Alan Resnick / Major Entertainer / Neil Hamburger - Bobby Carroll's Live Comedy Diary

Written by: Bobby Carroll
Published: Thursday 17th October 2024

I went in blind to see US visual artist and Adult Swim star Alan Resnick's self-titled One Funny Hour. No preconceptions, maximum ignorance.

The show begins with a poem from Kate, his tech and childhood friend. The medium length recital is a tribute to Edinburgh delivered without snark. It is an unusually sincere non-comedy way to open a show. Not deadpan, not winking. The textbook definition of how not to kick off a laughter delivery system. In many ways the unpredictable tone is fully established in this indulgent false start. Often, over the next 75 minutes, it is indistinguishable as to what is straight playful meta comedy, intentional anti-comedy and... I'm going to do my best to give you a flavour of what Resnick achieves without spoiling too many of the mind-boggling swerves.

More neatly turned out than the Burning Man scruff depicted on his tour poster would suggest, LA resident Resnick strongly resembles Succession star Jeremy Strong with a clipped beard. Or a tech bro it is safe to leave your drink unattended with. LEDs dazzling and music pumping, his first gambit is a rather hack walk-on gimmick. If you've seen more than five Fringe shows you've seen the one where the tech doesn't stop the fanfare and the comedian's big entrance is drowned out by his own showbiz hubris. The expectation lowering entrance feels intentional and is maintained long after most acts might pull out of the sniggering fumble to start material. It seems like our patience is being tested long after even the most trusting has gotten the gag. Is Resnick reading the room? Or is he toughening us up early to the rigours of anti-comedy he intends to put us through?

Over the next 15 minutes he executes crowd pleasing meta spoofs of different types of comedy. He gives us a crash course of sub genres from clowning to mime and racism to that old familiar staple, Gun Violence Comedy. His instinct to run a gag into the ground without variation means the hardcore jump on and off board even after 3 minutes of being repeatedly shot in the head with finger guns and the same sound effect. The rulebook isn't being rewritten and it is pretty breezy for self-aware, awkward humour.

Then... it... all... switches... up...

The house lights go up, the quirky stage dressings of pot plants and ironing boards are removed. Resnick announces he has performed the required minimum minutes of comedy to now do what he really wants to achieve with his time. Kate the tech hands everyone in the audience an individual Non-Disclosure Agreement and a pen for us to all personally sign. For five minutes it is nothing but admin with Resnick waiting in the shadows, his outfit changed to dark sombre formal wear. If this is a prank, it is sustained long after any humour can be found in it.

The meat of the show happens after the confidentiality contracts are signed. I'll try my best to navigate the legal papers without giving away any of the content. Was it an unofficial Ted Talk? A pyramid scheme sales pitch? A scientology recruitment seminar? I'll never tell. What I can reveal is that for at least 20 minutes after this schism, there was not one line or image resembling a traditional or recognisable joke. It, no word of a lie, was a well-researched, erudite talk on a serious topic. Lack of laughter and eventual audible protests from pockets of the room aside, I left the Monkey Barrel vastly more informed and educated than when I entered.

The UK's current crop of master anti comedians are pretty out there. Beloved outsider acts like Ed Aczel or Mark Silcox subvert the stand-up form by delivering such vague, blurry unprofessionalism. With them, part of the gag is latching onto anything that can be repurposed as a half formed joke (and there always are) and relishing the confusion among the uninitiated as the studied, scripted non-performance unspools. To take the anti-comedy timeline back twenty years to when Will Adamsdale's Jackson's Way was a critical hit that lampooned corporate jargon, it was an authentic sales pitch but it was not dry. The fake seminar had a surfeit of humour running through it even if the declarative gags were minimal. And if we really want to go right back to the Big Bang of jokeless comedians then Andy Kaufman, whether playing Mighty Mouse or reading The Great Gatsby, did it in an obviously heightened way while he devilishly fed on and responded to any audience interruptions. There was always a coup de grace that allowed the room in on the joke.

All the above examples are mere camouflaged japery compared to what Resnick delivered in the middle act of his show. The closest we got to a laugh was him acknowledging that the bottled water he was sipping was causing an imperceptible burp. Even trying to be attuned to Resnick's intentions, I couldn't detect any coded humour in this one slim nod to the fact we had bought a ticket to a comedy show titled One Funny Hour.

The avoidance of jokes through studied boredom, smirking minimalism. The trick is obvious. But is all this unwavering poker face in the service of some eventual reveal? Will be there be a prestige?

