Rich Hall Articles/Reviews

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Slam dunk for home-grown clowns

March 22, 2005 - 8:16PM





Rich Hall

Aussie comics are a very necessary and perfect bridge in the stand-up world, writes Rich Hall.

In America , college basketball play-offs are known collectively as March Madness. It's my favourite time of year, watching a field of 64 teams narrowed down to a single champion. The past two years, I've foregone the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, opting instead to attend the Final Four, when the penultimate and final games of the tournament are played. The crowds at these events revitalise my faith in Americans.

College basketball fans are as good-natured a bunch of people as you'd ever want to meet. The matches aren't marred by free-foralls and there are no stinking pie vendors at the stadium.

Two of the most prominent players in this year's tournament are Aussies. Andrew Bogut is from Melbourne and plays for the University of Utah. He may well be the most intimidating amateur basketball player in America, covering the basket like an oak and shoving blocked shots back down opponents' throats. Luke Schenser, from Adelaide, plays for Georgia Tech and resembles Big Bird, although he's far more graceful.

If you met either of these youngsters in person, you'd realise instantly they were born for hoops. Their collective height is 4.4 metres. In a few years they'll both be NBA millionaires. And you can take that to the bank.
Last week I watched a couple of broadcasters discussing both players during the half-time break of a Georgia Tech game. One of them had posed the question: What makes these Australian players so good? The obvious answer would seem the fact they're both taller than a walk-in fridge. But the answer posited by the broadcaster was because they're more coachable than American players.

Now, you can fill in a number of other meanings for the word "coachable". Naive. Impressionable. Less attitude.

Hungrier. But the insinuation was transparent. Americans are stunned that an athlete from another country might excel at something we invented.

The same could be said for stand-up comedy. Stand-up comedy was invented by Will Rogers; the modern version - the type where you get to say f--- a lot - by Lenny Bruce. But that certainly doesn't mean America holds the patent. Every time I come to Melbourne for the festival, I leave wondering why so few Australian comics really try to go international. Where's their hunger?

The roster of good stand-ups in the world, (and by good, I mean any stand-up who's recognised by other stand-ups) is comparatively small. And stand-up comedy is actually not all that big a business.

On the entertainment scale, it generates less revenue than line dancing, drag racing or transvestite revues.

This makes comedians a fairly insular community - modernday carnies, if you will. We all know each other, but we don't really know each other. Take Greg Fleet. I don't know that much about Greg Fleet, but because we've performed together on at least four different land masses, he somehow feels like a brother to and whenever I run into him, he eagerly solicits my advice. Years ago, for instance, I did him a real solid. He'd written a show called 10 Years In a Long Sleeved Shirt, about his ongoing battle with eczema. It needed a punchier subject.

I said, "Make it about heroin addiction". He did, and that show went on to tour such places as somewhere in New Zealand. He's a good kid. Very coachable.

Fleetie is one of the funniest men I know, despite his overuse of wood-based imagery. But nowadays he's firmly rooted in Australia. The same for Lano and Woodley, Paul McDermott, Dave Hughes.

They're all world-class comics. But If I want to work with them, I have to drag my sorry ass to Australia. It's downright rude, actually. Don't get me wrong. I'm not chastising Australian comedians.

They have their reasons for staying at home, and frankly it's none of my business. But too many times I've been on a stage in London, New York or Montreal, felt the show slipping away from the crowd and thought to myself, "Christ, I know what this line-up needs right now - an Aussie".

Why? Because the Australian comedian - instantly affable while oozing bitterness and selfloathing - is the perfect bridge between the American comedian who's a little too slick and the British Comedian who's - well, there's no other way to put it - way too gay. Also, Australian comedians aren't afraid to wear a funny hat.

The Melbourne International Comedy Festival is just what it says it is - international. Not everyone gets equal billing, not everyone gets paid the same. But everyone gets an hour to say what they want to say, and for that hour, it's their rodeo. It's a unique and remarkable platform of international talent, darkened only by a small contractual clause that stipulates Australian comics must provide warm towels to international comedians directly after their performances.

