‘What disease did legendary ice-cream makers Ben & Jerry give to all the prostitutes in their home town of Waterbury, Vermont?” “At what point at a Julio Iglesias concert do most people throw up?” Say what you like about anti-comedian Neil Hamburger, but his set-ups alone are works of art. Gregg Turkington has been playing the character for more than 25 years, ploughing a distinctive furrow of anti-comedy, where the jokes aren’t just bad – by conventional standards – but often outright evil. This Soho theatre gig was the first time I’d watched the act in a few years, certainly since we embarked on our new cultural moment of (supposedly) hair-trigger sensitivity to offence – in which atmosphere, you might think Turkington’s shtick would curdle.
It doesn’t – for a variety of reasons. It’s interesting watching the show within days of seeing Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais in action. Those latter acts are frequently unpleasant, while insisting they don’t mean to be. By contrast Hamburger, who was created to be repugnant, is – on this form – almost lovable. Carr and Gervais style themselves as PC refuseniks, fearlessly telling all those jokes against lesbians, fat people and the trans community that the rest of us are too oppressed to tell. I don’t know the first thing about Turkington’s personality or politics, but that’s clearly not what he’s up to with Neil Hamburger.
Whether or not it’s a deliberate response to changing mores, who knows, but homophobia is absent from No One Loves a Hater. That’s not always been the case with Hamburger, a tuxedo-clad old-school entertainer, hair greased across his pate, clutching his vodkas like a lifeline, whimpering in self-hate after every poison punchline. He bows to no one – not Frankie Boyle, not Jerry Sadowitz – in terms of the rococo horrors his imagination can conjure. Sexual deviance, diseases – it’s all here, and revelled in. But as background, usually, not as the butt of the joke.
That role falls to the more or less obscure celebrities that get Hamburger’s goat. The character is a failure, a sad-sack; his life is pathetic. His act is about hating on people whose success rubs his nose in it – particularly, those whom a 1950s relic such as Hamburger might consider counter-cultural. The Grateful Dead, Johnny Depp, the lead singer of Blind Melon: “perverts”. Limp Bizkit: “jerks”. ET and Domino’s Pizza: signs of the end times. A long central section breaks up the one-liner rhythm with a dark-fantasy tirade against Kiss frontman Gene Simmonds’ new restaurant in Terminal 1 of LAX airport.
So the joke’s not on the abused minorities in Carr and Gervais’s firing lines. It’s on an arbitrary selection of B-list celebs. And – rebounding back off them – it’s on Hamburger himself. As Sadowitz and, to a lesser extent, acts like Doug Stanhope demonstrate, hateful comedy flies when we can see what hate does to the hater. (We’re laughing less at the ostensible butt of their jokes than at the loser, the broken man, who’s telling them.) It’s an uglier proposition when the comic is high status, when we’re encouraged to see viciousness and meanness of spirit as cool attributes, as something to admire – as a ticket, indeed, to fame, fortune and adulation.
That’s not to say Hamburger’s current show is an offence-free zone. Some may well find his zingers – glancing at rape, eating disorders, drug abuse and so on – hard to take. The brand of resentful inadequacy he’s sending up feels pretty male – and he attracts a mainly male crowd, among them fans who bark and whine in sync with Hamburger, to show how much they get the joke. I’d guess that behaviour is more likely to offend than anything Turkington says, in a show proving that – even in our brave new safe-space world – there’s life in this loathsome character act yet.
• Neil Hamburger: No One Loves a Hater is at Soho theatre, London, to 29 June.
