If I were a rich man

This month sees Rich Hall make a welcome return to these shores with a performance at the Galway Comedy Festival. I wonder if Rich will be performing in the guise of his most celebrated comic creation, redneck jailbird Otis Lee Crenshw?

“I think I might,” replies Rich, speaking down the line from London. “I never retired him, although I did put him aside for a while a few years ago until I had a batch of new songs and new stories to tell. But now we’re back touring and I’m sort of my own opening act. I do stand-up for a while, and I then I bring Otis back out. I can’t follow him!”
In fairness, few people can. What is Otis up to these days?
“Essentially, after two or three years of not doing him, I thought I’d have to try some new subject matter to just the general prison, married- seven-times kind of thing,” replies Rich. “So the new songs sort of take different directions. There’s a song about George Foreman, there’s a song about trying to talk your girlfriend out of the Ku Klux Klan, and other numbers about white trash living. I think maybe they’re a bit more personal this time. But they’ve been really well received, so I’m pretty happy.”
Rich has played in Galway several times before and, of course, is a fixture at the Kilkenny’s Cat Laughs festival each summer. He obviously has a particular fondness for playing in Ireland.
“Well, if you spend enough time in Britain, you really look forward to getting to Ireland,” says Rich. “People have a self-entertaining button which they can switch on, so they’re helping themselves as well as you making them laugh. I don’t know, they just have a better sense of humour. They’re not the whiners that Brits are. I’m not saying I mind British audiences, but when you get to Ireland it just feels like people are really up for a good time. You don’t have to convince them.”
In addition to his stand-up work, Rich has had a long and fascinating career in television, including a stint on Saturday Night Live in the 1984/85 season, when other cast members included Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer of This Is Spinal Tap. How did Rich find the experience of working on SNL?
“It was very hard,” he recalls. “It was a very rough show to do, because there was never enough time to rehearse anything, and you were constantly working. They used to walk us into the office on Tuesday nights to try and write the shows for Wednesday mornings. But that’s the way it’s always been and you just kind of get used to it after a while.
“You don’t see much of the outside world, it’s a very insular kind of existence. You don’t really even have a chance to go out and see if you’re having any impact on the public. But obviously that show has been around for a long time. It’s kind of amazing that it’s still there sometimes, ’cos it’s so hit and miss. But if you can have one good sketch, that sort of erases the three bad ones that came before it. It’s always been like that.”
Interestingly, one of the writers on SNL during Rich’s season on the show was Seinfeld co-creator and Curb Your Enthusiasm star Larry David, who became so fed up with his failure to get any sketches aired that he quit one Friday evening, only to turn up again the following Monday as if nothing had happened. Famously, this was a story that David utilised many years later for a Seinfeld episode.
“There were a lot of things that happened on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm which were unused Saturday Night Live sketches,” says Rich. “No one else would have recognised them unless they’d been on the show. There was an episode of Curb where he trips and injures Shaquille O’Neal, and that was originally a Saturday Night Live idea, although back then it was another basketball player.
“And there’s an episode of Seinfeld where George leaves an angry message for his girlfriend on her answering machine, then has to break into her apartment to try and get the tape. Those were Saturday Night Live sketches that somehow didn’t make the cut.”
Another show Rich contributed to in the early ’80s was Not Necessarily The News, where other staff members included future Simpsons writers Conan O’Brien and George Meyer. Is it true that Mo from The Simpsons is based on Rich?
“It is, yeah,” he responds. “People used to do impressions of me around Saturday Night Live, and then Harry Shearer went to The Simpsons. I didn’t know whether it was true or not, but Matt Groening says that it is. It is an honour, once you get over the shock of seeing the interpretation of yourself as a two-dimensional character.”
At a public interview with Pauline McLynn a few years ago in Kilkenny, I remember Rich saying that he once played support to Talking Heads. How did that come about?
“I was doing stand-up in New York, but I was also doing a lot of street performing, ’cos that’s’ where I could make money,” explains Rich. “One time I went down to the University of Maryland and did a performance on the commons with a big trunk of props. Talking Heads were there a day early, on a tour of mostly universities up and down the east coast. The tour promoter just happened to be walking by, and he saw me, and he said, ‘Do you want to open for Talking Heads tomorrow night?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’”
“It went really well, and then they put me on the rest of the tour. Talking Heads at that point were sort straddling the line between being a really hip art college band, whilst being on the tail end of the whole punk movement. So you never really quite knew what you were going to get, depending on the audience. But because we were mostly in colleges, they turned out to be really good crowds. I wouldn’t have wanted to open for them in CBGBs or something.
“I sort of impersonated David Byrne on Saturday Night Live after Stop Making Sense came out. I came out in the big suit, and it was one of the more memorable things that I did on the show. Then I ran into him somewhere a bit later, and he wasn’t offended by it. So I managed to get away with that!”

Rich Hall plays The Black Box, Galway on March 21 as part of the Galway Comedy Festival