From the Comedy Vault Dept.: Back in my reviewing heyday, I presented myself as someone able to write knowledgably about many different disciplines, usually the snooty ones, but I enjoyed forays into realms like comedy, popular song, and even offbeat subjects like ice skating. Here’s a look at Rich Hall’s stop in Schenectady in 1990. Hall dipped into the SNL universe for a season and since has been busy writing plays (at his ranch in Montana) and living and working in London.
RICH HALL'S APPEARANCE at Proctor’s Theatre Thursday night was presented in the guise of comedy, and it’s true that he worked a lot of delightfully-entertaining bits into his set. But he’s really, down deep, a humorist, following a tradition too few comics know about these days.
It wasn’t like that at all. Hall works the audience with easily-recognizable situations – like so many others, he has his own dog and cat routine – but he’s also got a fascination with language that leads him into a territory of free-association once the province only of people like George Carlin.
Like Carlin, Hall explores the sound and sense of words. They differ markedly in matter, however. Carlin shocks by going for the jugular of taboos and chills the audience into laughing at itself. Hall’s is a warmer approach, making friends with the crowd and inviting them into the banter.
And a college-age bunch always has a few willing to cooperate. Vociferously. Hall listened, and worked it all into his routine. He localized the event, seamlessly working what sounded like tried material into a Schenectady-oriented framework.
“Schenectady,” he muttered, prowling back and forth on the apron of the stage, head bent, a shock of hair bouncing as he walked. “Schenectady. Sounds anatomical. Femur, Schenectady, Patella.”
As a humorist, he invents a universe that sounds suspiciously like the one we see. Only his is explainable in terms we never thought of. Terms that make sense. Sort of. (He has written books of “sniglets,” terms he invented to cover ideas the dictionary ignores.)
A late-night trip to Denny’s (“Always open!” he snarled. “Sounds more like a threat”) led to the violence of vegetables (“Beets. Squash. ArtiCHOKES”).
A large portion of the audience was gathered as part of a conference – “Conference? Don’t let me disturb you!” – of the National Conference of Undergraduate Research. As some material based on the enormity of a local Price Chopper failed to spark recognition in an obviously out-of-town bunch, Hall turned to home states for ad-libs, polling people on their origins. It was deftly done.
Free association is a key to this kind of comedy, which puts you at your most vulnerable on stage. Some ideas stay grounded, some take off with marvelous spontaneity. The skilled performer keeps a few surefire saves close at hand, too.
Hall had an impressive number of such unprepared forays fly, and kept the audience with him through nearly an hour and a half of it. He encored with a freewheeling rap with the more vocal contingent and shared some as-yet unpublished sniglets as well.
Glen Schweitzer and the Jalapeno Brothers opened the program with a pleasant set of folk-country material. A mixture of standards and originals, vocals and instrumentals, handled with taste and good cheer in Schweitzer’s Steve Goodman-ish style.
The group is a trio of guitar, bass and mandolin, which makes for an enjoyable sound. But the material leaned toward the languorous, presented with a little too much laid-back diffidence. A “Talking Cigarette” number showed how excitingly the group can hop. I’d like to see a few more such numbers worked in.
– Schenectady Gazette, 19 April 1990
No comments:
Post a Comment