NEIL HAMBURGER – HOT
FEBRUARY NIGHT (OFF-PRICE VALUE CENTER/DRAG CITY)
Neil Hamburger is a
prince among little men. Housing a
permanent flu his is an awful act akin to Tony Clifton abusively attempting to
make sense of the world. And for that he
is a very funny turn.
I have always had the
impression that Hamburger was a happy accident.
Rather than being a going concern as a comedian, as an actual act,
instead he was something of a figure of fun, a trick that would be played on live
rock audiences in the name of meta comedy and stirring a crowd. But then the act took off.
The first time I saw
Hamburger was unsurprisingly at All
Tomorrows Parties. At that stage he
was still pretty much exclusively under ownership of indie rock and to see him
step out and rag on our rock heroes while insulting the audience was a
beautiful thing. It was an act of
bravery by the man and an act of hypocrisy by the crowd. Where were the people supposed to stand with
regards to this act? The instinct was to
hate him, hate what he was saying because he was being insensitive but secretly
we liked what he said. A few years later
I would see him again at All Tomorrows Parties and when at the end of the set
he would throw his drink at some nacho eating arseholes and they ducked only
for it to crash over me, I couldn’t aim blame at Hamburger.
Those guys were in the
wrong place, they should have been at the Neil Diamond concert listening to him
perform Hot August
Night.
“What did Santa Claus
give Paris Hilton for Christmas?”
This is a fun
album. Its comedy, its ballsy, its
performance art, it’s a test of patience.
Recorded in February 2007 at Madison Square Garden , New York
It begins well with a
nice exchange of salutations but then he drops a clunker opening with a rape
joke about Paris Hilton. The gasp is a
wonderful thing to behold. There are
laughs but they are sinister emerging from the evil minorities of bad people
and those in the know. This was strange
fruit.
With that for just
over thirty minutes Hamburger proceeds to relish the opportunity to do just
what he wants, say what he wants and antagonise to new heights. In the words of Woody Allen through Alan
Alda’s lips “if it bends its funny, if it breaks its not”.
His third joke of the
evening is a knock knock joke with the most aggressive punchline to such a gag
in history. And at this point he begins
addressing the situation; addressing Tenacious D and threatening disrupt
proceedings with refusal to leave the stage until the mood picks up. It’s just what the man deserves.
“What does the
Godfather Of Soul Gerald Ford have in common with disgraced vocalist James
Brown and activist Saddam Hussein?”
It doesn’t take long
for the natives to become restless with their “lines of hatred”. They don’t care that he is saying the most
awful things about James Brown before redirecting his sights on Elvis Presley.
“Can we get some more
laughs in the monitors?”
Track 3 is entitled
“Shoulder Trouble 07”. It is a
wonderfully pointless nine second moment in serves, which in many ways
encapsulates just what Hamburger is all about.
Moving on the material
continues to test the levels/standards of taste with cancer, AIDS, retard and
vagina jokes. The intent is to offend
but it doesn’t necessarily always happen.
We now live in incredibly stifled and censored times, regulation is
everything, and nobody can say anything negative anymore. And thus as a result awful things can only be
said as if delivered on an ironic level.
And for that there is something in Hamburger that frees up the spirit,
frees up the soul. Then the biggest
irony comes in the conservative audience (the Tenacious D audience) hating him
for saying things that they apparently think while the liberal audience (the
ATP audience) love him for saying things that ordinarily abhor them and would
cause him to be ostracised by such a community.
This is deep.
Indeed by digging at
McDonalds he is acting as some kind of lefty cliché.
A shout out to the
Tenacious D crew later Hamburger further pushes the crowd’s patience suggesting
that a wall should be built onstage to separate the good audience and the bad
audience as a chant of “D” emerges from the masses as he asks if that was the
grade they got in their exams before suggesting that they probably got a more
positive score in their AIDS test. You
just can’t say these things but Hamburger the hero does. And then he even pops at another comedy hero
in the form of Robin Williams.
Not afraid to take on
sacred crows track 7 is entirely devoted to Beatle Paul and one-legged thing
that he married cleverly comparing these circumstances to those that were
predicted in the song “When I’m 64”. And
finally after that tirade we get our first “but hey, that’s my life of the
evening”.
The joke about Elton
John and a sabre tooth tiger actually manages to get a round of applause. The audience is secretly homophobic? He then jokes about Angelina Jolie adopting
in Namibia
“I have a few more jokes
before we bring out Kevin Federline and the rest of our opening acts”.
After jokes about the
Rolling Stones, Metallica and one man’s breathe smelling of eating human faeces
he introduces Tenacious D’s curtain before storming to his finale of asking why
Courtney Love won’t be having any cranberry sauce with her Christmas dinner. And it is at this point he somehow manages to
get the crowd on his side with a call and response chant of “cranberry
sauce”. People are so easily pleased.
He encores with a
track entitled “His Deathbed” ripping on Colonel Sanders and Sally Field just
to ensure that he leaves with no goodwill left in the house. Incest jokes will do that. And with that he is done and gone.
At the end of the day
Neil Hamburger is an old school entertainer.
He is neither two-faced nor arriving with an agenda, he is not Simon
Cowell or some reality joke, he is sincere in the style of Krusty The Clown.
He was paid $25,000 to
tell these jokes tonight.
In all its
characterisation, this is the real deal.
Thesaurus moment:
mordacious.
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