Media Quotes...

Rich Hall is Otis Lee Crenshaw
Winner — Perrier Comedy Award 2000
The most talked about act of this year’s Fringe, Otis returned to Edinburgh with his new show and astounded critics and audiences alike with an unrivalled performance.

Otis Lee Crenshaw was created in 1998 by Rich Hall.
Otis is a redneck jailbird from Tennessee, who has been married seven times, all to women named Brenda. A singer-songwriter, Otis writes bourbon-soaked, Tom Waitsian tunes and blends this with audience banter, producing a perfect fusion of music and comedy.

Since then, Otis Lee Crenshaw has been charming sell-out audiences each year at the Edinburgh Festival, throughout the UK (on tour), at several festivals in Australia including Adelaide and Melbourne and at London's famous Comedy Store, where he had a monthly slot for six months.

At the Edinburgh Festival 2000, 'Rich Hall is Otis Lee Crenshaw' won the highly prestigious Perrier Award - the Oscars for Comedy in Britain.

Looking like a Pearl Jam roadie, Crenshaw's creator, Rich Hall, is a master of absurdist irony while eschewing the human condition. He particularly likes to lay into Americans and life across the Pond at every opportunity. As Rich Hall the stand-up, he has visited the Edinburgh Fringe Festival several times and performed at the major comedy clubs in Britain and across the world. He is well known in the United States for appearing and writing on The David Letterman Show - Rich pocketed two Emmy Awards for his efforts.

In the United States Rich Hall has also appeared on Saturday Night Live. In the UK, Rich has appeared on: Have I Got News For You, Never Mind The Buzzcocks, Jack Dee's Sunday Service and Edinburgh Nights.

TV

Rich Hall's Badly Funded Think Tank (BBC Choice) Host

Otis Lee Crenshaw - London Not Tennessee (BBC2)

Friday Night With Jonathan Ross (BBC1)

Room 101 (BBC2)

Have I Got News for You (BBC1)

Never Mind the Buzzcocks (BBC2)

It's Only TV But I Like It (BBC1)

Clarkson (BBC2)

Jack Dee's Sunday Service (BBC1)

Edinburgh Nights (BBC2)
In the USA

The David Letterman Show (CBS)

Saturday Night Live (NBC)

The Conan O'Brien Show (NBC)

RADIO

Jonathan Ross Show (BBC Radio 2)

AWARDS

Grand Jury Prize winner, Apsen Comedy Festival 2002

Perrier Award winner 2000

Time Out Comedy Award winner 2000

British Comedy Award nominee 1999/2000

Adelaide Festival Fringe Award winner 2000

2 Emmy awards for writing for The David Letterman Show

Rich is the current Time Out Award Winner for Outstanding Achievement in Comedy. You’ll find out why when you see him perform. Mind-blowing ad libs and improvisation blend seamlessly with scripted material that is both intelligent and razor sharp.
With a voice like six miles of gravel road, songs like a hangover set to music, Tennessee’s Brushy Mountain State prisoner and his band will make you cry with laughter. Accessible and edgy, brutal and clever — a must see.

"Crenshaw skips through blistering spontaneity, excrutiatingly funny banter and heckler put downs as mortifying as an electric chair" Guardian

"Otis Lee Crenshaw is a masterpiece of character based comedy. A perfect blend of charm and satire." Metro

"I doubt if anyone forgets the first time they witness the comic genius that is Rich Hall" Scotsman

"Character comedy at its best, beautifully observed and fully realised." Independent

"An inspired comic creation, striking the perfect balance between flirtation and intimidation. Unmissable....Hall is one of the most winningly funny stand-ups in the business" Independent on Sunday

“Brilliant … hard drinking, romantically grim … raucously anarchic.” The Australian

Otis Lee Crenshaw Pleasance Cabaret *****
Dave Simpson The Guardian Wednesday August 9, 2000

Despite snubs by successive Perrier panels, Rich Hall keeps on honing his alter ego. The murderous ol' singin' Tennessee jailbird has now spent another year in the penitentiary, and married and divorced his seventh wife called Brenda. The result is a "character" so outrageously realistic and funny that it's worth risking Riker's Island just to see it.
The beast has been slightly remodelled (that gravel voice is, implausibly, now rawer than a gargle with steel) but has thankfully not reformed. Out go fondly remembered ballads such as the prison-rape anthem He Almost Looks Like You to be replaced by a clutch of dangerous new songs. Women Call It Stalking ("It's just selective walking") has the audience in uproar.

Vitally, Hall is not playing safe. His rapid-fire wit is now so spontaneous that he should consider leaving his brain to science (they might not want his body); his songs - notably a stunning duet with Catherine Porter - could be number-one hits with a little... er... lyrical attention.

Hopefully, the Perrier panel will show more sympathy than the jury that put Crenshaw away.

