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by L. Wayne Hicks

Comedian Rich Hall vanished from American stages and shores more than a decade ago, the price he paid for being too popular.

You might not remember Hall's name, but you probably would recall the name "sniglets." Coined by Hall to describe things that don't have a name but should, sniglets were a regular feature on the 1980s HBO show "Not Necessarily the News." On the show and in five books, Hall defined such words as "dasho" - the area between a car's windshield and dashboard where coins and pencils can't be humanly retrieved - and "nerkle," or someone who leaves Christmas lights up all year.

"People in America, they still say, 'Oh, sniglets, they were great,'" Hall says. "They were. I'm really glad they were so popular, but I think that it kind of cut into my ability to do other stuff on stage. That was quite a while ago. Now it's just another phase in my career. It's not the dominating feature of what I do anymore, and I'm pretty happy about that, but people still remember that in America."

Born in North Carolina in 1954, Hall enjoyed a tremendous run on television during the 1980s. Before "Not Necessarily the News," Hall worked his way through David Letterman's short-lived morning show (for which Hall won an Emmy for writing), ABC's "Saturday Night Live" clone called "Fridays," "Saturday Night Live" itself and his own Showtime special. He also appeared on "The Tonight Show" more than a dozen times and made a series of commercials for Pizza Hut.

But what brought the fans out, what they wanted to see, was Hall doing sniglets. After all, he compiled five books of them between 1984 and 1989.

"Because they were so popular," Hall says, "it sort of hindered my ability to do standup. I'd go on stage and people would want to hear sniglets because they'd seen them on TV or read them in books. But they didn't really work on stage. You couldn't just stand there on stage and go, 'When so and so happens it's called Š' It just didn't have the same effect. So I decided to stop doing standup for quite a while."

"It's funny how people can get tired of something that's successful," says Harland Williams, a Canadian comic now living in Los Angeles. "When you do something that's catchy, people want to hear it all the time. I guess you have to go under the radar until it's died down a bit."

Williams met Hall in Montreal in the early 1990s. Since then, he's shared the stage with Hall in Vancouver, Hawaii and Kilkenny, Ireland. "I've bumped into Rich all over the world," Williams says. "He's a guy who likes to spread his comedy around."

Hall calls London home these days. He spends half the year there and the other half in Livingston, Mont. He says he may try to revive his career in America later this year - "after the statute of limitations runs out" - but for now Hall is enjoying his success in the United Kingdom. Hall and his fiancee of six years, a Liverpool woman named Karen, have a newborn daughter, Dixie Ray.

"I think there's a different attitude about comedians in Britain and Ireland and Europe even," Hall says during a telephone interview from England. "People still come out to see live shows here. I've always enjoyed live performing more than anything, but I wasn't getting much out of playing all the Knuckleheads and Chucklehuts and all those places scattered throughout America where they're serving drinks while you're on stage."

Originally a journalism student at the University of Washington, Hall chucked his studies to become a street performer. He couldn't juggle or do magic, so he tried comedy. Initially, his act consisted of rounding up willing strangers and screaming at them under the guise of filming a student movie. He made his way around the country, stopping at universities and passing the hat, and eventually made his way to New York, arriving in 1979.

"It never occurred to me to be a comedian," Hall says. "It came out of my desire to not hold a regular job. That's why I became a street performer. Then when I ended up in New York City, there were these clubs you could go into and try your stuff out."

For his first time on stage, at the famed Comic Strip, a young but established comedian named Jerry Seinfeld was the emcee. Hall and other comics would make the nightly rounds between the Comic Strip, the Improv and Catch a Rising Star, grabbing stage time and polishing their acts.

Hall was working at a club when a producer spotted him and offered him a writing job on "The David Letterman Show," an NBC morning program that would star the frequent "Tonight Show" guest host. The show ran for three months in 1980 before it was canceled. "I think we all kind of knew it was in the wrong time slot," Hall says. Hall's career chugged along after that, until the overwhelming popularity of sniglets triggered a self-imposed exile from the stage.

"After the Pizza Hut commercials - they gave me a lot of money - I went up to Montana for a while and didn't do anything," Hall says. "I didn't do anything for a while, just having a good time."

Hall returned to standup in 1994, this time on a different continent. He started over in the U.K., without sniglets hanging over his head. Hall also ventured to the month-long Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland, the largest arts festival in the world.

"It's hard to describe the festival if you haven't been to it," Hall says. "The city of Edinburgh is just taken over by millions of people. They come in from the States. They come in from all over Europe, all over Britain and Ireland and they all just converge on this town. Practically every place you pass has been turned into a venue, so there are thousands and thousands of shows going on, from major productions to little tiny shoestring productions. There's comedy, theater, music, dance, opera, everything."

