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Brick Wall Comedy
Brick Wall Comedy

Raw Hamburger

Neil Hamburger

Drag City · Album · 1998 · 32 min

A failing lounge comic attempts a disastrously edgy rebrand.

Gregg Turkington’s alter ego Neil Hamburger is an act built on profound failure, but his 1998 album finds a specific new way for him to fail. Fictional management supposedly pressured the comedian to modernize his material for the audio release, hoping he could compete with the shock-value comics of the era. Hamburger obliges, applying his trademark throat-clearing, agonizing pauses, and miserable anti-comedy to subjects he clearly does not understand.

Instead of pushing boundaries, Hamburger delivers punishing jokes about bestiality, cloning, and Snoop Dogg. The punchlines are deliberately weak, turning the tension onto the live audience. They are forced to endure an entertainer attempting an edgy rebrand that only highlights his own pathetic existence. Released by Drag City, the record builds out the lore of a desperate lounge act trying to salvage a sinking career by isolating whatever fans he had left.

The set list

3 bits

  1. Trying on topical material about rap music and Snoop Doggy Dogg.

    Delivering clumsy, poorly conceived jokes on current subjects that miss all conventional humor.

  2. Exploring profanity and forbidden topics in a bid to perform 'raw' adult stand-up.

    Relying on tired taboos and dead joke tropes as a form of comedic necrophilia.

  3. She Sits Among the Cabbages and Peas.

    A musical novelty tune tacked on at the conclusion of the performance about a urine-filled vegetable garden.

How it plays

Tone
Abrasive, cynical, deliberately unamusing, crude, and depressing.
On stage
The worst comedian in the world: an inept, washed-up, sad-sack airport-lounge comic and self-proclaimed 'America's Funnyman' who is abrasive, clumsy, and painfully out of touch.
Pace
Labored delivery with painful timing, awkward pauses, hacking throat-clearing, and defeated sighs.
About
profanity and blue humor, drugs and freebasing, divorce and comedians' wives, disease, AIDS, and Alzheimer's, celebrities and pop culture, the right to die

What the critics said

Lauded by alternative comedy critics as a brilliant, hilarious deconstruction of stand-up comedy and mediocrity through aggressive anti-humor, while acknowledged as intentionally polarizing and likely to baffle mainstream audiences.

In the room: Studio-engineered hostile lounge atmosphere filled with clinking silverware, uncomfortable silence, groans, boos, hisses, and an eventual physical beatdown by an enraged patron.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: en.wikipedia.org, dragcity.com, neilhamburger.bandcamp.com, prettygoodmusic.app, avclub.com, washingtoncitypaper.com, spidey.kfjc.org, markprindle.com.

Backstory

Conceived and performed by Gregg Turkington as an anti-comedy studio project that used canned crowd chatter and ambient lounge noise to portray a pathetic, hack lounge comedian urged by his manager Art Huckman to spice up his act with R-rated 'raw' material.

Details

Released
Runtime
32 min
Where
Drag City (album)
Topics
After
Laugh Out Lord (2002)

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