A rude, infantile prestige? The first time it appears the room explodes. Then that gag is repeated and repeated and repeated... ad infinitum. The crowd shift from relief to mirth to interaction to boredom. All the while Resnick admirably sticks to his guns, continues his lecture without a nod or a wink to the disturbing tsunami of fleshy imagery he is bombarding us with. We go from twenty minutes of no jokes to twenty minutes of the same transgressive gag... over and over... and over... and over...

Resnick is a powerful risk taker. He runs his show into the ground three different ways: lampoon, serious, and puerile. 18+ with a mimed bullet. Totality banality engorgement. And yet he never hits a lull with his hyper intelligent abrasiveness. Between the long game prank it does feel like the 75 minutes says something fertile. Is it comedy? Is it art? One Funny Hour is ugly enough to be one and reactive enough to be the other. Resnick deserved praise for his naturalism and commitment to the dead eyed torture. His director Anna Seregina undoubtedly deserves to take a bow too as the deeply sophisticated performance and unique orchestration of an audience could never be achieved in the moment and off the cuff. Memorably disturbing.

How perverse to say I was on far safer ground attending An Evening of Carefree Entertainment With Neil Hamburger almost a month later, at Monkey Barrel again? The infamous spoof character has been going for over 30 years now and had a reputation for supporting rock bands on arena tours and sometimes being boo'd off stage.

His own support, Major Entertainer, was super fun. An animated middle aged dude in an embroidery and sequin dappled cowboy shirt. He immolates the underground stage with an overkill of sound, backing tracks and furious feedback. All the while scanning the room with a furrowed brow, eyes interrogating the crowd. Are they going for it? Why are they going for it?

Some men hit their forties and embrace cycling or train sets. Major Entertainer got himself a cue board and an 8 bit music generator. He's Gene Belcher from Bob's Burgers all grown up and staring into the abyss of suburban obsoletion. The song What Happened to Heather? and a bridging tale of his high school best mate Dewey reveal a bleakness and the terror of nostalgia. Obscure Canadian horror flick Pin becomes a constant motif.

Major Entertainer kept on giving shameless powerhouse quirk. He prepped the room for the big ticket with flair. Get on the weird train. Don't stand on the platform hoping a normal car comes down the rails.

Neil Hamburger opens and closes on a song. His rendition of Heart's Crazy On You feels more like a threat. He skulks on with four pint sized cocktails under one crooked arm of his worn dinner jacket. When one mega drink is finished he pours the ice cubes on his head. One cube sticks to his greasy ink black combover for the entire first tirade of insult gags.

Gregg Turkington started this as a prank and now he is seemingly trapped in the monstrous cult success Neil Hamburger has become. The never blinking never winking "legendary.... LEDGE-EN-DAIRY" character act gives us his hits. Some of these slams on popular rock acts are older than the audience members. The only variations from his live CDs from my university days are that Dave Grohl gets some extra attention now that he is topical again with recent minor scandal, and mentally vulnerable female recording artists are now completely given a pass. His targets are safely, cis white male ageing guitar gods and mediocre one hit wonders from back in the day. Some references are so dated they leave the front row looking baffled. The Grateful Dead and Jim Morrison. "Tell them... tell them!" he implores the bald heads in the room.

I normally never ruin an act's jokes, but many of Hamburger's have been kicking about from a time before Napster and Limewire. For example...

What.. WHAT... What's worse than getting a parking ticket on your birthday?

"What?" we respond with pantomime glee.

Getting a Foo Fighters ticket for your birthday.

That's the geometry of about 75% of the show. There is some clever wordplay here and there, the bile is often off the register, the above illustrative example is tame. You wouldn't want more than 30 minutes of it. We get more than that and it explains why opener Major Entertainer eats up so much of the carefree evening's runtime upfront.

Where Hamburger excels is his audible self-disgust. Often after a bon mot about The Police or Rob Schneider, there is a cough of phlegm or a whine of disgust that almost chokes the stupidity. Muffled howls of discontent. Exclamations of pain so normalised that they might just be a dead in the eye unflinching comic's humanity leaking out beneath the hate. Beautiful.

Neil Hamburger. Major Entertainer. The pair of them are still inarguably alternative but maybe in a way that is now immediately graspable. What once felt revolutionary is now merely trad punk. Punk that capsizes comedy expectations but sinking only confident swimmers who already know torpedoes are on the way to their pleasure cruise. Alan Resnick, bless his heart, has no interest in getting you back to shore or even sinking the boat with any regard to naval law, buoyancy or intergalactic physics. How earth shattering do you want it?

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