If you asked me “Whatever happened to comedian Rich Hall?” the answer “He
made good in the UK” not have been my first or my 100th answer.
He’s a regular on QI.
He really is Moe Syzlac.
And he’s damned good on it, too.
“Which moon?”
-Joe
I love Rich Hall. I found that thing he did for the BBC, Rich Hall’s Fishing Show, appallingly funny.
What Merijeek said - search on Youtube for ‘qi rich hall’ and settle yourself down for a while 
That’s funny, because as I was wiping the cheedle* off my fingers the other day, I got to wondering what ever happened to that Sniglets** guy. Now I know.
- cheedle - the Sniglet for that cheese powder that gets all over your fingers when you eat cheetos.
** Sniglets - those words for things that there ought to be words for, but aren’t.
I caught him live on a campus street corner back in the 70’s. He would travel across the USA stopping at college campuses and do a few routines on the streets for donations.
My favorite was a story about a valley in Columbia where the wind would whip the marijuana leaves off of the plants, naturally separate the seeds from the leaves and the buds, and then roll up the buds within the leaves and deposit “cigars” upon the hillside. He used a subject from the audience, a fake “joint” the size of a banana, and a clown mask to demonstrate the results.
Yeah, he’s pretty big here, in the vaguely intellectual comedy genre.
I went to see him live, twice, when I was living in Dublin. Once I saw him as Rich Hall, where in his set he did about 20 minutes - brilliantly - on Irish politics, that he’d just gleaned from reading the papers after he’d arrived. And once I saw him as Otis Lee Crenshaw, and it was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen, up there with Billy Connolly. The kind of comedy show where you just want the comedian to fuck off so you can stop laughing and breathe again. He’s really that good.
Arse, just remembered QI is on!
He is hosting a programme tonight on BBC4 called “Rich Hall’s How The West Was Lost” :-
Comedian Rich Hall travels around the US as he tries to find out what killed off that most quintessentially American of all film genres, the Western. Through films such as The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Little Big Man, The Wild Bunch and Unforgiven, he charts the rise and fall of America’s obsession with its own creation myth and explores how the image of the cowboy as a moral, straight-talking heroic figure was created by Hollywood but appropriated by Washington.
I hope nobody minds me bumping this, to report a sighting of Otis Lee Crenshaw, live and kicking (and as bitter & twisted as ever) on the British festival circuit 
He usually spends August doing a show at the Edinburgh Fringe, either as himself or Otis.
Having said that, he doesn’t seem to be attending this year…
There was a user here once with username “Rich Hall”, I wondered if it maybe was maybe the actual guy, since he seemed somewhat obscure to me here in the US, hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the guy since SNL in the 80s. Now I realize it was probably a Brit fan.
He’s headling a comedy festival in Dublin soon… I’m actually entered into a competition for the honour of supporting him. Not a chance of me winning the spot, but hey, I’ll give it a go!