Humour and the Unacceptable in Neil Hamburger’s Routine

Abstract

This paper addresses the comic routine of Australian born U.S. comedian Gregg Turkington’s alter-ego, ‘Neil Hamburger’, from the perspective of Aristotle’s ancient conception of the risible as a species of the unacceptable, or the unseemly. In doing so, it explores two thresholds of acceptability, subjective and social, which are relevant to an understanding of Hamburger’s comic style. The paper argues that Hamburger’s style willfully violates those thresholds, risking the audience’s laughter, and yet working towards the visualization of a less normative kind of ‘unseemliness’ that underlies Hamburger’s politics: reverence for celebrity and the sacred.

“This Kindergarten Country of Ours”: Daniel Tosh's Postmodern Social Politics

“…While Tosh never responded directly to Bassist, he revisited the controversy in his latest special, ironically titled People Pleaser (2016), where he explains, “You can accept that things are tragic and awful and still have a sense of humor about them; it doesn't make you a bad person despite what some blog may say.” Daniel Derrin provides a useful explanation of the ways in which unacceptable humor might be re‐evaluated for a more nuanced understanding of its social possibilities: “It is better to think of rebellious humour as an alternative moral vision that people can share or not share, find funny or not find funny” (5). In Tosh's case, Derrin's notion of a “shared moral vision” can be understood as the constant rejection of binary thought—the black‐and‐white reduction in logic to truisms, folk wisdom, or platitudes.…”