Hi Rich – tell us about the tour.
Well, it’s been the usual stalwart performances that I’m known for. I’ve only got a few weeks left, so I’m on to the last few dregs. Places like Redditch and Runcorn, places that don’t even have a Primark. That’s how devastated these places are.
How did the Hoedown shows come about?
They’re just a chance for me to indulge my country-and-western fantasies. A lot of us comedians are frustrated musicians, and my choice of music just happens to be hillbilly, shit-picker, bluegrass kind of stuff.
I aspire to the really great country music you can get, but there’s some horrible, diabetes-inducing crap out there. Guys singing about how they wanna have a beer with Jesus, or someone who’s punched the Statue of Liberty in the eye.
When I’m on a trip in the US doing a documentary, and there are Brits in the car with me, we have a game where we turn on a country station and everybody picks two words – like beer, or honky tonk, or gal – and almost invariably someone will have a word that comes up in the next song that comes on.
Musical comedy has never had a great reputation.
No, and that was my impetus for trying, as it was all rubbish. You’d just get hack guys doing parodies, like Smoother Vibrator instead of Smooth Operator, or taking a few lame jokes and stringing them along to music. But then I’d see someone really good, like Bill Bailey inspired me a lot, so I thought, OK, I’ll give it a try.
Is there a knack to writing a good comedy song? A lot of people get it wrong, or over-rely on funny rhyming.
I think if you find a funny underlying premise, that helps. Often, if you take an American premise and give it a British twist, it’s inherently funny as nobody would romanticise the things we do here. We do a British trucking song, about an asylum-seeking African jumping on a truck, it’s called Eritrean Trucking Buddy – it’s still a trucking song, but there’s no romance about the British truck at all.
How much of your time is spent in the UK?
I quite often go back to the States. I have to write documentaries for BBC4, so I go back to do that. I’m pretty much a slave to my work, but that’s fine; I like working. After a few months off stage I miss it.
Where do you go to write?
I go to Montana. I sit on my porch and make rude comments to people who walk by. I sit there with a beer and knife and some wood and I whittle. That’s what I do.
What’s the view like?
There are some mountains, some houses, quite a lot of dogs, the occasional moose. We had a moose living in my yard last year. I’ve got some apple trees and he was eating all the apples, getting drunk, so the park rangers came around and escorted him off. It was big news around the town, we had a steady stream of visitors.
What do your family think of your stuff?
They like me on TV, but most of them are pretty religious and probably walk away from my shows, going: “I’ve never seen that sort of thing before.” I’m nervous when they’re there. I think a lot of comics don’t like performing to their families, we prefer a clean slate. Families take it much more personally, and think everything you’re saying is what you believe in and start psychoanalysing it.
Has Otis Lee Crenshaw been retired?
I have plans to bring him back: he’s going to be fronting an Otis Lee Crenshaw tribute band. The idea is that there was an Otis Lee Crenshaw tribute band going around but the singer dropped out so he took over, so he has to talk about himself a lot in the third person. I’m definitely gonna bring him back at some point. I didn’t just want to be associated with one thing, and I ran out of prison songs to write. I think I exhausted them all.
Were you in bands when you were younger?
No, God no. I started playing music when I started Otis, I’d never picked up a guitar or sat down at a piano until about 1996-97. When I’m playing, I’m stretched to the extreme limits of my ability. If someone threw me a guitar solo I’d fuck it up. Hard.
Who will be the next US president?
Oh, it’ll definitely be Hillary Clinton. Unless she steps in a really huge pile of shit, I think it’s pretty much guaranteed it’ll be her. It’s perfect. It’s what America needs. I’d love to have a female president, it’s just as important a ceiling as a black president or a Hispanic president. It’s not just that, though, she’s got the chops: she’s been secretary of state, a senator, she’s aware of what’s going on in the world. And she’s got Bill as her cut man, he’s like her Angelo Dundee, massaging her between rounds. It’s a formidable team.
- Rich Hall’s 3:10 to Humour tours until 7 June. Rich Hall’s Hoedown tours from 9-18 June.
