Neil Hamburger
There’s not very much comedy left in stand-up comedy. Everyone with any insight or charm has his own sitcom by now, and with all those cable television channels to fill, any dimwit with a cheap sport coat and a spiral notebook (for his “societal observations”) can now turn a buck kvetching about airplane food and sex.
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Although he never quite gives contemporary stand-up the smack in the face it so deserves, the fictional Neil Hamburger takes some prisoners via the nearly extinct format of the comedy LP. Hamburger, the creation of prolific Bay Area quirk rocker Gregg Turkington, is presented “onstage” gauchely delivering a god-awful performance. Turkington (whose better-known endeavors include the Amarillo record label, the zine Breakfast With Meat, and the band Zip Code Rapists) is only alluded to in production and copyright credits, and even stays in character for interviews and the record’s spelling-disabled liner notes, a “Special Edition!” of “Neil Hamburger Newsletter.”
Occasionally, however, Turkington grants his character an idiotically delighted audience, and this is where America’s Funnyman hits the bull’s-eye. After all, the funniest part of the Saturday Night Live Seinfeld satire was the studio audience’s reaction: the crowd seemed to miss the point, laughing at the intentionally bad jokes rather than at their intended banality. What’s really weird about bad comedians is how hard the American public laughs at their oh-it’s-so truisms.
It’s especially appropriate that Turkington has enlisted Neil Hamburger in Drag City’s army. Many independent record labels define themselves by a sound, but Drag City’s melting-pot roster is united by a shared pursuit of irreverence in the face of the mainstreaming of underground music. Former Slint bassist Ethan Buckler deserted punk rock for the arguably more provocative goofball funk of King Kong; Palace and Pavement have encouraged their own mystique with pseudonyms; Royal Trux and the Silver Jews started out making consummately abrasive records, pushing the limits of what indie-rock’s self-proclaimed open-minded audience would tolerate.
