Neil Hamburger--

Left For Dead in Malaysia

(Drag City 163)

You either got the central conceit of "It's Garry Shandling's Show" or you didn't.

. . . and you either laugh at the Red's Bar telephone prank tape or you didn't. And you'll either get this or not. If you don't, chances are you're a better person for it.

Here's the set-up: Neil Hamburger is the worst comedian in the world, a walking advertisement that stand-up really is hard work and not just any juice-bar raconteur should take his act on the road. Almost every aborted joke he mewls is so completely off of the mark that, to some of us retreads it's a whole new form of comedy: anti-comedy, if you will, where the funniest jokes are the worst because they just ain't funny! Which, in itself, is some sort of anti-tautology. I think. Hell, call Richard Rorty, ask him.

Every album (and this is his third, which means that not only are suckers born every minute but so are suckers three times over, count me one of which because I have bought them all) is a painful shaggy dog exercise the whole purpose of which is to make the listener squirm uncomfortably. Occasionally he comes up with a good one (for example, talking about his ex-wife's new husband: "He's a dentist. A dentist. Can you believe that? Don't they scribble on their dicks with crayons?") but these are totally accidental or even non sequiturial and as such merely show up the rest of the albums as being that much more of a grind. The joke here... well, the only joke here... is that he's booked for a gig in Malaysia, but no-one in the audience speaks English. So he gets loaded on Mai Tais and drools into the mic for forty minutes. And just so you get it, really get it: there are no jokes.

So why do I like it? The easy answer is that I'm perverse and that my irony glands are swollen to the size of baseballs. I don't want to know what the deeper reason is. I might be going screwy, but if so then so are a couple of my friends so at least I've got company. Just pray you don't run into us in a dark alley, else you'll hear my own stand-up routine, the one that I worked up in high school that featured the joke about SteakUmms ("Are they steak? Ummm....") and that I was too gormless (or intelligent) to perform in public.

None of us wants that. Least of all, Neil Hamburger. He's got a beautiful little niche going.

—T. Magil