Tim Heidecker & Neil Hamburger @ Soho Theatre Review - 21/8/17
Tim Heidecker starts his 40 minute set in the cramped downstairs lounge of the Soho Theatre with two minutes of physical comedy - he wrestles frustratedly with the microphone and its stand, desperately trying to fit the mic into its holder and aim it at his mouth. It’s an easy task, but Heidecker makes it look like the most physically challenging action a person can undertake. It’s such an hilariously incompetent way to start a show, and it’s a bit that has some of that Story of Everest sketch from Mr Show formula in its blood - the longer it goes on, the funnier it gets. And the more painful it gets, the funnier it gets. The microphone swings wildly at the end of its cable, sometimes coming within inches of audience members, at other times crashing loudly to the wooden floor. As well as feeling dangerous and unorthodox, its a test of endurance, and like the rest of his and Turkington’s set, it dares you to keep laughing at it. It’s comedy that is so furiously funny that you have no choice but to keep laughing. Heidecker, getting progressively furious and demanding the music be turned off, is a master of playing a character that is completely losing control, as is Turkington.
The concept of a lack of control is at the centre of the two sets. Heidecker’s routine is a terrifyingly accurate parody of those terrible, right-wing “i’m anti-PC!” comedians - his ugly leather jacket, unflattering dad jeans and sweat stained shirt make his character look like a stressed out alcoholic who is furious at his audience. “I say to people ‘I’m a comedian’, they say ‘what, like Tim Allen’, and I say “OOOOUUGGH?”, is one of his opening lines, a line that references Tim Allen’s, erm, catchphrase - a reference so dated and awful that it could’ve come from Tim Allen himself. Heidecker has such a perfectly tuned ear for how this kind of person talks, a catchphrase spouting, self-praising blowhard who spends most of his set talking about how twisted his mind is. It’s such a perfect distillation of a comic blowing their own set through anger and incompetence, and aside from being jaw-achingly funny, it actually has something to say about the hypocrisy and foolishness of a very specific brand of white male comedians who mistake their own anger for edginess, and mistake that edginess for something that people would actually want to hear.
Early on in the set, he asks “What do you call this, London? England?”, at which point he makes direct eye contact with me. I nod, and he angrily says “you’re just nodding, which fucking one is it?”. Being the target of his frustration would be uncomfortable if it wasn’t so unbelievably funny. The audience members are hostages, and his inability to interact with them successfully keeps us at gunpoint. Because it feels so loose and purposefully sloppy, it has a feeling of anything-goes mayhem which makes it funny in such an immediate and urgent sense. At one point, he looks down at my girlfriend who has been laughing through the entire set, and for no apparent reason asks “Are you alright?”, in a kind of “What the fuck is wrong with you, why are you laughing?” voice. When she says yes, he pulls a face that’s hard to describe, and is best illustrated by using this screenshot from Heidecker’s web short Tim’s Cook Off:
Later, someone says something quietly in the audience, to which he loses his temper and insists on restarting his interminably pointless story about a movie theatre (”I went to the movies last week, we saw....uh...Superman”) that had Pepsi instead of Coke. He curses himself, and gets angrier and angrier as he routinely blows the most simple of “punchlines”, and like the microphone that he couldn’t put onto its stand, it gets funnier and funnier the more he misses. His crowd-work ranges from almost non-jokes (he walks over to me and says “Lets talk to the guy with the hair, I love it! What’s your name? Alexander? Alexander the Great! Here we go!”), to defeatist and aggressive (”Kyle? I have nothing for that name, you understand that? You’ve given me fucking nothing”), which all manages to be funnier than most comedians’ actual jokes.
Fans of his work will know how funny he can be physically, and he puts that on display when regaling the audience with a story about his wife dragging him to the opera. His face when describing his anger is the kind of face that he does so well, the kind that has spawned endless GIFs across the internet - clenched teeth, face trembling in thunderous anger, head twitching to the side - it is such an hysterically unfitting over-reaction to the situation, and it develops this horrible character that he’s playing: someone with a whole bunch of misplaced, impotent fury. The story ends with him saying he jumped from his seat, leant towards the stage and screamed “SHUT THE FUCK UUUUPPP!!!??!” at the performers. And he claims this story received a ten-minute standing ovation at his last show, implying that we were rude not to do the same.
The bit is a perfect distillation of who this character is: the loudest man on earth with the worst, most toxic opinions, who thinks he’s brave for saying what everyone else is supposedly “afraid to say”. Throughout Heidecker’s career, no matter how surreal and abstract his work has gotten, it shouldn’t be forgotten that what he really is is a satirist. Whether he’s making fun of late night talk shows, right-wing-targeted action TV programmes or self-important male comedians, what he really is - and what his set really demonstrates - is that he is one of the best satirists in comedy.
