On his first visit to Kilkenny American comedian Rich Hall quipped that he was so unknown this side of the Atlantic that people thought he was a venue. Well this year he is, because the festival organisers have named one of the venues after him and they've even commissioned a special cat scultpure in his honour. If it wasn't part of the general giddiness that comes over Kilkenny at this time of year all this honouring would seem a bit on the serious side but Rich Hall does have a special place in the festival's history. He is the only imported comedian who has appeared at the festival since it started. On his first Cat Laughs outing, probably the only people here that would have been familiar with the 41-year-old comedian's achingly funny laid-back style were late night cable channel hoppers. He spent a year on Saturday Night Live and for years he has been a regular on the Tonight Show and the David Letterman Show and he is currently guesting on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
Add to this several US comedy shows of his own, including a weekly series on the US comedy channel, and it's obvious that he's one of the best known stand-ups the festival has managed not only to attract, but to keep.
If you're a two-time Emmy Award winning comedy writer (for David Letterman) then why put yourself through the gruelling business of standing up in front of people trying to make them laugh when you could be sitting in LA earning big money writing scripts? "Stand-up keeps you really sharp and it keeps you writing," says Hall, "and anyway I love it." Any comedy circuit regular who has sat stoney-faced while some US stand-up rambled on about some backwoods senator or inter-state rivalry will be familiar with one of Rich's favourite bugbears. He's scathing about American comedians who come here and trot out the same routine they do on the US circuit. "And when it doesn't work on the first night they just blow it off and trot it out the next night instead of putting in some local stuff," he says. "As professional comedians we're paid to notice things and make them funny, it's just laziness not to," he adds. The only apparently lazy thing about Hall is his voice which is pure Virginia drawl. He's written several best-selling humour books and last year wrote a self-help book called Self Help For The Bleak. "Well, hey, everyone else was doing it." The particular cheesy paradigm his book is based on is that life is like a car and you have to keep the four tyres, the love tyre, the work tyre and so on, inflated. "It's got some cool tips," he says, "like let's say your partner finds it difficult to talk about emotional stuff, just re-label the condiments so that when he opens the fridge he has to say `Hey, where's the Love or the Commitment?'." The worrying thing is that it sounds just like the sort of guff that real self-help books are full of.
He now divides his time between a ranch in Montana and a house in London. "London is a great place for a comedian," says Hall, "because there are so many venues. It's the best place to try out new material because if they don't like it in one club you won't be run out of town." He's working on material for the Edinburgh Festival, some of which will make it into his Kilkenny routine. "The great thing about coming to Kilkenny," he says, "is that it's a great place to catch up with other comedians." Dom Irrera and Dave Attell are his personal must-sees.
Rich Hall performs in Cleer's, Thurs 8 p.m., Watergate, Fri 9 p.m., Langton's, Sat 6.45 p.m., Langton's, Sun 9 p.m.
Rich Hall : "The great thing about coming to Kilkenny is that it's a great place to catch up with other comedians."
