Hall Of Fame

It's the afternoon after the night before, and Rich Hall is looking a little dishevelled. And no wonder. The previous night's show in the Andrew's Lane Theatre saw the American comedian fight a running battle with an eccentric old codger whose demented heckles were as good an argument for involuntary euthanasia as I've yet heard.

From there, Hall did a late night stint at the Festival Club in Vicar St., where the Montana comedian reprised his role as Otis Lee Crenshaw, the divorce-prone prison convict with a penchant for women called Brenda. A malleable mix of interactive stand-up and ironic prison ballads, Hall's latest comic creation is what might have happened had Fletcher from Porridge ever auditioned for Stars In Their Eyes.

With his fake goatee beard, tacky tattoo and garish American headscarf, Crenshaw is also visually striking: Sinbad The Sailor goes to Hollywood, perhaps. Although for the moment, he has to make do with the Shelbourne Bar. So where did the inspiration for Crenshaw come from?

"He's basically a lot of members of my family fused into one," says Hall, without a trace of irony. "I've had offers to do the show in America and I'm curious to see how it goes down there, especially in the South. I'm sure some people will say, 'hey, that's just like my brother-in-law, he reminds me of Ronnie!'. Otis is not that an unusual a character by white trash standards in America!

"And I like the idea of being able to play songs badly and get away with it. Cos he is, obviously, a crap musician - self-taught! But it's good for me to get up and do something like this. I feel that comedy might have reached a point where all that's left to do is to create your own universe and then let people into it."

Indeed, Otis' universe of lonely prison walls and sexually frustrated cell-mates is quite removed from its creator's usual habitat. As a straight stand-up, Hall produces some of the mostly highly-charged political comedy around. Yet he dismisses the idea that he is in some sense keeping the flame of the late, great Bill Hicks alive.

"I think comedy aficionados are all looking for a new Bill Hicks but I think they should stop waiting for a new one to come around because Bill Hicks was it. He was very unique. There may have been far more tasteless comedians than Bill Hicks but I think that as far as pushing that ulterior envelope goes, he did it."

It's a fairly safe bet that if Hicks was still alive today, he'd have plenty to say about the events in Kosovo and East Timor, to name but two. Hall himself tackles these subjects in his act. Is he fired by the same humanitarian rage that motivated Hicks?

"I don't have a humanitarian bone in my body," he answers, as if he were simply stating an irrefutable truth. "I just talk about where I find humour. And a certain tense topic is always going to yield a certain kind of humour, especially if you look at any kind of tragic, dangerous or edgy situation: there's always something in the middle of it that's not quite right.

"Maybe there's a bit of irony in there or just some ridiculous, human type of behaviour. Or maybe you just find a way to humanise the whole thing and then get people to laugh at it. I think that's the challenge.

"It's not as if I look at East Timor and say, 'now, what's funny about this?' But I read about it as much as anybody else and I say, 'now, wait a minute, why are they getting all worked up about this, but not that'. I'm not getting self-righteous about it because, frankly, I haven't done anything to help the people in East Timor any more than most other people have. And making jokes about it doesn't alleviate the situation.

"But it does make people think it's a fucked-up world. Most people know that. But when you wake up in the morning, you've still got to get through the day. I think, 'why not try and find some humour in it?', as opposed to talking about the differences between cats and dogs.

"You can't deal with tragedy for too long. You have to laugh about it or else you just go nuts. Kennedy crashes his plane in the ocean and within minutes you have comedians saying to themselves, 'what is the cruellest joke I can think of' because it was so ripe for comedy."

Hall's future plans, apart from yet another trip to Dublin next month for the next Murphy's Ungagged Comedy Festival, consist of collaborating with Jack Dee on a TV show as well as writing a feature-length film involving his beloved Otis.

"I can imagine doing modern day versions of Elvis-type movies for Otis, where he just breaks into song, but where the reaction would be the way reactions really would be if someone jumped up on a table here (he looks around the Shelbourne bar) and started singing. And he'd have a band following him around, dreading the moment when he breaks into song, 'cos they'd have to set up the mic!"

And the man who claims not to have a humanitarian bone in his torso has also agreed to do some charity work next month in the Third World, on behalf of Oxfam.

"They want me to be a narrator on this documentary on starvation in Ethiopia," he says, somewhat mournfully. "I'm going over to do it but I'm dreading every second of it. An hour with a bunch of starving children is about as long as I really want to be there - but it's ten days!

"I'm also afraid that after ten days over there, I'll realise that my whole life is a sham and I should be doing volunteer work and saving these kids. But I like what I do. So if you don't hear from me again, I'm in Ethiopia mixing up dry milk powder and swatting flies. I'm gonna bring over these Otis Lee fly-swatters." n

* Rich Hall plays the Murphy's Ungagged Comedy Festival in Dublin next month. The festival runs from 11th-14th November.