I’M DYING UP HERE: Entertainment (2015) & comedy shorts.

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I’M DYING UP HERE: Entertainment (2015) & comedy shorts

Normal Cinema Club presents an evening of film dedicated to the premier art form of our time – stand-up comedy. Only these brave artists can speak truth to power by ‘saying it like it really is.’

ENTERTAINMENT is a road movie inspired by the life and times of Neil Hamburger (known in other circles as Gregg Turkington). Neil Hamburger is a stand-up comedian known for his act which revels in bad taste, confusion and heckling: a joke lands well if no one is really laughing at it. We follow Hamburger as he travels from gig to gig, absorbing the desolate American landscapes with him as he confronts the vacuous nature of being a full-time performer. On his travels, he encounters friends, fans, estranged family and mysterious benefactors who pay for his presence, all played by fan-favourites of the Alternative including Tim Heidecker, John C. Reilly, Amy Seimetz and Michael Cera. Recalling films such as Paris, Texas and Two-Lane Blacktop (without the cosmetic pleasures of those pictures), Entertainment is a darkly absurd film with a brilliantly pathetic performance from Turkington at the centre of it all. This is feel-bad entertainment as good as it gets.

Before the feature, we will screen a programme of shorts considering how stand-ups, podcasting and crowdwork videos are poisoning the public psyche, including work from local funnymen Rónán and Eoghan Duffy, and a visual investigation into the lingering influence of Norm MacDonald on young men everywhere from Normal Cinema Club.

If your darkest urges have ever made you think, ‘I could do stand-up’, this evening will make you think again.