Up the North Fork, Rich Hall Looks for Laughs at Home Ranch Bottoms’ Comedy in the Woods
Rich Hall's long comedy career has included best-selling books, a turn on "Saturday Night Live," and a seven-season satirical HBO news show
By Mike Kordenbrock
In the opinion of Rich Hall, the dusty, bumpy, occasionally just-a-little-bit-treacherous drive up to Polebridge — a gravel descent deeper and deeper into the fringes of the North Fork backcountry punctuated by the occasional run-in with wildlife and charismatic megafauna — could use a little bit of improvement.
Put more bluntly, the last 20 miles of the North Fork Road is “a huge pain in the ass,” Hall said.
What he’s proposing is nothing major, really. A simple pave job over the whole thing, and then expanding it out to four lanes of traffic. And maybe building a nice little Town Pump, to, you know, “open it up to the world.”
But before anyone starts to strap on their combat Chacos, oil up their torches and do a little maintenance work on their pitchforks, now would be a good time to note a critical fact about Rich Hall: He’s a comedian.
During a recent interview, just as he gets to the part about the Town Pump, he starts chuckling, finally conceding that this joke plan would “completely ruin” Polebridge and turn it into Bozeman.
His true plans for the North Fork are, in theory, a little bit less destructive.
He wants to make people laugh.
And he’ll have the opportunity to do it this Saturday at Home Ranch Bottoms, which is hosting Hall for its third Comedy in the Woods event. For one night, Home Ranch Bottoms owners Flannery Coats and Danny Freund will attempt to turn their bar, restaurant and campground into a backwoods comedy club framed by mountain ranges, with Winona Ridge as the scenic backdrop behind the stage. To further set the comedy club mood, Coats and Freund will move tables and chairs closer to the stage (people can also bring their own chairs), and at a certain point shut the gates to the property and wind down dinner service in time for the show.
There will be a number of food and drink specials this year. Flannery said she’ll be making pulled pork and her mom’s broccoli salad, a combination she admits sounds crazy but tastes delicious. They’ll also be serving up “Sniglet Gimlet” gin cocktails (more on “sniglets” later), and a “Not Necessarily the Booze” rhubarb mint lemonade mocktail. Home Ranch Bottoms will also have its regular menu available, including their beloved smashburgers and huckleberry margaritas. This year’s opening act is none other than Accordion Bob.
Hall, with his typically dry humor, has been the centerpiece of the show since its inception a few years back, and his involvement is made possible by Freund’s time in the Livingston music scene. Hall splits his time between the Livingston area and London, and he and Freund used to play music together back when Freund was still living in the Paradise Valley.
Music has been a regular part of Hall’s comedy act for a little over 20 years now, including in the form of a character named Otis Lee Crenshaw who is supposed to be a fictional country singer ex-con uncle of Hall’s who has been married seven times, all to women named Brenda. At one point in his career Hall would play a piano, but these days he plays the guitar, in a manner he characterized as “fumbling at best.”
Typically part of his comedy act involves working the crowd for bits of information that he can extrapolate and build something out of it, whether that be a joke or an entire song. He’s not much of a fan of the Weird Al Yankovic style of musical comedy, which lays parody lyrics over well-known songs.
“I like the idea of taking something from the crowd and really trying to build on it, you know and not just throwing out some arch comment and then moving on,” Hall said, referencing the way some comedians do crowd work. “To me it’s a big part of my show, especially musically.”
Flannery described Hall’s act as also taking aim at current events and politics, something she said he does from a distinct, external vantage because of the time he regularly spends out of the country. Turning the news into comedy has long been a part of Hall’s reportoire as a comedian.
The early part of Hall’s comedy career included stints writing for the short-lived daytime “David Letterman Show,” and the ABC sketch comedy show “Fridays,” as well as a turn as a cast member for the 10th season of “Saturday Night Live.” He also wrote for and starred in the HBO satirical news show “Not Necessarily the News,” which ran from 1983 to 1990, and has appeared on a number of late night talk shows.
His forays into TV have continued over the years and he’s been involved in several BBC Four documentaries and comedy series, and has also been a guest on BBC One’s “QI” trivia show and its “Live at the Apollo” comedy show. He’s also been in “The Simpsons.” Well, sort of. Hall has said in the past that he was the inspiration for Moe Szyslak, the curmudgeonly bartender on “The Simpsons” who is voiced by comedian and actor Hank Azaria.
In addition to his work on the screen and the stage, Hall is also the author of a dozen books, beginning with the 1984 release of “Sniglets,” and most recently with “Nailing It! Tales From The Comedy Frontier.”
“Sniglets” takes its name from a term that Hall coined on the “Not Necessarily the News” show for words that don’t appear in the dictionary but should. The first edition of “Sniglets” featured words like “aquadextrous,” meaning the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off with your toes; “expressholes,” for people who try to sneak more than eight items or less into the express checkout line, and snorfing, for “the little game waitresses love to play of waiting until your mouth is full before sneaking up and asking ‘Is everything okay?’”
The success of “Sniglets” was something of a double-edged sword for Hall. In a 2023 interview with the British comedian Richard Herring, he explained that the series of “Sniglets” books became New York Times bestsellers, but the words and written jokes that went with them didn’t translate well onto stage.
“It was a textual thing, these work as a book,” Hall said. “But of course the club owners are going ‘Hey the guy wrote ‘Sniglets,’ he’s playing this weekend.’ So people showed up, and the club owners didn’t care. They were snakes, they were like let’s just get the asses in the seats. And I’d walk out on stage and I’d be like 10 minutes in and you’d hear ‘Sniglets!’ ‘Sniglets!’” from the crowd.
He likened it to if Gary Larson tried to come onstage and describe a The Far Side comic. “It’s just not gonna be that effective.”
He found that performing in the UK, nobody knew about “Sniglets,” and he could get back to his comedy act without the burden of the crowd demanding something he didn’t want to deliver.
After his Comedy in the Woods Show, Hall is headed to Reno, and by the time October rolls around he’ll be touring in Great Britain.
“Basically, my tour’s put together by a drunk guy with an Etch-A-Sketch,” Hall said.
Of the upcoming show, he said most people who have played at Home Ranch Bottoms would probably acknowledge it’s the most remote gig they’ve ever done. But people show up nevertheless. And Hall said that if a moose wanders up to the fence line, for example, he counts that as a body.
“You’re looking out beyond the audience at where you are,” Hall said. “And you figure it’s just this voice, your voice in the wilderness. That’s actually kind of funny, you know? Telling jokes to the big wide open.”
Comedy in the Woods with Rich Hall is Saturday, Aug. 9, at Home Ranch Bottoms. Doors open at 6 p.m., and dinner service is expected to wind down by 7:30 p.m., when Hall will take the stage for about a one-hour set. Tickets are $35 and can be purchased online at https://www.homeranchbottomsmt.com/ or at the gate.