“What is the difference between Courtney Love and a porcupine?”
“If you get pricked with a porcupine’s needle, you won’t get AIDS.”

Ahh… Neil Hamburger aka America’s Funnyman returned to NYC last night and I was there to bring you the pictures. What’s that you say? Pictures of comedians are boring? The crowd is 95% dudes? Well, fuck you. If you wanted to see the show you should have been there.

As I mentioned my friend Mike is in town and his band Daiquiri is on tour with Neil Hamburger as of today. They weren’t on the show last night, but Mike was running Neil’s merch and got me into the show. When I got there I was pleased to find that the two guys who introduced me to Neil were there already. I shot some photos of them, a few shots before the show, of the pretty hilarious opener JP Incorporated, and by the time the show was over I was a few shots away from having an actual galleries worth of images to sell to the Village Voice, which means I don’t have to go out tonight. It’s always good to get paid to shoot something I actually want to be at instead of pretty much everything else I shoot.

At the show I met Gavin McInnes who as you probably know was one of the founders of Vice. I had a super awkward conversation about how I now shoot Dos/Don’t for the magazine he referred to as his abortion. If you haven’t already you need to check out his site Street Carnage where he reclaims his Dos & Don’ts in a section called Street Boners. Honestly, he has probably made fun of half the people reading this site right now. Plus the site has ton of TV Carnage videos. I have been a TV Carnage fan for the greater part of this decade so it is good to see them online. If you have no idea what I am talking about, again, just check out the site.

I also met a music reviewer named Mark Prindle who started reviewing records online since before you realized the internet and AOL were two different things. I didn’t know who he was because I am not really into this whole “internet” thing, but some of the kids I were hanging with seemed to be more excited about seeing him than they were Neil Hamburger.

I also met a man named Greg Turkington before the show that seemed to vanish just before Mr. Hamburger went on stage. The Clark Kent like transformation that Greg makes into America’s Funnyman is impressive. Had I met him under any other circumstances I would have never guessed who he was. He walked around the club without anyone recognizing him. I didn’t take any photos of him out of uniform because frankly that would have been just wrong. After the show he was hanging out with comedian Todd Barry. I have shot Todd a bunch of times but it was still pretty funny to see them talking about hotels with Greg in the Hamburger suit but completely out of character. It was like catching a mall Santa smoking… with Todd Barry.

Afterwards I scammed free pizza off of people at Alligator Lounge and then walked home. It was a good night.  Click here to see all the photos from Neil Hamburger at Knitting Factory Brooklyn.

PS. Not sure if I mentioned this, but the show was funny. Also Neil threw a drink at the Asian guy below for heckling. Fantastic.

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