And so is Gregg Turkington, whose set as Neil Hamburger follows Heidecker. If Heidecker’s persona is someone desperately trying to hold on to some semblance of control, Hamburger is Heidecker in another 10 years: off script, off the road, and wallowing in chaos. There is no control whatsoever with this person. His comedy is Andy Kaufman-esque, playing with the basic form of comedy itself. Some people have described this style as “anti-humour”, which is a term i’ve never been fond of. Turkington isn’t anti-comedy: he clearly loves it, and is bending it and twisting it to his own unique style. He doesn’t subvert typical comedy by resisting it - he subverts it by taking typical comedy and channelling it through an abrasive, ugly man in the middle of a meltdown.
It isn’t anti-comedy, because the comedy and the material is there - although in some senses, it’s not really the material that matters: it’s the performance. You can go and see Hamburger for the jokes, but what his shows are really about is a man who clearly has such a disastrous personal life that it has seeped into his work, and now his show - and his hair - all drip with booze and fear. Some bits don’t even have clearcut punchlines, because he is this joke. When he tells jokes about Gene Simmons, the thing that is funniest about it isn’t the punchline, it’s the progression towards it. He starts by calling him “Leeeegendary” and showering him with superlatives, but somehow over the course of his rambling, his descriptions of Gene Simmons have turned to “Physically disgusting, repugnant, worthless singer...”. Like the Heidecker character, the anger inside this man is turning all of his jokes into assaults, and if someone dares to boo or shout “That’s stupid”, which someone does after a bit about Ozzy Osbourne biting the head off a cooked chicken, he snarls “No it isn’t, because it’s true to life”.
Moments of clarity in his character like that are some of the funniest, and that clarity is deftly juxtaposed with convoluted absurdity - and there is a kind of genius in how he balances both in his stories. One, for example, is about a joke Paul McCartney told while judging a contest for charity. The story about the contest rambles on with a fair amount of reasoning and believability, and this in itself is funny - the idea of this drunk, wet haired, comb-overed, phlegm-clearing old insult comic being at some sort of contest with Paul McCartney - and finding it delightful - is a deeply funny image because it places this nightmare in front of you in the real world. And then, he twists it into another absurd direction where suddenly nothing makes sense, when he nonchalantly reveals that it was a pissing contest that he was judging. For charity. And that’s not even the punchline, but it might as well be. (The punchline is that Paul McCartney, when choosing a winner - after seeing 150 contestants - said ‘Peed Best!).
His references are largely ancient and esoteric - they’re jokes that’d require you to know specifically about the works of bands like the Grateful Dead, and whether you do or do not doesn’t matter - it’s the seeming disgust and discomfort he seems to have in his own material and his own being that is key to his work. After a more current joke about Linkin Park earns encouraged groans from the audience, it’s his disbelief that anyone could find it distasteful that is the biggest laugh. “Don’t worry, i’m sure they’ll keep making shitty music for you and your shitty friends”, he says, seeming to hate everyone in the room for not liking him, as well as hating himself for putting himself in this situation. With a lesser performer, it could be simply unpleasant, but with Turkington, it’s that unpleasantness that makes it kind of funny, and, to paraphrase Tears for Fears, kind of sad. Under all the nastiness, there is something human and tuned-in about these guys that stops them from being simple exercises in irony. There is an ugly, human truth in them that’s as tragic as it is hilarious. There’s almost a bit of sympathy in there, too.
A very good movie came out a couple of years ago called Entertainment, a surreal road movie where Turkington plays himself and Hamburger, and the influences in that movie make it clear where he is getting his influences from: all over America. Hamburger is a great amalgam of old, dusty comedians in darkened barrooms who refuse to alter their personality despite it doing them no good, and self-sabotaging losers that live in Tom Waits songs. Hamburger’s and Heidecker’s personas come directly from these types of people, and they are worthy and potently funny portraits of these broken rejects. Moreover, the show as a whole says more about comedy than most documentaries about comedy do. They are trapped in a past that never really was, where they’re certain this material would kill. Heidecker and Turkington, in real life, do kill in Soho. They do the seemingly impossible and control the uncontrollable, masterfully managing their sets while still allowing them to feel chaotic. They put on an exciting show of two halves which compliment each other beautifully, and as well as being smart, on point, and terrific performances, they are uniquely and fiercely hilarious.
Oh, and Tim is a really nice guy, too.
Heidecker and Turkington (or Hamburger, if you like) are playing at the Soho Theatre in London until 2nd September, and you can and really should get tickets here.
