I DIDN'T know him personally, you understand, but I cringed on his behalf. It was a Sunday morning and, browsing through the Sunday Independent, a photo caught my eye. I immediately recognised the pensive stare, the thick-set features, the curly mop of dark hair - it was Rich Hall, an astonishingly funny American comic I'd seen a few months previously at the Cat Laughs comedy festival in Kilkenny.

The reason his visage was plastered across that particular edition of the Sindo soon became evident. The subject of a particularly intriguing Brighid McLaughlin literary epic, it seemed he'd broken the columnist's heart when she'd visited him in his native Montana having first made his acquaintance in the Marble City. The content? Well, suffice to say that hell hath no fury like a Sunday Independent columnist scorned. Surprisingly, when I broach the subject two years later, Rich doesn't bat an eyelid.

"I never read that piece but I heard about it," he confesses. "I met Brighid at Kilkenny and she started talking to me about Montana because I'd mentioned it in my routine ('Montana is so goddam flat that on a clear day you can see the back of your own fucking head! In fact, if the weather's really good you can watch your dog run away for three days!'). So she told me she was coming out there and I gave her my number. A while after, she called me and said she was coming so I collected her at the airport and we went driving around Montana.

"She was doing a story on some guy so we hung out together and went swimming in the lakes . . . I mean, it was fine. And then I got back here and y'know . . . she had never told me she liked me that much. I mean, I liked her but it was odd. She was really, really busy all the time so I didn't talk to her for a while, I didn't pursue it. She just never, ever told me that she liked me that much. Then I went off to Australia, I think, and I didn't call her or anything. Then when I came back I discovered that she had written this article saying that I'd broken her heart or something like that. She told the whole world about it, but she never told me!"

Seeing as our interview is taking place the day of the first of three Rich Hall headliners in the Murphy's Laughter Lounge, I enquire as to what Rich would do if Brighid were to put in an appearance at one his shows.

"I dunno," he shrugs. "Maybe we'd go out and have a good time and get drunk! Maybe she will turn up. The whole thing was very odd because she never put her heart on her sleeve or anything, but even if she did write an article about me, I could never get past the first page of one of her pieces. They're so goddamn long!

"Actually, y'know what's weird?" he continues, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "I saw about 12 of her articles. I think she comes over to the States a lot, so if I saw the Sunday Independent on the news-stand I'd buy a copy. And y'know? No matter what her story was about there was always a photo of her in it. Anyway, I think the only people who would remember that article about me would be the people who know me. I just hope she didn't accuse me of being a jerk, because I wasn't a jerk. I could just never quite understand her."

For all this unsolicited exposure, Rich Hall remains relatively unknown in Ireland, despite his annual pilgrimages to Kilkenny and occasional performances in Dublin, Cork and Galway. The same cannot be said for his native America, however, where he has starred on Saturday Night Live, written for The Letterman Show and bagged himself an Emmy for his troubles. Indeed, to this day he makes occasional guest appearance with The Dave, and in Britain, he was a resident fixture on the set of Jack Dee's last series. To what does Rich attribute his success, at a time when there are so many atrocious American comedians in circulation?

"Well, I have this reputation for being grouchy on stage and I guess that's an aspect of my character that I exaggerate when I'm performing," he muses. "I mean there's no reward for being nice. If you go up on stage and you're really happy, then you're not a comedian. You're just a clown. You might as well make fucking animals out of balloons. Comedy is all about misery, y'know. It's about gauging the collective misery of the audience. I mean, people come to comedy shows to forget about how miserable they are, so any comedian worth his salt will immediately get up on stage and start telling them things they don't wanna hear. The secret, of course, is to do it in a funny way."

Listening to the earnestness in Rich Hall's voice as he talks about comedy is frightening. It seems the only time he doesn't take it seriously is when he's performing, telling his audiences exactly how shit he is: "My act's got holes in it that are so big you could drive a truck through 'em. Jeez, the only reason you're all here is because you saw Rich Hall and thought it was the venue."

At 41, you'd think he'd be happy in the role of embittered old wiseacre with a chip the size of a Chevy on his shoulder - but forget it. He retains all the enthusiasm of a 19-year-old rookie. Which begs the question: offstage, does he, like many other comics, take the business of making people laugh a bit too seriously?

"No, not at all. Most comedians are just amazingly lazy," he smirks. "A lot of them are talented, so when I say lazy, I don't think they'd be lazy if they were doing another job. But the thing about comedy is that it's very hard to get motivated because it's just you. With stand-up there's no deadlines, so it's so easy to just not push yourself. You don't have to push yourself. I mean, you know as well as I do there's a lot of people who go 'Oh, comedy - that looks like a good way to make a living. You get your 20 minutes together and you run around the country doing gigs and probably make quite a lot of money'. But if you're a comedian, there's always that voice in your head that's forcing you to be prolific. A lot of people choose to ignore that voice and come up with really lame excuses as to why they can't write new stuff."

Is Rich Hall one of them?

"Yeah, I suppose I am. Actually, no. I take that back. I just think I'm lazy. You have to assuage your own guilt and just try and come up with new stuff, even if nothing is happening. For example, Seinfeld used to write for six hours a day, six days a week. He used to get up, sit at a table and just write jokes. There was a guy on before me last night, Michael Mee (a relative newcomer from Cork fast developing a reputation for killer oneliners - B.G.) - now he's clearly a writer. Looking at someone like him you're going to go 'There's a guy who's gonna write lots and lots of good jokes'. I mean, God knows how many he's passed over since he started doing comedy."

