That’s ‘Entertainment’: The Story Behind the Cringe-Comedy of the Year
If you were to meet Australia-born, Arizona-raised musician Gregg Turkington, you’d find a somewhat shy, easygoing 47-year-old guy, the kind of person who seems more comfortable doing voiceover work for shows like Adventure Time than baiting a paying audience. But if you were to encounter his alter-ego in the indie cringe-comedy Entertainment — a sweaty, Borscht Belt-style stand-up with a penchant for phlegmy throat-clearing and telling rancid, rat-a-tat-tat one-liners like “Why did God create Domino’s Pizza? To punish humanity for their complacency in letting the Holocaust happen” — you might be tempted to throw a drink at him. A patron, in fact, chucks an entire cocktail at him during one of the movie’s several performance scenes. You get the sense that this is not the first time this has happened.
Identified simply as “The Comedian” in the end credits, this frazzled, drunken performer with the messily wetted-down comb-over and the disintegrating tuxedo bears a strong resemblance to Neil Hamburger, Turkington’s cult anti-comic that’s performed for crowds since the mid-Nineties. But as the man behind that nasal-voiced terror explains while sitting in a Westwood conference room, people should not think of this as a vehicle for his Tony Clifton-like creation. The Comedian and Neil Hamburger, he claims, are not one and the same. He understands why fans might be confused.
“It [started] with Rick saying, ‘Let’s do a Neil Hamburger movie,'” he recalls, referring to Entertainment’s director and co-writer Rick Alverson. Turkington had gotten offers before to design a feature around his stage character, “but everyone always saw it as something where we film a bunch of stand-up and then we go out on the road interacting with people as this character — kind of a Borat thing. I would tell them, ‘That’s not going to work, because I don’t think that this guy is necessarily funny at all offstage. I think he’s a broken shell of a man.’ And that’s what Rick thought, too.”
This offbeat, this funny-sad movie follows the Comedian’s dreary tour of the American Southwest with a sort of deadpan sympathy. Fading into obscurity, he wanders through days filled with an endless string of dead-end gigs, unsatisfied crowds and soul-crushing boredom. It’s a life-on-the-road character study in which the supposed “entertainment” is often woeful, and per the star, where the performer’s “emotional state has become part of the show where it shouldn’t be.” Though he’s referred to as “Neil” a couple times, Turkington, Alverson and their co-writer Tim Heidecker (of Tim and Eric fame) ultimately decided against having the film’s spectacularly bitter protagonist be explicitly identified as Hamburger.
“We don’t want the movie to come across as a promotional vehicle for a comedian, because then it diminishes what it is,” Turkington says. “And it is different than the Neil character in a lot of ways. There’s things that happen in the movie that I’m not necessarily sure I would want credited to him,” alluding to some of the Comedian’s crueler interactions with audience members. “It’s better this way. As Rick says, he borrowed the [Hamburger] character to make this movie.”