This will be my sixth visit to the festival. I've also been to six Final Fours. Both of those events are highlights of my year, and I hate having to choose one over the other. And much like the reverse Schadenfreude I get watching Aussie basketball players whipping Americans, I'm hoping there's a few Boguts and Schensers on the bill in Melbourne this year.

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Trailer park trashed

March 24, 2005





Having dumped his alter ego, Rich Hall has only Harvey the white rabbit for company.




Rich Hall has banished his southern alter ego to the trailer park. Lenny Ann Low investigates.

RICH HALL
Where Sydney Theatre, 22 Hickson Road, Walsh Bay
When Friday and Saturday, 8pm
How much $37.50/$29.50
Bookings 9250 1999

It's midnight in London and Rich Hall, freshly home from an unexpected stand-up gig at a club, is cradling his eight-day-old daughter, Dixie Ray.

"I'm staring at the top of her head right now," he says in his gravel-voiced drawl. It's a tender scene but one that doesn't immediately spring to mind when matched with the creator of the hard-drinking, hard-living Tennessee jailbird and tunesmith Otis Lee Crenshaw.

"I'm cool with it," Hall says of the life-altering experience of being a first-time father.

"It's weird. It sounds boring but every day she's an incredible source of fascination. Just starin' at her. Babies don't do anything but they're still fascinating."

Hall, who's starting his latest Australian tour tomorrow with the first of two shows at the Sydney Theatre, is a regular visitor here.

Crenshaw, his redneck alter ego, was hatched while Hall was midway through a season at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. He won Hall the prestigious Perrier Award at the 2000 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

This time, Hall is leaving the bourbon-soaked country and western singer behind to pick over his trailer-trash life alone.
"This is just going to be me," Hall says, who lives for part of the year in a house in Montana. "Just myself with a microphone. No backing musicians. I might have a piano and I might do a couple of songs, but they won't be country songs. They'll just be songs to break up the show a bit."

Surely it can't be curtains for Crenshaw, who has married six women all named Brenda and given the world such catchy tunes as I Don't Come From No Monkeys, Are You My New Daddy Now? and He Almost Looks Like You, an ode to prison rape?

"No, no," Hall says. "But I never want to stop coming out on stage and just doing some more or less pure stand-up, you know. I've never really done that in Sydney other than a few clubs. Pretty much the last couple of times I've been to Australia I've done the Otis show.

"I just thought, 'This time, I'll draw on my vast reserves of jokes that I've written and then hope I don't get around to telling them.' Just wingin' it with the crowd most of the show."

Any Crenshaw fans concerned by the worldly wise ex-con's absence on this tour can console themselves with the news that Hall has released Crenshaw's first book of memoirs.

Otis Lee Crenshaw: I Blame Society, which is credited to Hall, is a funny, angry, bitter and alcohol-fuelled ride with Crenshaw as he falls in and out of love with his many Brendas, and in and out of jail cells. The action takes place while Crenshaw traverses and observes the America he prizes and despises.

The first chapter starts thus: "My Old Man's name was Jack Daniels Crenshaw. No surprise what he liked to drink. As a very small child, I remember teething - cryin' out savagely for relief. Eventually he would appear over my crib and rub Jack Daniel's on his gums until he fell asleep ..."

Not one of Crenshaw's father's questionable parenting techniques has rubbed off on Hall, although he is determined to continue his commitment to touring the worldwide comedy circuit.

"Course I'm going out," he says, laughing.

"I run out every chance I get. The crying. In fact, that's what I told her as soon as she was born. She doesn't understand it yet, but she's goin'. She's goin' where I go. She's going to have to have a big fat passport by the time she can read."

He's also adamant that having a baby will not mean his comedy patter will move from incisive discourse about the "scary" power of George Bush, the decaying of America and the absurdity of life.

"Absolutely not," he says. "Because I hate it when other people do that. I always think, 'Well, if you didn't have a kid you wouldn't have those 15 minutes of material. So that makes me think you just had the kid just for the new material.' There's no way I'll be doing that."

