you end up like Ben Konop, once a rising Ohio politico, now famous for this clip in which a guy boos him for three minutes. And be warned, Gov. Christie: A politician who perceives himself as skillful at fending off audience attacks could be putting himself in danger of becoming the next George Allen.

Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich handle crowd eruptions in completely different ways. Whose strategy is best? I asked two stand-up comedians, Rob Delaney and Paul F. Tompkins, to apply their expertise to the question.

Rick Santorum

The winner-by-a-fingernail of the Iowa caucuses draws a very specific kind of heckle: the gay rights bellow. Ever since Santorum warned of incipient “man on dog” relations if gay marriage was legalized, pro-gay voters have daydreamed about humiliating him. At Santorum’s final pre-vote event in New Hampshire, I watched as stunt candidate Vermin Supreme (a Democrat, technically) put his bullhorn on a window and warned of human-canine intercourse happening outside. At a much more widely broadcast event, Santorum refused to concede an argument about gay marriage to a group of college students.

What do we learn? Santorum hears a heckler and senses an argument he can win—even if the crowd isn’t with him. He uncorks the kind of hyper-confident verbal assault that defined his Senate career, the same impulse that leads him to take eight minutes to answer a town hall question. He knows that the heckler hates him for ideological reasons; to win, he will deploy the facts he’s honed for years, stuff the heckler won’t know how to answer.

The problem, according to our experts: Santorum won’t just win the argument and move on.

“He barely wins against an emotional crowd,” says Tompkins, “with an argument that could have been torn apart had the crowd actually expected him to have an argument. Maybe they forgot that homosexuality and abortion are Rick Santorum's twin muses, and thoughts of them are never very far. In the end, he blows it by staying out there long enough to get booed. He should have thrown the mic down and walked off.”

Mitt Romney

The richest candidate in the race draws the most Occupy protests. I’ve watched 99 percenters bum rush Romney three different times, once in Iowa and twice in New Hampshire. The Iowa confrontation was instantly legendary—Romney started taking questions at the state fair, got into it with liberal activists, and told one of them that “corporations are people.”