No joke: doctor-turned-comedian Ken Jeong jumps offstage to save woman having seizure at stand-up show

Stand-up comics, famously, do not like hecklers.

They ruin shows. They divert from meticulously calibrated jokes. The response to them is often so brutal and hilarious that heckler takedowns is itself a comedy subgenre.

Ken Jeong thought he was being heckled in Phoenix on Saturday when a woman in the third row during his set at the Stand Up Live Comedy Club unmoored the comedian with a disturbance.

The lights came on, and it became clear the woman was having an apparent seizure, an audience member later said.

Then, The Hangover and Community actor reverted to his dormant profession: doctor.

“He couldn’t see what was going on with the lights. He thought he was being heckled. He was playing with them from the stage for a second,” audience member Heather Holmberg told USA Today. “It was a moment where time stands still. Someone was having a crisis. There was a hush over the room.”

Jeong, an internal medicine practitioner turned Hollywood funnyman, cleared the area and attended to the woman alongside a medic who happened to be in attendance, Holmberg said in a Sunday tweet.