I was first exposed to Gregg Turkington, aka Neil Hamburger, about 15 years ago. I was tagging along with a friend, and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. At first I was disgusted and confused with the one liners coming out of this awkward man’s mouth. He was sloppily dressed with an arm full of drinks — spilling with every movement — and had this phlegm infested clearing of the throat tick that never seemed to end. It took some time to realize that this was his schtick. His weirdness and vulgarity intrigued me and I have been following his work ever since.
In preparation for his show at the Iron Horse, I bought his new film, Entertainment, on Blu-Ray. It’s got to be one of the most depressing movies I have ever seen. Entertainment is full of Hamburger’s dry, almost-not-funny humor and told the behind the scenes “real life” of fictional character Neil Hamburger on tour. It was more like a Kubrick film than a comedy. I was left feeling that I need to give this man a hug and offer my shoulder to cry on, but also snort-laugh at his ridiculous jokes that were spread evenly throughout.
The night of the show, I saw Turkington looking like a normal guy walking around the venue. His hair was not plastered to his head a la Hamburger. He wore no glasses and he seemed very pleasant. Once the announcer introduced Hamburger, though, a whole other persona emerged on stage that looked nothing like the man I had just seen stroll past me.
“At what point in a Julio Iglesias concert do people throw up? When he comes on stage!” That was his introductory gag that set the room in tears of laughter immediately. I knew at that point I was surrounded by people with the same distasteful humor as myself.
Like a rotten industrial-sized metal shredder in a scrap yard, Hamburger ripped into musicians, mostly, including The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Madonna, and Britney Spears. We were all witnessing a massacre. There was a woman in the audience who shouted out the butt of Hamburger’s joke before he could get to it. Bad move. He immediately turned his nasty ire toward her for a good five minutes or so. It was clearly improv spewing into her face, which goes to show that the underground stand-up requires some quick retaliation skills.
The majority of the set was based on Hamburger’s one-liners that I think if anyone else said them, they would not be funny at all. More idiotic than laughable, there is something about the whole Hamburger package that makes it work. If you can laugh at life’s crudeness, he is the man to deliver the crud.
“What does Gene Simmons use to scoop up Marilyn Manson’s shit out of his yard after a shock-rock party? An Alice Scooper!”•
— Jennifer Levesque, jlevesque@valleyadvocate.com
