Chomp! Neil Hamburger at Hemlock Tavern
What, me worried? Photo by James Maclennan.
By Ben Sinclair
While Neil Hamburger, the oldest and most haggard to receive the title “America’s Youngest Comedian,” is generally enough to handle on his own, having an act like Pleeseasaur (hardly related to the plesiosaur, ancient Loch Ness monster-resembling reptile of the underwater world) open for him felt overstimulating. Not in a bad way, as this is the humor of estrangement, but each performer so demands your attention that to keep laughing for the length of their set can be a trying task. However, on Saturday, Sept. 27, at the Hemlock Tavern, this task was well worth it.
Hamburger brought his repertoire of dark, so-bad-they’re-awesome jokes, told between spates of phlegmy, audience-snuffing smoker’s coughs and interspersed with long digressions.
He also played a game with hecklers: at one point he launched into a series of compliments directed at a few women in front of the stage. Someone yelled, “Tell some jokes!” Hamburger then accused him of having no respect for “these pretty laaadies," so he asked if the audience would pay, in dimes, the amount of the guy’s ticket in order to get him out. An even better use for these coins, he continued, would be to stack them on the guy’s face as he lay down and stomp a long narrow hole through his forehead.
Tenacious D tourmate Neil Hamburger stalks the red carpet at the premiere of Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny. Photo by Simone Turkington.
The set oscillated between moments such as these and jokes like, "What do you call five digits when they’re grasping a child’s penis? The Jackson 5!” and "Why did the members of Metallica cut of all their hair? Well, it was the only way to get all the matted cum out!”
At one point Hamburger apologized to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and an alleged fangirl in the audience for making so much fun of Anthony Kiedis. He followed up by claiming she’d told him earlier that “over the last 20 years (despite their truly horrific music), they have been paying very, very good wages to the mentally retarded... to design their tatt-ooos!”
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