Rich Hall, Autumn Tour 2010

Mindful that Dara Ó Briain ticked off one of my colleagues for revealing a punchline of his in his show, I can lumber without fear into reporting Rich Hall’s outing at the Wilde Theatre, Bracknell, as punchlines aren’t really what his comedy is all about. Morose as he looks on TV, on this very early date in an exhaustive 63-gig tour over the British Isles between now and December - I mean, Cambridge, Taunton, Dublin on consecutive days, or Hartlepool, Dundee, Durham (what is he travelling in? A helicopter?) - Hall had the audience on his side within seconds of starting.

So he won’t be winning awards with wordplays on Wilde and wild, but he’d swotted up on Bracknell, and he found a reasonably promising man in the front row, Robin, a “blue-collar recruiter”. Or human trafficker, as Hall swiftly pointed out - rambling through the possibilities to end up with a song written for him in the interval which included: “He stood on the white cliffs of Dover/ And screamed, Need a job? Come on over/ There’s a truck right there - get under it/ Big, bad Robin”.

Heckling the audience apart, Hall is as ever a dyspeptic commentator on his dual life between the US and the UK (he has a British wife, as well as a regular presence on intelligent TV panel shows like QI). America under Obama, he says, is like a shit film that Denzel Washington was great in. He analyses the charm of British TV advertising - so full of production values you don’t know what’s being sold to you - and chocolate, in a wonderful riff about the Kraft buy-out of Cadbury’s which crackles with inventive wit. It’s the genuine company he offers that is fun, rather than a schematic delivery of a string of jokes or of some adopted persona. Some of the material may predate 2010 but then most singers do old stuff too.

Several of his aperçus concern the supposed stoicism of the British: where in America there’s a “war on terror” and people everywhere are primed to spend daytime hours on constant terror alert, in the UK the reaction to anything about terror is “sigh - how much is it going to cost?”

The comedian’s insecurities (evinced by Mr Ó Briain about having his lines revealed) seem less in-your-face from the affably morose Mr Hall, as he says mock-grandiloquently that as a comedian he wants to help the world in any way he can, so why didn’t Al Gore ask him to perform in his global warming concerts? And later he tells an improbably funny anecdote about being invited to a Royal Garden Party, and Don Johnson, and William Shatner, and things not really turning out as they should’ve.

He looks shambling in his familiar sleazy black cowboy shirt with its gold embroidery that looks as if he got it out of a skip behind Graceland, and he plays fairly shambolic guitar and piano from time to time. One of his songs (a drunk's serenade) had the fine rhyme, “Boring Mormons don’t have hormones”. He points out that in obituaries people die either peacefully or suddenly - if it’s suddenly, you'll find the full story on page three.

His subjects range widely - not to say Wildely - from mass-killers to prairie dogs, and he manages to offend Muslims, Mormons, the English, the Irish, the “retarded”, women, scientists and Nick Clegg (“he got government office after being on TV less than Jedward”). More than two hours of material, delivered in an easy intimacy with a small, packed venue, where he comes across, swigging his beer bottle, as grumpy with twinkles. Some of the best gags are old ones, like the disgustingly funny one about how gay men know what they want, or the clever one about Miss Universe.

But the pinnacle was a moment of theatrical duende specific to the night: the turbo speed with which the audience cottoned on to one of his jokes, a joke which I guess he won't be telling in Ireland. The point was less the joke (a smart one-two) than the split-second rapport of an audience and entertainer in total mutual engagement.

• Rich Hall is touring until 14 December
  
• Rich Hall's DVD Hell No, I Ain't Happy on Amazon
• Jasper Rees reviewed Rich Hall at the Hammersmith Apollo a year ago