Style
Hamburger's live act, which is quite different from his many albums, features a barrage of question/answer jokes aimed often at celebrity targets as well as depressing barbs aimed at his ex-wife. His pacing is off, and he often clears his throat during his routine, usually to keep overzealous fans from shouting out his punchlines. He has performed in front of audiences worldwide from Madison Square Garden to Jimmy Kimmel Live! and the confrontational aspects of his act have drawn cursory comparisons to Tony Clifton. One of his most famous gags is the "Zipper Lips", in which he asks an audience member a question. If the audience member doesn't respond, Hamburger derides them for being a "zipper lips". A common phrase used by the comedian is "But that's my life!", which he uses when he mentions being humiliated or degraded for some reason .
Read more about this topic: Neil Hamburger
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals—and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not sure would ever feel this way—some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)