It's been a while now since Rich started doing comedy, however, but he still clearly enjoys it. Doesn't he?

"Yeah, I really, really do. I only really started enjoying it when I started back doing it in 1994. Before that I was writing on TV shows. I used to do it occasionally then: I'd go out once every two or three weeks and do 20 minutes in a club in New York, but I wasn't really enjoying it because I wasn't writing any new stuff. Finally, I just said 'Right, this is enough of this'. I'd made plenty of money writing for TV so I started coming to London, which has a much stronger scene than America has at the moment."

The differences between American comics and their British and Irish counterparts being . . .

"Well, I think there's a lot of comedians in America who are too slick and polished," Rich muses. "They're very Seinfeld-esque. I mean Seinfeld's good at what he does, so a lot of people aspire to that, but I think that people in this country, and in Britain and Australia . . . well, if you're willing to go off on some tangent then they'll stay with you. Americans don't go for that. They have this thing for really polished material."

The late Bill Hicks, the Texan regarded by many as the greatest stand-up comic of all time, was known to go off on the odd tangent in his day.

"Bill was an astounding comedian," Rich concurs. "In terms of anger and passion there'll never be anyone like him. I do think it's great that he's influenced so many great comedians. I think it's a big mistake to try and be like Bill Hicks, but it's not a mistake to realise that if you really nail something on the head then it doesn't matter how forbidden or dark it is. Anytime you can go somewhere that no comedian has gone before material-wise and get a response from your audience . . . well, he's inspired a lot of comedians to do that."

Did Rich know Bill?

"Oh yeah. We worked together a lot. About a year or 18 months before he got too sick to perform anymore he had developed a big following in America, but he was always appreciated more in this country and in Britain than he was back in America. Audiences here were much more tolerant than in America. There, he'd just get heckled so much and people would walk out of his show, which really drove him nuts. He'd just turn on them. I've seen tapes where he'd be down on his knees just screaming that, y'know, Hitler was an under-achiever. He'd just hate the audience so much."

These days, with the possible exceptions of Brits Mark Thomas and Mark Steel, there are few, if any, "political" comedians working on this side of the pond. Cowardice, maybe, or does Rich think there is a more practical reason?

"I think being a political comedian is suicide, because if that's what you really are, the only people who are even gonna come and see you are people who are interested in politics, which is quite a small minority," reasons Rich. "So if Mark Thomas goes up and starts being too specific then people aren't gonna know exactly what he's talking about. If you want to do a social commentary, then you have to find the part of any topic that appeals at a base level. That's what Bill did. So much of his stuff wasn't about politics but was about hypocrisy and the duplicity of America and what it stands for. A lot of it was about himself and what a fucked-up guy he was. People would just look at him and go 'Wow!'. I don't think anybody wanted to be Bill Hicks. You could just see that he wasn't a very happy guy. He wasn't, y'know, but he was someone who just couldn't not go on stage."

One of the most controversial episodes in Hicks' chequered career centred around the time he was dropped from The Letterman Show for doing a stand-up routine which encompassed, among other things, the issue of abortion. He was furious. Rich, too, spent a number of years working as one of a team of 13 writers on the show. Was it as creepy an experience as The Larry Sanders Show, the brilliant spoof of the American chat show genre, would have us believe?

Rich hums and haws at length: "I suppose it is a bit. I think Larry Sanders is more of an extension of Garry Shandling (the man behind Larry Sanders - B.G.) who is as neurotic a comedian as Letterman or anyone. But yeah, they are quite similar, because a lot of writers who write for Larry Sanders have probably written for Letterman or Jay Leno. All those chat shows in America are written the same way: you go in and waste as much time as you can until you have to come up with a joke."

Sounds a bit like a certain fortnightly magazine I work for. Cushy, isn't it?

"Nah. It's not cushy because you slack off a lot and then somebody comes in and says 'Look, we need this now!' and it's like 13 voices as one going 'Aw man!'. Or else the head writer comes in and yells at you because something you came up with didn't work on the show. Sometimes then, after the show, if Letterman isn't happy he might come up and throw a fucking shit-fit and call a meeting. Then they have what's called a post-mortem where, basically, everybody comes in and talks about the show; what went wrong where and what they want to do the next day."

Are we to understand, then, that David Letterman is an asshole?

"Naw, he's not," avers Rich, shattering one of my many flimsy-but-firm convictions. "If something goes wrong he doesn't take it out on the writer. He might take it out on the head-writer, but y'see, if you submit something on Letterman, your name is taken off it. The head-writer knows who wrote it, but Letterman doesn't want to know. He may ask afterwards, particularly if there's a new writer and he wants to know how he or she is getting on. Sometimes he can just tell who wrote a particular gag from the style."

Our interview closes with Rich regaling me with tales of the mountains of free "stuff" (magazines, books, albums etc.) he used to receive on a daily basis while working on The Letterman Show ("I'm tellin' ya, every morning was like fucking Christmas!"). Then of course there were the other perks: money, women, fast cars . . .

As I said, sounds a bit like a certain fortnightly magazine

I work for. n