The night Rich Hall won this year's Perrier comedy award for his show in which he plays a prisoner, he found himself in a real prison. Shortly after winning the prize at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, he heard that his friend, and everyone's favourite avant-garde performance comic, The League Against Tedium (aka Simon Munnery), had fallen foul of the local police and was being held in a prison cell overnight. Hall left the glitzy Perrier party to go and see his friend but later returned to thrill one and all with a stirring rendition of Bruce Springsteen's Glory Days from the stage. It was that sort of night.
Hall (42) is the first ever US winner of the Perrier, but more importantly is perhaps the first ever universally liked act to win the award. His charming, downbeat manner endears him not only to audiences but also to his fellow comics, and in a world where bitter jealousy runs rampant, nobody t seems has a bad word to say about the American with the husky voice.
Speaking from his home in Montana - "I'm here painting walls. It's very exciting" - he's happy to have escaped the post-Perrier feeding frenzy to land him his own TV series. "It's great, I'm here out in the wide open plains and every day or so my agent in London rings me telling me how much Channel 4 are offering and how much BBC are offering me for my own series. God bless the Perrier."
Not that he's entirely removed from the frantic world of showbiz wheeling and dealing. "Because of the Internet and more comedians travelling and me being the first American guy to win the Perrier, there's a bit of a deal being made of it over here. Yesterday, I got offered a TV show in Los Angeles. But they can shove it, I hate LA."
While on this side of the pond he's seen as a relative newcomer, back home he falls into the "Where is he now?" category. A contemporary of Jerry Seinfeld's, great things were expected of Hall back in the early 1990s. He was a regular guest on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, Late Night With Conan O'Brien and Saturday Night Live and so impressed David Letterman with his stand-up routine that the chat show host asked him to write material for the show - Hall's contributions to Letterman won him an Emmy award.
"I was quite well known back here for a while, at around the same time Seinfeld and Bill Hicks were coming through, but I just tired of the direction comedy was taking. It just seemed like everybody was doing stuff just to get a TV part and the material seemed to suffer. I lived in fear of being cast as the grumpy neighbour in a limp sitcom I was never really that mainstream anyway, so I decided to move away from it and go and live in Montana where, instead of doing gigs, I wrote comedy books."
His off-beat humorous books, Sniglets, Vanishing America and Self-Help for the Bleak, were a more caustic version of Bill Bryson and became bestsellers. With the money he earned, he decided to travel.
"I arrived in London, not knowing what to expect and started doing open spots. I was really impressed by the comedy atmosphere and the quality of the acts - it was so different to what was happening in the US. There were people like The League Against Tedium, The Mighty Boosh, Boothby Graffoe and Ross Noble, and I thought they were all great. I decided to stay for a few years, heard about this thing called the Edinburgh Fringe and was lucky enough to get a Perrier nomination back in 1996 - the year Dylan Moran won.
"The other thing that made me stay was all the comics were telling me about these great festivals in Melbourne and Kilkenny (the Cat Laughs) and since travelling was what I left the US to do, I went everywhere. I became a very different comic in Britain. In the US you have to be very tight and very focused with your sets, but playing places like the Comedy Store, I found I could just talk to the audience and that's where I found a new way to approach comedy. I'm now far less structured and more open to adlibbing than I was previously. In many ways, I'm a totally different comic."
As Rich Hall (as opposed to his stage alter-ego, Otis Lee Crenshaw), he's always been more of a Bill Hicks than a Jerry Seinfeld stand-up. His fascinating takes on geo-political systems and internal US politics led to comparisons with the great Hicks, but Hall always played them down. Hall wouldn't be considered a political satirist, and is happiest talking about his background in the southern US.
"I grew up in North Carolina, and we were an ordinary working family. When people ask me was it a blue collar or a white trash background, I just say my family lifted heavy things for a living. That's my definition of it - if you have to lift heavy things for a living, you're working class."
It was a background that inspired his alter-ego character, Otis Lee Crenshaw, for which he won the Perrier. "Otis is a bigoted, redneck southerner, and he's based on the people I grew up among. His main problem is trying to avoid prison - he's a bit of a serial offender. He's not a bad person as such, just unlucky. The last time he was inside it was for a breach of copyright when he was doing his ZZ Top tribute band and the time before that it was for bigamy - it wasn't really his fault, he just forgot to file his previous divorce papers on time. There was also a fraudulent bingo card scam but I don't really want to get into that."
Otis has been married seven times, always to women called Brenda. It's something that he's in analysis for. "The therapist suggested that I may have some issues from my childhood. In trying to figure out why I always married women with the same name, he suggested I talk to my mom, Brenda, about it."
Delighted to be coming to Dublin, Otis is keen to present his new girlfriend, another Brenda - "she's an IMAX porn star" he says proudly.
After Dublin, he has to decide which British television station gets the privilege of bringing Otis to the small screen. Then there's the small matter of Otis - the Musical to be getting on with. "It's going to be a musical set in a prison, I've just finished the first scene - it's Otis being hit over the head with a phone book by a singing sheriff . . .
Otis Lee Crenshaw performs at Whelan's, Dublin on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday next. Both Otis and Rich Hall perform at Vicar St, Dublin next Saturday night
