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Rich Hall is a multi-award-winning comedian, author and musician. He wrote for David Letterman and was a frequent guest on both Letterman's morning show, "The David Letterman Show" and "Late Night with David Letterman." Hall was also a cast member and writer for "Saturday Night Live," "Fridays," and "Not Necessarily the News." In the late '90s, he created a character named Otis Lee Crenshaw — a redneck jailbird from Tennessee. For his performance as Otis, Hall received a prestigious Perrier award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2000.
Hall moved to the UK in 2001 where he continues to perform stand-up and his own brand of musical comedy. Rich recently released a memoir called "Nailing It: Tales from the Comedy Frontier." The book explores real-life experiences in which Hall really had to nail it. And he did — every single time.
Journalist and novelist Carl Hiassen says that it’s rare for somebody to be as funny on paper as they are on stage.
So what is Hall’s secret to getting the laughs onto the page?
"When you're a stand-up comedian and you have an audience who immediately tells you if something works or doesn't, that's a pretty good bellwether for your comedy working," Hall told Wisconsin Public Radio's "BETA." "But when you're writing it, you really have to fall back on what made you want to be a comedian in the first place. I think I'm funny."
From obit writing to dog baptisms
Hall started his career as a journalist for the Knoxville News Sentinel, where he wrote the publication's obituaries.
"I was writing obituaries at midnight in a big, empty building with nothing but an old typesetting room over my head. This is after studying journalism at Western Carolina University. This is after editing a newspaper," Hall said. "And the next thing I know, I'm just writing up dead people that I don't even know. And that just did not last long."
"It was a sort of weird turn of events that made me look out the window one day and see a campus preacher named Jed Smock, who weirdly only passed away a couple months ago and was still up to his dying day, going around the campuses and evangelizing," he continued.
After he saw Brother Jed Smock proselytizing, Hall went to the university library and kept thinking about what he had witnessed.
Smock would get the crowd together and really antagonize people, which would draw even more people, Hall explained. In a matter of minutes, Smock would have around 200 people gathered around him.
Hall was inspired by Smock's ability to heckle.
"He was better than any comedian I've ever met at dealing with hecklers, because that's what he did, you know? And he knew it. He knew how to out-Bible anybody in the audience," Hall said.
Hall said after witnessing Smock, he thought about what it'd be like to rile up a crowd of that size for 10 or so minutes, and then reveal the bit was all a joke.
"I had no real inkling that this would turn into a comedy career. It just seemed to me I could go out there and after 10 minutes, suddenly I'm pulling out this giant album that says 'God's Greatest Hits.' That's why God is everywhere," he said.
Hall worked as a street performer, creating improvisational sketches on various college campuses.
"And then I started baptizing dogs. I'd get dogs out of the crowd. And it was one of those things comedically when you know that you have a pay off. And now all we have to do is sort of reverse engineer it up to that point. And the payoff was I could exorcise a dog — 'exor' not 'exer.' If you poured a pitcher of water over their head and then say, 'Denounce Satan,' what are they going to do? They're going to shake like crazy. And it worked every time. It was great," Hall recalled.
David Letterman and Otis Lee Crenshaw
Once Hall decided to pursue a comedy career, he had no second thoughts.
"I just felt like, well, this is what I should be doing. And I also happened to start at a time when comedy was really starting to become a viable career choice. Suddenly, comedians (were) all over TV. And I just thought, 'Oh, that's what I want to do,'" Hall said.
"I think after learning how to be a street performer, I thought the obvious next step is to get indoors with a readymade crowd. So by the time I reached the clubs in New York, it was astounding to me that there was a crowd already there," he continued.
One of Hall's early breaks was his showcase for David Letterman's morning television show on NBC in 1980. It was at the Improv, with some high profile company. In fact, Hall went on after Larry David.
"They were looking for writers primarily. So all of us thought, oh, what a great gig that would be. (Jerry) Seinfeld was there, Larry Miller, Paul Reiser. Everybody came out and did their tightest material, and they were great," Hall recalled.
Everyone was so great that Hall decided to ditch his tight eight-minute showcase routine. Instead, he came out and badgered the audience into paying for pizza. He pretended he was a slightly unhinged Vietnam veteran who was now working as a pizza delivery man.
"And I decided, 'I'm just going to walk through the audience and work my way to the back where I knew Letterman and his staff and writers and producer were and just kind of harangue Letterman into paying for pizza.' It was crazy, but it worked. It really worked," he said. "So they hired me as a writer. The next day, I went from going on to these late night gigs at the Improv and Catch a Rising Star in New York to walking into Rockefeller Center to my own desk overnight."
"I felt like the reason I was hired was because we had shared sensibilities, Letterman and I," Hall said.
"And basically anything I wrote for him, he made it better. I felt almost right away we were on the same wavelength. I just kind of knew how to write stuff for Letterman."
Letterman's morning show was canceled in October 1980.
While Hall was working on the HBO series, "Not Necessarily the News," in the '80s, he created "Sniglets" — words that should be in the dictionary but are not.
During the late '90s, Hall invented a character named Otis Lee Crenshaw.
"That was my entrée into musical comedy. I came up with a character who doesn't understand why nobody is recording his songs. But he's been in prison most of his life, and a good number of songs are about being in prison. And he was very easy to channel because he was so many of my marginal relatives that I grew up with in the South, the ones coming out of the woods in North Carolina and Kentucky. And it was a character I knew inside and out," Hall said.
When Hall toured Australia in 2009, he wrote and performed a song with his band at a funeral for a man that he'd never met.
"Some people came backstage, just kind of barged in and started saying, 'You're my granddad's favorite comedian. He loved you.' And then they said he just recently died, reversed his car off a supermarket parking lot in Adelaide. 'And you've got to come to his funeral.'"
These people did not realize that Hall was playing a character. They believed that Otis was a real person. So Hall ended up performing a song about "this rotgut rum called Bundaberg, which is like jet fuel and alcohol." And he went on to perform the song during his live shows.