You've gotta be a sick bugger to like Neil Hamburger. Neil's an ersatz tenth-rate comedian character created by Greg Turkington, and the concept is simple: Neil sucks. Neil goes out on the stage with bad, poorly-learned, dated material, and bombs horrendously. Consistently. When he somehow manages to win over an audience, it's accidental, and you get the feeling they're always laughing at him, not with him. Raw Hamburger ups the ante by giving Neil a new hook -- this time out, he's working blue. In the Neil Hamburger context, that means sudden, almost tourettes-like outbursts of gratuitous profanity, puerile dirty jokes and wanton, tasteless attempts to be edgy. You'll hear Neil tell jokes without punchlines, and hold for laughs that never come. You'll hear him bail on jokes halfway through the setup, and make ridiculous non-sequitur transitions. Sometimes you'll hear him bait audience members and pay the price; other times he'll fight a losing battle for their attention At one point, he tries repeatedly to get someone, anyone, to give the traditonal "How dumb is he?" response to his "My friend is so dumb..." -- and when it fails, he smoothly moves along with "But women like big dicks, huh?" And if that's not enough to bust your spleen, it's clear that these audiences are almost as strange as Neil himself -- they sporadically, without taste or warning, actually laugh at his non-jokes (including a three-minute laughing jag near the end of the disc). The beauty of Neil Hamburger is that he really thinks his material is funny; to him, the audience inexplicably fails to get his hysterical jokes. As with the best caricatures, Neil's played absolutely straight -- so if you're literal-minded, you might not see the point of Raw Hamburger. But if you get the meta-joke, you'll laugh at Neil -- not with him -- for hours.
Neil Hamburger Raw Hamburger Drag City CD
			Review by George "But That's My Life!" Zahora

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