June 11, 2006
Gabe’s Oasis
By Sean Moeller
Maybe for comedians it’s different. Maybe when they tell someone they’d like to have them come out on tour and open for them, they’re really just offering them a trap door, something that person will unwittingly fall into. As they fall, from the top, you hear their wailing getting softer and softer as they slide through the chute and pop out into the waiting dumpster at the other end. If you’re a band, you bring someone good out with you, someone you can drink slippery nipples with and someone who can appreciate a good dirty joke or two. It’s more congenial, like asking for a cup of sugar or to borrow the neighbor’s garden hose. It’s a win-win.

Poor, poor Daiquiri. Poor, poor anyone who warms the microphone before Neil Hamburger. The way it seemed this night is that there are diehard Hamburger fans, already sauced up and ready to hear jokes about Metallica cutting their hair because it was the only way to get the matted sperm out of it and anything to the contrary, anything additional in the form of an opening act is unwarranted and doomed. Songs about glass found on the side of a highway, a sadistic/scary version of Foreigner’s “I Wanna Know What Love Is” and the quirkiness of a unicorn costume and an overhead projector with slides that say things like “Sometimes We Lose Money On Shows” are no match for priceless and tasteless jokes about Britney Spears and Madonna feeding her infant child Alpo dog food.

Hamburger is a purveyor of the least common denominator joke, going below the belt frequently and pulling his hand back up to find that he’s got something stinky, but altogether hilarious in his grasp. I purposefully took a friend who had never heard of Hamburger to the show, warned him little about what he was going to witness and then enjoyed hearing him laugh at the jokes about shit and Courtney Love, one after the other that made for a night of off-color, side-splitting wrongness. Entering the stage from the faux green room, Hamburger came out in a ratty tuxedo, with a lime-topped drink in his hands and his hair greased over with Vaseline or some other slimy hair treatment. He made quite the entrance. When he reached the mic, he let out one of his signature throat-clearing hacks and a stream of slobber escaped from his mouth and rolled down his suit. My thought: Perfect. He jumped right in with some new material about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. He sticks to his claim that he gets all of his material – especially all of the heroin news about Love – from the USA Today, the nation’s Bible. About Jolie and Pitt, Hamburger asked – in his conventional riddle format, “Why did Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have their baby in Namibia? Well, that way they had a scapegoat when the baby turns out to be retarded.”

Without beating a dead horse (too much), Hamburger ran down the roll call of maligned and overexposed celebrities, funning on their faults and perceived downfalls, ragging on their celebrity and their omnipresence. The jokes are so crass and crude and fantastical that they’re hilarious just in their telling, in their derivation. The fact that Hamburger thought many of these jokes in the first place is essentially what makes them funny. His down-on-luck, boy-I’m-faltering-up-here persona adds to the fire and makes his vaudevillian, lounge singer look the very definition of clashing. Though we know he’s not really a guy in a tuxedo (because that would mean he would be portraying a sense of style and properness, the man of the ballroom) and he’s actually just in a bar with nothing too fancy on tap, the jokes come out of him with a little shock value, as if your grandmother were telling you to not be such a pussy. He spins the pronunciations of Doobie Brothers, cranberry sauce and Paris Hilton sex video in the same delicious and wavy octave-jumping spurt that makes the words a joke that defies convention. Then when the World’s Funnyman (his new DVD of the same name is set for release in August on Drag City) tells me that Ronald McDonald is a well-known collector of Old West weaponry and that Michael Jackson turned down a $10 million offer from McDonald’s to advertise Happy Meals because “he doesn’t at all find obese children sexually appealing,” I become a diehard.

But that’s…my life.

www.dragcity.com
Unofficial website: www.americasfunnyman.com
Become Neil’s friend at: www.myspace.com/americasfunnyman