Sam Taylor
Sunday August 6, 2000
The Observer

There was a point in his career when Tom Waits might have become one of the great American comedians. Nighthawks at the Diner , the live double album, released in 1975, is full of extravagantly tall stories, wild characters and witty one-liners; the music is wonderful and the words make you laugh. This successful fusion of comedy and music is extremely rare - you could add maybe Randy Newman and Leonard Cohen on certain records - but when it works, it makes for a sublime live experience. Otis Lee Crenshaw is exactly that.
An ex-con country singer, created three years ago by classy US stand-up Rich Hall, Otis is a skinny, grizzled, sexy, world-weary, screwed-up but ineffably cool Tennessee dude. He wears a Confederate flag bandana and a sinister triangular goatee. As a boy, his family was so poor that 'blues singers used to come to our house when they had writer's block'. His guitarist introduces him as 'the man who makes Johnny Cash look like a goddam intellectual'. Otis has been married seven times - all to women named Brenda. 'It's just a coincidence,' he insists. 'The psychiatrists can make anything they like of that, but as my mom, Brenda, used to say...'

Like Al Murray's Pub Landlord, whose throne as Edinburgh's favourite comic character Otis looks sure to take, he may be borderline psychotic, but he is, crucially, a lovable guy; Hall is made for this role, with his Mephistophelean handsomeness and that gravelly voice.

The show is relaxed and slow-burning - part of me wishes he could go on all night, like a real country bar singer - but it's also stuffed to bursting with brilliant one-liners and great songs, all played with real fire and skill by his guitarist and bassist sidekicks, the Black Liars (Damian Coldwell and Christian Riley).

Boldly, Otis doesn't play any of his old hits, such as 'He Almost Looks Like You' (a tender ballad about falling in love with his rapist cellmate), but concentrates exclusively on new material. The titles speak for themselves in most cases: 'Women Call It Stalking' (sample couplet: 'Tears fall down my face/ It might be love or it might be mace'); 'They Fought the Lawn (and the Lawn Won)', a song about all those great singers who died tragically in gardening accidents; 'Asses On Seats', about the grim realities of performing at the Edinburgh Festival; and 'Rodeo Man From the Shetland Islands' (sample couplet: 'Some folks say that they're too small/ I look like a monkey fucking a football').

But the most extraordinary song is 'Show Me on the Doll Where He Touched You' - a ballad about child abuse that is, however sick it sounds on paper, screamingly funny. In between songs, the patter is similar to Hall's 70 per cent improvised stand-up show - but filtered through Otis's deeper, darker psyche. He picks on a guy in the front row called Russ, who happens to run a bluegrass festival near Perth. 'OK, get your kneepads on, guys,' Otis instructs his cohorts, 'we've got some serious work to do.'

Astonishingly for a first night, Otis Lee Crenshaw was sold out. Asses on seats, baby, and maybe the Perrier Award to come. Better buy your tickets now, folks.
Edinburgh Festival

Rich Hall justifiably became the second ever American to win the Perrier award last year with his Otis Lee Crenshaw creation - a country and western jailbird from Tennessee. The music is wonderful, the jokes razor-sharp and as the Guardian said "a character so outrageously realistic and funny that it's worth risking Riker's Island just to see it".

RICH HALL IS OTIS LEE CRENSHAW Pleasance, Edinburgh August, 2000

Hall's musical sideline – career convict Crenshaw, in Scotland as part of a prisoner exchange scheme – has now expanded to the point of swallowing its creator, and it works a treat.

Where Hall as Hall would sometimes come a cropper by taking a verbal riff too far or working himself into a corner, Hall as Crenshaw can digest it within his character and shamble free of such snares in a few seconds. The Crenshaw routine now incorporates material which is strictly out of character – would this tattooed Tennesseean who remarks that "To call my family white trash is an insult to polystyrene" really know that much about scientists weighing the planet, or even know the word "subtext" to apply it to Barbara Cartland novels? – but is sustained by ragged not-so-good-ol'-boy amiability.

So, in addition to these spoken segments and characteristic Crenshaw numbers like "Women Call It Stalking" and the Shetland rodeo cowboy song, we are offered a sharp dissection of the reality behind "Jailhouse Rock", a coffin-country ditty about real major musicians who died in agricultural accidents ("They fought the lawn, and the lawn won"), and such skill at working the audience that he even generates a brace of spoken-word numbers about his chosen victims. It may well be time to put Hall's name and those magic Fringe words "Perrier Award" in the same sentence. [After-the-fact note: well done, me!] Written for the Financial Times

Otis Lee Crenshaw is a bourbon-soaked bigamist whose music makes rats weep and canaries yodel. Don't miss this redneck cabaret featuring Crenshaw performing prison-penned songs that have been rejected by every major Nashville artist, including "He Almost Looks Like You" and "I'm Gonna Love You 'Til I Don't." Starring SNL alumnus and renowned comedy star, Rich Hall, as Otis Lee Crenshaw.