He is, however, planning to touch on topics that are associated with Australia's chummy relationship with America.

"Australians are, by force probably, very political. I think because they're geographically isolated they have to make an extra effort to stay connected to what's going on in the world. Because it really does affect them. Like, Canada is kind of America's attic, Australia is America's patio."

[Laney]

tonight was the first time i'd seen rich hall live and he was pretty good. i like the otis lee crenshaw character but the show was still funny without the character.
the show was set to go for 70 minutes but there was so much talking to the audience and improvising songs the show ran for 90 minutes instead.
rich hall did a pretty funny song which included a lot of random sydney places..just as a list...parramatta..woy woy..chatswood. heheh. it was just a bit random.
anyway, i can't write reviews but i didn't really know what to expect from rich hall (because they always play his best parts on tv and i didnt' think they were always all that good) so tonight i was happily surprised at how funny this man is.

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this was taken from here: http://www.tvparty.com/80richhall.html

by L. Wayne Hicks

Comedian Rich Hall vanished from American stages and shores more than a decade ago, the price he paid for being too popular.

You might not remember Hall's name, but you probably would recall the name "sniglets." Coined by Hall to describe things that don't have a name but should, sniglets were a regular feature on the 1980s HBO show "Not Necessarily the News." On the show and in five books, Hall defined such words as "dasho" - the area between a car's windshield and dashboard where coins and pencils can't be humanly retrieved - and "nerkle," or someone who leaves Christmas lights up all year.

"People in America, they still say, 'Oh, sniglets, they were great,'" Hall says. "They were. I'm really glad they were so popular, but I think that it kind of cut into my ability to do other stuff on stage. That was quite a while ago. Now it's just another phase in my career. It's not the dominating feature of what I do anymore, and I'm pretty happy about that, but people still remember that in America."

Born in North Carolina in 1954, Hall enjoyed a tremendous run on television during the 1980s. Before "Not Necessarily the News," Hall worked his way through David Letterman's short-lived morning show (for which Hall won an Emmy for writing), ABC's "Saturday Night Live" clone called "Fridays," "Saturday Night Live" itself and his own Showtime special. He also appeared on "The Tonight Show" more than a dozen times and made a series of commercials for Pizza Hut.

But what brought the fans out, what they wanted to see, was Hall doing sniglets. After all, he compiled five books of them between 1984 and 1989.

"Because they were so popular," Hall says, "it sort of hindered my ability to do standup. I'd go on stage and people would want to hear sniglets because they'd seen them on TV or read them in books. But they didn't really work on stage. You couldn't just stand there on stage and go, 'When so and so happens it's called É' It just didn't have the same effect. So I decided to stop doing standup for quite a while."

"It's funny how people can get tired of something that's successful," says Harland Williams, a Canadian comic now living in Los Angeles. "When you do something that's catchy, people want to hear it all the time. I guess you have to go under the radar until it's died down a bit."

Williams met Hall in Montreal in the early 1990s. Since then, he's shared the stage with Hall in Vancouver, Hawaii and Kilkenny, Ireland. "I've bumped into Rich all over the world," Williams says. "He's a guy who likes to spread his comedy around."

Hall calls London home these days. He spends half the year there and the other half in Livingston, Mont. He says he may try to revive his career in America later this year - "after the statute of limitations runs out" - but for now Hall is enjoying his success in the United Kingdom. Hall and his fiancee of six years, a Liverpool woman named Karen, have a newborn daughter, Dixie Ray.

"I think there's a different attitude about comedians in Britain and Ireland and Europe even," Hall says during a telephone interview from England. "People still come out to see live shows here. I've always enjoyed live performing more than anything, but I wasn't getting much out of playing all the Knuckleheads and Chucklehuts and all those places scattered throughout America where they're serving drinks while you're on stage."

