For twenty years now Gregg Turkington has been performing under the guise of Neil Hamburger, the worlds most visible proponent of the anti-humour movement and a deliberate attempt to create the world’s worst stand up comedian at the same time. With a limply pasted comb-over, wheezy delivery and an ill-fitting tux, Hamburger is part Vegas sleaze and part misanthropic ghoul. His routine typically consists of a series increasingly bizarre and offensive one-liners:

Why does Britney Spears sell so many millions of albums? Because the public is horny and depressed.

Did you guys hear the one about the paparazzi with the heart of gold? He stole it from Princess Diana as she lay dying in her car.

Why did Sir Mick Jagger shove a carrot up his daughter’s ass? He mistook her for a fan.

Why did God create Domino’s Pizza? To punish humanity for their complacency at letting the Holocaust happen.

Delivered with a languid, phlegmy rasp until the audience begins hurling bottles at his head. Equally loved and reviled in equal measure, Hamburger’s act has been scarily consistent for the length of his twenty year career, which makes Entertainment, a demystification of the Hamburger persona, appear somewhat like a swan song. A final desperate and depressing howl made by an ugly person adrift in an ugly world. It is also one of the most grimly hilarious, unique and startling films to come out of America this year.

The film is loosely structured around a series of sinister encounters and crowd-baiting gigs, so awful that if Hamburger weren’t so abjectly numbed to his environment they’d be humiliating. He moves from one anonymous deadbeat bar to another with such passivity that it’s credit to those involved how compelling a central figure he actually is. In one sequence, the comedian assists in the birth of a still-born baby and his face barely registers beyond his default expression of dulled exasperation and bemusement. There are a number of moments similar to this, that demonstrate that although Hamburgers act is one of shock and confrontation, it’s off stage where the true horror takes place. A full-throated suffocating claim that the comedian is prisoner to his creation: both his life-blood and his death rattle in equal measure. He has no life, no personality and most importantly no purpose beyond his role as the hatful and hated Hamburger. One recurring ‘gag’ that drums home this point takes the form of a series of increasingly pathetic and lonely voicemail messages he leaves for his anonymous off –screen daughter that comment on the increasing banality of his existence.

Entertainment is directed and co-written by Rick Alverson, who treaded similar anti-comedy territory in his previous film The Comedy. Whereas the former was a very specific skewing of post-millennial apathy amongst privileged Brooklynites, Entertainment lacks it’s predecessors social critique, though is in some ways a more formally ambitious work. There’s a real command of visual dislocation, that leaves the audience as disorientated as the comedian. Alternating between expansive washed out desert and claustrophobic sodium-lit interiors, the film purposely denies us both spatial and temporal consistency. Scenes often abruptly end before satisfactory resolution or extend into hypnotic monotony. This visual and temporal abstraction is geographically anchored in one cruelly funny gag; that the film is building towards a glitzy celeb-filled (Liza Minnelli!) gig in the Hollywood Hills. Though the reality is that he hyperventilates inside the giant cake he’s meant to jump out of before the show can even start.

Although it can be broadly viewed as comedy, Entertainment most closely resembles a horror film. Flavoured with Lynchian style interaction and a fever-dream logic, there’s a building tension created in whether the increasingly anaesthetized Hamburger is going to finally implode. One film that also uses the desert road trip as a location for existential horror was Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms, but whereas that film explodes into a moment of extreme violence, the true abject misery of Entertainment is that Hamburger’s meaningless, pitiful existence will continue on and on in an endless stream of loneliness and hatred.

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