Montreal

THAT'S RICH!

Ali Curran caught up with comedian Rich Hall after his recent run of sell-out shows in Dublin, to talk about his writing and his "uncle" Otis Lee Crenshaw.

Rich Hall is probably best known in Ireland and the UK for his dead pan, sarcastic brand of stand up comedy. In the United States he is best known as a comic writer and performer for television. At forty two you could say the future's looking pretty bright for the ever popular Mr.Hall who played recently to packed houses in the Laughter Lounge Dublin. Its hard to believe then he started out in the early 1980's as a street performer collecting his first pay packet in a plastic bucket. Living in Seattle and in debt from financing his University education Hall happened upon a festival of some of the world's best street performers.

'The first guy I saw had a little camper van on the back of his pick up truck, wooden sided with shingles on it and I just thought, God that's great, I thought street performing was just a very romantic lifestyle'

Running off to join the circus - so to speak - Hall busked six to eight shows a day travelling around the US and never thinking of being a stand up comic until he arrived in New York three years later. 'Stand up comedy was just starting to take off so I went into a comedy club on open mic night and decided to get up, the person who put me on stage was Gerry Seinfeld.'

Given that the US is the original TV nation and being subjected to some of the best and some of the worst comic performances seemed to have been a career decider for Hall. Convinced that he could do better then the majority of comics being seen on TV at the time and inspired by the likes of Steve Martin, the rise and rise of Hall had begun. Over the next ten years Rich Hall stood up with some of the true great American comics such as Billy Crystal, Gerry Seinfeld, Micheal Keaton and Dave Letterman. Hall's four-year period of writing for the Letterman show won him two Emmy awards.

'When you write for Letterman you basically just write the shell of an idea and he ad-libs it. The important thing to Letterman is the comedy between the interviews. He has a comedy show that runs for an hour five nights a week - he needs writers - no comedian is that prolific, no one. The most a comedian can hope to offer is a persona where other people can write for them, that is the mark of a truly original comedian.'

Hall not only writes comedy for his own sets and that of other TV comedians but has also published three best selling humour books in America, 'Sniglets', ' Vanishing America', and 'Self Help for The Bleak'. Eager to pursue more live work Hall came to the UK four years ago for what he thought would be a working holiday. His first stand up gig in the Bear Cat Club, London was a success and encouraged by the positive response he's been a regular on the comedy circuit ever since.

'I think if the audience had turned on me that first night I would have thought oh fuck this just isn't worth it..I was improvising a lot which the audience seemed to appreciate where as in the US they just like you to play it safe'.

So he came and he stayed, and with a combination of live work, his writing for publications such as Scotland On Sunday, and more recently producing a new show for BBC2 hosted by Mark Lamarr and contributing to the 'Eleven O'Clock Show' for Channel 4 (both shows due to go on air in the spring) we seem to be hanging on to Mr.Hall.

'I think I get a lot more respect here then I did in America as someone who can string together sentences that are publishable. There's much more of an appreciation for the written word in Ireland and England. I suppose if I have any long term plan it's to build up an audience who would buy my books if I were to publish them in this country'.

Being a writer and a performer allows Hall to be flexible about where he lives. Currently based part London part Montana and a fair amount of 'if it's Monday it must be.'in between, the transient life style seems to suit this private, lone dog kind of guy. It becomes apparent very quickly that this man is very independent and self sufficient, happily wandering through his work-driven life with a quiet confidence and endless commitment to his field and passion for his latest project - in this case his character show Otis Lee Crenshaw.

Otis Lee Crenshaw is a convicted felon in the US who has spent most of his life in prison for robbery, burglary and forgery. He's self-taught on the piano and has written songs like 'I Don't Come from No Monkey' his classic anti-Darwinism anthem and 'He Almost Looks Like You' a touching melody about prison rape, he's a pretty dark fellah and he's Rich Halls uncle, it's hard to see the connection!

"Otis can get away with stuff that I as a comedian couldn't. The best thing you can say about him is that he's an interesting, if frustrated, musician. He does really have something to say and by god people are going to listen". Anyone who had their ear to the ground at last year's Edinburgh Fringe would have come across Otis, whose unplanned gigs gained near cult status. Luckily Irish audiences will get a chance to see Otis during the spate of comedy festivals (Cat Laughs, Kilkenny and Comedy on the Fringe, Dublin) over the coming months. Hall tells me he's keen to resolve contention that had arisen between himself and his Uncle Otis in the past

'Otis isn't allowed into the country unless he's sponsored by someone with a clean record: so we'll be there. I'm going to try and make reconciliation with him, I think of '99 as a new leaf.'

What a nice guy, and seriously funny with it.

Ali Curran 07/99 © WOW!