What's It Like to Live as One of the 'Worst' Comics in the World

It's 1992 and a 20-something Gregg Turkington is sitting with friends in a San Francisco apartment making prank phone calls. They dial a local nightclub and ask who's performing. As the owner starts to answer, Turkington blurts out, "Cancel it! Neeeeeil Hamburger's in town!!!"

In an unlikely career that surprises even him, Turkington has turned his spontaneous joke - immortalized on an album he called "Great Phone Calls" - into a full-fledged, internationally known character. As phlegm-voiced stand-up comic Neil Hamburger, he sports a terrible comb-over, an ill-fitted tux and huge glasses, while delivering vulgar, groan-worthy one-liners that eviscerate celebrities and corporations.

"What's the difference between Courtney Love and the American flag?" Hamburger asks in a smarmy, creaking whine. "It would be wrong to urinate on the American flag." If anyone boos or heckles, Hamburger drowns them out with a deafening throat-clear, begs for their mercy ("c'mon, I have cancer!") or attacks them with vitriolic put-downs.

Though he's probably baffled as many people as he's entertained, Turkington has achieved legitimate success in this odd role. He's released 11 albums, appeared on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" and even played at Madison Square Garden, opening for Tenacious D.

"I could never have imagined the things that have happened to me," Turkington, now 47, marvels. "Young comics come up to me and ask, 'What can I do to have a career, what did you do?' I say, 'I don't think I have the advice you're looking for. You can't really follow this path.' "
 
For a long time, Turkington closely guarded that path, only doing interviews in character and never revealing secrets (like how a man with a full head of hair creates a comb-over). "I think these kind of things are better when there's mystery," he explains. "So often in comedy, people don't take it all the way. They nudge-nudge and wink-wink - 'see, we're just kidding!' I don't think it's funny unless it has total commitment."

Turkington's dedication to a confrontational character is, in a way, following in a comedy tradition. His clearest forefather is Tony Clifton, the alter ego of Andy Kaufman, who wore an even tackier tux and provoked crowds into heckling sprees. Turkington himself cites respect for Andrew "Dice" Clay, who was so committed to his foul-mouthed persona that "it was detrimental to his career that people believed that this was actually who this guy was," Turkington says.

Recently, Turkington's commitment to the Neil Hamburger story has changed because of a new role. He's the lead in director Rick Alverson's feature film Entertainment, a fictional tale of a comic touring the West Coast. Turkington is billed only as "The Comedian," but he performs his Hamburger routine in onstage scenes. In between, we watch him travel, prep for shows (including creating his comb-over), and contend with family struggles and existential crises. At first, the movie - which also stars John C. Reilly and Michael Cera - appears to shed the mystery surrounding Neil Hamburger.

But Entertainment (in select theaters and available on-demand and on iTunes Nov. 13) is no documentary, and it is much murkier than a straight behind-the-scenes biopic. "I had no interest in it being a promotional vehicle for Neil Hamburger, and that (opinion) interested Gregg," says Alverson, who first worked with Turkington on his previous film, 2012's "The Comedy."

"Originally we were going to name my character Neil Hamburger," adds Turkington. "But then the movie could be misinterpreted as a promotional vehicle, and who wants to see a vehicle for some act they've never heard of? If somebody hears about a movie about some depressing comedian that's at the end of his rope, that sounds more interesting than 'Did you see the new Neil Hamburger movie?' "

So the pair eschewed the detailed back story that Turkington built over the years for Hamburger, and instead made a dark, unpredictable film that provokes more questions about this unusual character than it answers. There may be new information about Neil Hamburger in "Entertainment," but the mystery remains.

Still, putting Hamburger in someone else's hands wasn't easy for Turkington. "Having controlled this character for more than 20 years, it was difficult to give up on the way it's presented," he recalls. "But once Rick talked me into it, it was easy to put all my trust in him." "I understood that I was essentially messing with his livelihood," Alverson adds. "I'm really grateful to Gregg for trusting me and being totally vulnerable."