The best comedy show is singled out for the prestigious Perrier Award. Nominated for the award in 1996, Hall won it in 2000, the first American to do so.

"I know it doesn't mean a lot in America," Hall says, "but it certainly means a lot in the U.K. It's like the most prestigious comedy award you can win." Hall won the Perrier Award for his very American character of Otis Lee Crenshaw, an often-jailed, gravel-voiced singer of wretched country tunes that Hall created in 1998. To become Otis, Hall wraps a Confederate flag bandana around his head, slaps on a fake goatee and smokes. A lot.

"That gets my voice right where I want it," he says. "I don't recommend that as a process for preparing your singing voice to most people, but it works for me. It's not hard for me to be that character because it's really an amalgam of people I grew up with. I can go back home and see my folks who live in North Carolina and there's hundreds of Otises walking up and down the highways."

Hall taught himself to the play the piano and write songs. The rough nature of the Otis character explains away Hall's admittedly amateurish musical ability.

"I'd always wanted to write songs but I didn't really have any musical training so I decided to come up with a character that wasn't a very good musician," Hall says. "In the last 10 years or so, I've gotten to be a fairly adequate keyboard player. Enough to hold my own. Enough to play my own songs. I'm not good enough to play in a hotel lounge or anything, but I'm good enough to play my own songs, especially when you surround yourself with capable musicians."

Hall's songs reflect his character's storied past. Consider the lyrics of the uptempo song "Women Call It Stalking":
She said she'll see me in court.
Well, I can't wait.
She calls it a trial,
but I call it a date.

When the judge throws the book, I'm going to pretend it's a bouquet because I'm going to marry that woman someday.

You can tell the woman that you love her face to face,
or you can do it from a phone call that can't be traced.

"You occasionally get people who don't quite get that it's a character," Hall says. "So you get all kinds of reactions. I've had a few people come up to me going, 'I'm really proud of you. You've really done well for yourself,' thinking that I really have been in prison."

Hall grew up listening to his dad play Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash and Roger Miller records. He says the Otis character is as much a tribute to country music as it is mocking it.

"It's important that people hear all the lyrics," says Hall. "If they don't hear the lyrics, they're not going to laugh. That doesn't mean that some songs can't be more poignant than others, but it all sort of has to embellish the character of Otis."

As Otis, Hall has released two CDs, "London, Not Tennessee" (also available as a DVD) and "How Do We Do It? Volume!" and written a novel, "I Blame Society."

The novel provides a backstory to Otis Lee Crenshaw, telling the sad story of his many marriages to women all named Brenda, his struggles to learn to play the piano and his brushes with the law.

"It was fun to write this book because it sort of gave me insight into his past that I didn't know existed," Hall says.

In addition to "I Blame Society" and the sniglets books, Hall has written "Self-Help for the Bleak," "Vanishing America" and a collection of short stories, "Things Snowball." Except for "Vanishing America" and the sniglets books, Hall's books are available only in the United Kingdom.

"The great thing about Britain is they're very avid readers here," says Hall, who wants to write another collection of short stories. "If you're a standup comedian in America, it's not going to occur to most publishers to approach you about writing a book unless it's something trading off of your fame. Here, I'm able to write books that aren't just something that's a spin-off of my TV show or something like that. They stand on their own."

Hall's popularity in England has been rewarded. He starred in "Rich Hall's Fishing Show" on the BBC, a satirical look at issues of the day discussed while fishing. He also was given the task of explaining the American 2004 presidential election in "Rich Hall's Election Special." Hall has begun writing another BBC program to air in June, this one putting Hall in charge of a cattle drive.

"We're going to drive a herd of cattle from Wales to central London," he says. "It's almost impossible to actually do that. It's not like going from Texas to Montana. It's going from Wales to central London, so there's going to be all kinds of impediments along the way - animal rights activists, tree huggers and just the bureaucracy that you have to go through to actually get a herd of cattle across Britain."

"They really took a liking to him over there," says Robert Schimmel, a comedian who knows Hall and finds him hilarious. "I performed there twice and I could see if I kept going back, I could really develop a following there. He really did."

Hall says whether you perform your comedy in Los Angeles or London depends upon your goal. If you want to use standup comedy as a springboard to a situation comedy, then go to Los Angeles.

"But I'm not really a big fan of Los Angeles," Hall says. "Never have been. So I prefer London."

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