Originally a journalism student at the University of Washington, Hall chucked his studies to become a street performer. He couldn't juggle or do magic, so he tried comedy. Initially, his act consisted of rounding up willing strangers and screaming at them under the guise of filming a student movie. He made his way around the country, stopping at universities and passing the hat, and eventually made his way to New York, arriving in 1979.

"It never occurred to me to be a comedian," Hall says. "It came out of my desire to not hold a regular job. That's why I became a street performer. Then when I ended up in New York City, there were these clubs you could go into and try your stuff out."

For his first time on stage, at the famed Comic Strip, a young but established comedian named Jerry Seinfeld was the emcee. Hall and other comics would make the nightly rounds between the Comic Strip, the Improv and Catch a Rising Star, grabbing stage time and polishing their acts.

Hall was working at a club when a producer spotted him and offered him a writing job on "The David Letterman Show," an NBC morning program that would star the frequent "Tonight Show" guest host. The show ran for three months in 1980 before it was canceled. "I think we all kind of knew it was in the wrong time slot," Hall says. Hall's career chugged along after that, until the overwhelming popularity of sniglets triggered a self-imposed exile from the stage.

"After the Pizza Hut commercials - they gave me a lot of money - I went up to Montana for a while and didn't do anything," Hall says. "I didn't do anything for a while, just having a good time."

Hall returned to standup in 1994, this time on a different continent. He started over in the U.K., without sniglets hanging over his head. Hall also ventured to the month-long Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland, the largest arts festival in the world.

"It's hard to describe the festival if you haven't been to it," Hall says. "The city of Edinburgh is just taken over by millions of people. They come in from the States. They come in from all over Europe, all over Britain and Ireland and they all just converge on this town. Practically every place you pass has been turned into a venue, so there are thousands and thousands of shows going on, from major productions to little tiny shoestring productions. There's comedy, theater, music, dance, opera, everything."

The best comedy show is singled out for the prestigious Perrier Award. Nominated for the award in 1996, Hall won it in 2000, the first American to do so.

"I know it doesn't mean a lot in America," Hall says, "but it certainly means a lot in the U.K. It's like the most prestigious comedy award you can win." Hall won the Perrier Award for his very American character of Otis Lee Crenshaw, an often-jailed, gravel-voiced singer of wretched country tunes that Hall created in 1998. To become Otis, Hall wraps a Confederate flag bandana around his head, slaps on a fake goatee and smokes. A lot.

"That gets my voice right where I want it," he says. "I don't recommend that as a process for preparing your singing voice to most people, but it works for me. It's not hard for me to be that character because it's really an amalgam of people I grew up with. I can go back home and see my folks who live in North Carolina and there's hundreds of Otises walking up and down the highways."

Hall taught himself to the play the piano and write songs. The rough nature of the Otis character explains away Hall's admittedly amateurish musical ability.

"I'd always wanted to write songs but I didn't really have any musical training so I decided to come up with a character that wasn't a very good musician," Hall says. "In the last 10 years or so, I've gotten to be a fairly adequate keyboard player. Enough to hold my own. Enough to play my own songs. I'm not good enough to play in a hotel lounge or anything, but I'm good enough to play my own songs, especially when you surround yourself with capable musicians."

Hall's songs reflect his character's storied past. Consider the lyrics of the uptempo song "Women Call It Stalking":
She said she'll see me in court.
Well, I can't wait.
She calls it a trial,
but I call it a date.

When the judge throws the book, I'm going to pretend it's a bouquet because I'm going to marry that woman someday.

You can tell the woman that you love her face to face,
or you can do it from a phone call that can't be traced.

"You occasionally get people who don't quite get that it's a character," Hall says. "So you get all kinds of reactions. I've had a few people come up to me going, 'I'm really proud of you. You've really done well for yourself,' thinking that I really have been in prison."

Hall grew up listening to his dad play Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash and Roger Miller records. He says the Otis character is as much a tribute to country music as it is mocking it.

"It's important that people hear all the lyrics," says Hall. "If they don't hear the lyrics, they're not going to laugh. That doesn't mean that some songs can't be more poignant than others, but it all sort of has to embellish the character of Otis."