The basic plot of Entertainment - a comic on tour - is rather simple. But Alverson uses bleak tones, minimal action and surrealist turns to upend road-movie cliché. As he journeys down empty highways between increasingly tense gigs, the Comedian reacts to disturbing events with near-paralyzed stoicism. Alverson imagined the character behind the comic as a resigned, exhausted man, and asked Turkington to play him "very flat" to contrast his onstage persona.

In response, Turkington gave a hauntingly subdued performance inspired by, of all things, a donkey in Robert Bresson's 1963 film "Au Hasard Balthazar."

"As all these awful things are happening, the donkey is so passive, and you see the existential crises in its eyes," he says. "When Rick asked me to give a blank expression, I would flash on that donkey in my head. It's a weird acting influence, but I think it helped."

It's never quite clear whether the horrors that befall the Comedian in Entertainment are real, yet it's still tempting to assume the story reflects Turkington's life. He's certainly performed for hostile crowds, and he knows how numbingly mundane touring can be. But things are a lot brighter for him than what we see on-screen. "Some reviewers have been disturbed because they think this is what my life is like when I'm touring," he says. "That couldn't be further from the truth."

Though he never planned to become Neil Hamburger, Turkington was always fascinated by characters like him. Growing up in Arizona, he spent hours in thrift stores obsessing over cheap records by unknown artists. "I loved finding these privately pressed vanity albums," he recalls. "They're much more interesting than regular records because you can never get to the bottom of what's going on. You just wonder, why did they do this?" When Turkington made his first Neil Hamburger 7-inch, he snuck copies into thrift-store bins, hoping customers would stumble on them and wonder the same thing.

A Chicago record label, Drag City, eventually released a handful of Neil Hamburger albums as Turkington continued to develop the character.

His humor has expanded far beyond a prank; now, a Neil Hamburger show can be silly, awkward, vicious and legitimately hilarious.

"I'm genuinely trying to get people to laugh," Turkington insists. "It's weird when people assume it's about not being funny. One review said my shows are just hipsters standing around laughing to be cool. I actually get plenty of hipsters who don't like it at all and walk out, but then a 75-year-old dishwasher in the back of the room says he loved it - it was his kind of comedy."

Nor is Turkington out to provoke confrontations like the one depicted in Entertainment, in which an unsatisfied customer physically attacks the Comedian - though the scene is not far from reality.

"Gregg has literally been assaulted on stage," says Alverson. "But it certainly isn't something that he welcomes, and I think it shocks him when that happens."

What inspires Turkington is what sparked his teenaged obsessions: the obscured realms of entertainment, where earnest dreamers struggle to sustain mediocre careers. "Often people in show business who win awards say, 'I just believed in myself and followed my dream, and if you just do that, these great things will happen to you," he says. "It ignores the fact that thousands follow their dreams just as passionately but it doesn't work out. What if you have a dream and no one's interested?"

Turkington's interest in outsiders has ironically led to a successful career on the inside. Based in Los Angeles for the past 12 years, he does voice-over work for cartoons, co-hosts a movie-review parody series with Tim Heidecker on Adult Swim called "On Cinema at the Cinema," and recently landed roles in Marvel's "Ant-Man" and the finale of CBS's "CSI." He's getting more calls than ever lately but is in no rush to answer them all.

"I try to do things that I like or have some sort of novelty," he says. "It's not that I'm too good for sitcoms, I just don't have that set of tools. I wouldn't enjoy it and I wouldn't be good at it, not to mention that it might destroy my reputation."

But what about Neil Hamburger's reputation? Will fans be confused by Entertainment? Will unfamiliar audiences find him entertaining or repulsive? To Turkington, these are risks worth taking.

"Rick and I both thought, let's light stuff on fire here," he recalls. "There was never any conversations where we said, 'Uh-oh, this seems off-putting or extreme.' It was more like, 'Yeah, this seems off-putting and extreme!' You have to pick somebody to try to please, so why not yourself?"

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