Book review by Steve Bennett

In what’s almost an aside at the end of Nailing It, Rich Hall laments the fact that increasing professionalism of the stand-up scene has robbed it of the ‘renegades, rebels and self-saboteurs’ whose comedy was a by-product of their reckless lifestyles.

Hall might not share the excesses of the forebears he mentions, but he still embraces the easily romanticised idea of the the grizzled road comedian, the travelling troubadour with every line on that notoriously craggy Moe Szyslak face telling a story.

This book is a collection of just some of those hard-won tales, so warmly and wittily told that it’s a paean – not, I’d hope, a eulogy – for the sort of nomadic comedian who  has no more a career plan than to collect experiences and make people laugh.

That Nailing It is a series of anecdotes rather than a formal cradle-to-now narrative memoir is apt given what stock Hall puts in what stories a man has . Nevertheless, these tales – wittily and compellingly written with a keen ear for phase-making – build up a vivid portrait of a life less ordinary.

Hall’s origin story is suitably quixotic, starting life as a comic street performer, going from campus to campus in the guise of an evangelical preacher spreading the word of dog, proselytising all the canines in his ad-hoc crowd. It sounds like a great act.

He always wanted to be a storyteller, but a short-lived stint as a local newspaper reporter convinced him that journalism was not the path for him. He found an open mic night in the small city of Tempe, Arizona, where his frank conversation proved more of a hit than the endless parade of over-earnest musicians. He struck up a friendship with a comic magician on the bill called Bob Dubac and together they would stage comedy nights wherever they found a willing bar.

A particularly odd open spot – and a surreal turn of events – gave him an unlikely inspiration for a TV audition, and he got on to the writing team for David Letterman, who embraced the weird and disruptive when TV was barely ready for it. There was a  one-season stint on Saturday Night Live (alongside Martin Short, Christopher Guest, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jim Belushi and Pamela Stephenson) and Hall became known on the talk-show circuit for creating ‘Sniglets’ – ‘any word that doesn't appear in the dictionary but should’, akin to the Meaning Of Liff books in the UK.

Their ubiquity became a millstone around the comedian's neck until he discovered the Edinburgh Fringe, where he could reinvent himself as a pure stand-up, away from that past. The irresistible story of his first festival is protrayed as a clash between his freewheeling style and his promoter, Marlene Zwicker, wanting something more repeatable and commercial to impress the Perrier judges – and repay her investment. In the end he won the big prize a few years after his debut with his alter-ego, the reprobate country singer Otis Lee Crenshaw.

So much for the career rundown, but it’s the strange-but-true incidents along the way which shine in this book. Such as the time  Hall got carried away with Crenshaw’s white trash artifice, attending – in character – the funeral of a bogan Australian fan he never knew.

He’s also got stories of an ill-fated Vegas residency, buying a Montana ranch without telling his wife Karen, trying to get inspiration for a short story while concussed, a chaotic, nerve-jangling singing performance at Roger Daltry’s Teenage Cancer Trust gig and an awkward invitation to Buckingham Palace.

The situations and the people he encounters are almost all odd, but Hall celebrates that, even when he doesn’t quite know what to make of them. Any reader of Nailing It will likewise embrace the comic’s easy-going eccentricities.

• Nailing It: Tales from the Comedy Frontier by Rich Hall​ is published by Quercus priced £20. It is also available from Amazon priced £14.37.

Review date: 23 Sep 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett