Nailing It: Tales from the Comedy Frontier

Product Information

It's rare for comedians to be as funny on paper as they are on stage, but Rich Hall nails it. He is clearly a writer at heart, and his true tales about life on the stand-up comedy circuit are hilarious, touching, and bravely personal. I selfishly wish he had his own TV show here in the States, but this book will fill the void nicely until he does * Carl Hiaasen * Hall’s origin story is suitably quixotic, starting life as a comic street performer, going from campus to campus in the guise of an evangelical preacher spreading the word of dog, proselytising all the canines in his ad-hoc crowd. It sounds like a great act.

This book is a collection of just some of those hard-won tales, so warmly and wittily told that it’s a paean – not, I’d hope, a eulogy – for the sort of nomadic comedian who has no more a career plan than to collect experiences and make people laugh. These are stories about the crux of the comedy moment - in both my professional and personal life - where I had to nail it. Screwball turn-of-events, wayward characters, unplanned disasters, and something-wonderful-right-away moments that made my life funny by happenstance. They're not all triumphs, but if someone propped me up at the end of the comedy bar and put a quarter in me, these are the tunes I would spin. Hall doesn’t always come out of them all covered in glory – far from it – but if someone propped him up at the end of the comedy bar and put a 50p coin in him, these are the tunes he would spin. And you’d be laughing all night. I loved this book. Absolutely adored it. I devoured it and savoured every word. A wild and wonderful love letter to comedy' - ADAM HILLSHall says: ‘There are only two kinds of good comedy: smart stupid and stupid smart. With Nailing It, I strived for the latter, but I can live with the former.’ I loved this book. Absolutely adored it. I devoured it and savoured every word. A wild and wonderful love letter to comedy * Adam Hills * I was doing this long before I met you’ may have been one of his best lines: I think of Joseph Hayden’s wife using the composer’s manuscripts for wrapping vegetables: ‘Behind every great man…’. It wasn’t exactly a triumph, and he didn’t get the girl, but he had found his true calling. Nailing It is a collection of true stories from both Hall’s professional and personal life where he really had to nail it. They’re not about glitz, or fame, or how he met his seventh wife at the rehab clinic and found spiritual direction. So much for the career rundown, but it’s the strange-but-true incidents along the way which shine in this book. Such as the time Hall got carried away with Crenshaw’s white trash artifice, attending –in character – the funeral of a bogan Australian fan he never knew.

Nailing It is described ‘a collection of funny and often absurd epiphanies... hilariously self-deprecating, deliciously acerbic and often utterly surreal’. Rich Hall has been around our comedy consciousness for some time now (his Otis Lee Crenshaw won the Perrier Award at Edinburgh in 2000) and whether he’s on TV with QI, doing standup, or presenting documentaries — where he showcased his fine musical taste — Hall has always proved enjoyable company. You could say he’s reached “classic album” territory in terms of judging his work and legacy, so now is as good a time as any for a memoir. Meryl bookclub 2024 maybe ✅ …. American comedian Rich Hall recalls moments in his comedy career when he nailed it, gleefully hamming up his moments of triumph, hilariously accompanied by humiliation, unexpected failure and many, many teachable moments.Nailing It is a book of many ideas. It is not a straightforward autobiography of the acclaimed comedian Rich Hall. It is not a guide to comedy, or even to life as a comedian. It is not a tome of name-dropping grand-standing. It is not a travelogue, but it talks of travel. It is not a rags-to-riches story, although there are rags and a few riches along the way. BLURB: "A collection of hilarious and often absurd epiphanies in the legendary comedian's life that defined him - more in a for worse than for better kind of way - and all delivered in his unique deadpan style."