As Otis, Hall has released two CDs, "London, Not Tennessee" (also available as a DVD) and "How Do We Do It? Volume!" and written a novel, "I Blame Society."

The novel provides a backstory to Otis Lee Crenshaw, telling the sad story of his many marriages to women all named Brenda, his struggles to learn to play the piano and his brushes with the law.

"It was fun to write this book because it sort of gave me insight into his past that I didn't know existed," Hall says.

In addition to "I Blame Society" and the sniglets books, Hall has written "Self-Help for the Bleak," "Vanishing America" and a collection of short stories, "Things Snowball." Except for "Vanishing America" and the sniglets books, Hall's books are available only in the United Kingdom.

"The great thing about Britain is they're very avid readers here," says Hall, who wants to write another collection of short stories. "If you're a standup comedian in America, it's not going to occur to most publishers to approach you about writing a book unless it's something trading off of your fame. Here, I'm able to write books that aren't just something that's a spin-off of my TV show or something like that. They stand on their own."

Hall's popularity in England has been rewarded. He starred in "Rich Hall's Fishing Show" on the BBC, a satirical look at issues of the day discussed while fishing. He also was given the task of explaining the American 2004 presidential election in "Rich Hall's Election Special." Hall has begun writing another BBC program to air in June, this one putting Hall in charge of a cattle drive.

"We're going to drive a herd of cattle from Wales to central London," he says. "It's almost impossible to actually do that. It's not like going from Texas to Montana. It's going from Wales to central London, so there's going to be all kinds of impediments along the way - animal rights activists, tree huggers and just the bureaucracy that you have to go through to actually get a herd of cattle across Britain."

"They really took a liking to him over there," says Robert Schimmel, a comedian who knows Hall and finds him hilarious. "I performed there twice and I could see if I kept going back, I could really develop a following there. He really did."

Hall says whether you perform your comedy in Los Angeles or London depends upon your goal. If you want to use standup comedy as a springboard to a situation comedy, then go to Los Angeles.

"But I'm not really a big fan of Los Angeles," Hall says. "Never have been. So I prefer London

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http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/en...his_roots.html

Rich goes back to his roots

Marissa Burgess



QUAYS SHOW: Hall
RICH Hall has been late getting back to his roots of late, spending the summer in the gigantic landscape of his native Montana.



Despite coming from one of the vastest states in the US, Hall nevertheless loves it in his adopted, pokey old Britain - but that’s partly to do with how we love his sense of humour. He is, after all, simply un-American.

"I'm not brash; I'm apologetic,” he says. “That's all you have to be to win over a British crowd,” he laughs.

Despite the dismissive comments, he does make a concerted effort to blend in with the Brits: “You don't walk out and say, 'Where's Starbucks?' I learnt from reading Bill Bryson that if you show interest in a place, it will take you to heart.”

Though he adds: “Whereas Bill Bryson is affable, I'm cranky - but at least I'm affably cranky!"

He also attributes his popularity in this country as partly due to that crankiness. "As a comedian, you've got to go where the misery is," he deadpans.

Art form

The British comedian’s attitude to stand-up suits Hall, too. As he notes, it’s an art form in itself, not (as it’s often perceived in America) merely a stepping-stone to something bigger.

"American performers don't need stand-up,” he explains. “They look at it merely as a springboard to something else: a sitcom, a movie, or their own TV show.”

Though to be fair, he reasons, that’s partly due to the attitudes of the audiences over the Atlantic.

"Most Americans believe they could get up there and make jokes, so they think, 'Why should I pay to watch someone else do that?'” he says.

“They won't pack out a theatre, and American comedy clubs are not great venues for expressing yourself. As a stand-up, you're always competing with a noisy blender at the bar.”

Looks like we’ll be keeping Hall for a bit longer yet then.

Rich Hall is on at The Lowry on Thursday, December 8 and Saturday, December 10. £14. To buy tickets, call 0870 060 1768 or book online.