Back behind bars

Speaking on his echoing mobile from the lobby of the Glasgow Radisson, a rather weary-sounding Rich Hall isn’t quite sure exactly when he’s coming to Ireland, but he’s certainly looking forward to it. Stuck in a mid-tour moment he can’t get out of, the former Letterman writer and Emmy/Perrier-winning comedian gruffly informs me that he views his impending Dublin date as, “a bright shining ray in an otherwise dismal concoction of British hellholes.”

Midway through an eight week joke-jaunt around the UK, the 40-something stand-up won’t actually be in the Fair City until February 16, when he’ll be taking his white trash alter-ego Otis Lee Crenshaw to the Olympia’s stage. Hall created the character in 1998, a redneck, jailbird, troubadour from Tennessee, who has been married seven times, all to women named Brenda. But given that this will be Crenshaw’s third visit to these shores, what kind of show can Irish audiences expect this time round?

“Well this is gonna be our big farewell performance, so there’ll probably be a lot of ‘Fuck you, I never liked you people anyway!’ kinda stuff,” he deadpans. “Nah, this will be our third time at the Olympia and I think that’s enough. I think it’s probably time for Otis to go back to prison. But he’ll go out in style.”

Although he’s retiring – or rather, incarcerating – the character on this side of the pond, Hall reckons that Otis still has a lot of mileage left in the States (where they’ll hopefully get the joke).

“Yeah, I think I’m gonna continue doing the show in the US because we just did it off-Broadway and that went really well, so we’re just gonna go back and do a much bigger theatre in Manhattan. But as far as England, Ireland and Scotland are concerned, it’s probably time to go onto something else.”

Although he’s not ruling out a return to straight stand-up, Hall already has another outlandish alter-ego in development.

“Well, I’m not sure about him yet,” he explains. “I’m working on a new character who’s got Tourette’s Syndrome – a scat singer with Tourette’s Syndrome. You know scat singing? It’s where you just make the words up – (sings) ‘Dee bop aloo bop, azapa dee dop, azapadee doo’. It’s basically just streams of gibberish, so I’m pretty good at it. I’m very fascinated with it, but I don’t know if there’s an hour-long show in it yet. It’s kind of a big band thing – except that he’s completely filthy.”

Hmm… another musician character. Is Hall trying to tell us something here?

“It’s not that I have any serious aspirations , just that once you start doing a music show you don’t wanna stop!” he laughs. “I just love the idea of being able to play songs badly and get away with it. And having covered the country perspective with Otis, I think it’s time to move into scat singing, because it’s very under-appreciated.”

As we speak, Hall is preparing to travel to do an appearance on Daire O’Brien’s new BBC late-night comedy-fest, the Live Floor Show. Although he professes to liking Ireland’s heterosexual answer to Graham Norton, it apparently took a while for O’Brien to win him over…

“Daire’s a funny guy,” he muses. “He’s really made himself warm and likeable. He didn’t used to be! I remember when I first met him, he would come up and he would actually swat you on the head. He was evil! He’d shake you down for money! He told me when I first got to Ireland that there was a tax on jokes that I had to pay him. He also once removed the windows from my hotel room. He was just evil. But I think he was bitter at the time. He also weighed about 420 pounds but he’s slimmed down – he’s lost about 100 of them – and he’s got a better attitude. Of course, it’s all fake. I know he’s putting on an act. As soon as he gets a bit of fame, he’s gonna turn back into the big prick that he was.”

He’s joking, of course (at least, I sincerely hope he is!). But speaking seriously of sinister things lurking underneath, what does Montana-born Rich Hall make of the current Persian Gulf crisis and his country’s role in it all?

“It’s so painfully obvious that America wants to get their big greasy palms on that oil under the guise of, ‘This guy Saddam’s a nutcake!’ Well, there’s plenty of nutcakes out there running countries! They just don’t happen to have oil. If you study it, Iraq has the second largest untapped oil reserves in the world – there’s a very small amount of production. And that’s what it’s all about. That and the axe Bush has to grind, with his father breathing down his neck. There’s so much politicking going on. And what have they found? Empty shells! They’re empty! We suspect they have chemical weapons of mass destruction? We invented chemical weapons of mass destruction!!”

Although he opens his Ireland and UK shows ranting about this sort of stuff, before going into Otis-mode, is he brave enough to make these kind of comments onstage at home in the States, where patriotism is at fist-clenching, flag-waving fever-pitch?

“Oh yeah!” he affirms. “The great thing about stand-up is that you can make as many points as you want as long as there’s a joke at the end of them. But Americans aren’t gonna have the same view as people who can step back and look at America as a role player, and not be in the middle of the role-playing. Most Americans probably think that they’re entitled to go to war with Iraq – they’ve just sort of accepted the idea that this guy is evil and the war is inevitable. But then the real groundswell hasn’t manifested itself yet. I don’t think Bush has as much support as he thinks he has.”

As a former buddy of Texan uber-comedian Bill Hicks – whose hilarious attacks on the original Gulf War were the stuff of legend – does Rich Hall view stand-up comedy as a force for political change?

“Nah, I don’t think so,” he says. “Comedians don’t really change things or convert people. Bill Hicks didn’t convert people politically. He was just a truly gifted and talented performer who converted people to his comedy. I mean, he may have helped people look at the world a bit differently but, in the end, people come to laugh. If you start taking yourself too seriously, you’re fucked. Look at Lenny Bruce – you don’t want to end up reading your court transcripts on stage.”

Reading your court transcripts on stage? Sounds like something Otis Lee Crenshaw would do…