For Rich-er, for funnier

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is finished. The prizes have all been won, the money's all been lost, the flats have all been trashed, the livers have all been pickled, the acts are trickling back to London, and the winner of the coveted Perrier Award for comedy is off to Las Vegas.

In Vegas, Rich Hall is going to be doing some simple stand-up. In Edinburgh he's been playing his wonderful character Otis Lee Crenshaw, the drawling Tennessee redneck who sings about living in trailer parks and getting buggered in prison. But three weeks of Otis and his band have been exhausting: "I get tired hauling equipment around. Every night I had to pack up my suitcase and wheel it to a different venue on a hand-truck. In the last few days, people were like, 'There goes the Perrier Award-winner. Pushing his stuff up a hill'."

Producers will now be scurrying to get Otis Lee Crenshaw on to television. Rich Hall fancies doing a musical travelogue of Britain, but "the ultimate vehicle for Otis would be to revive the Elvis movie format. The trouble with Elvis films was they were crap. But it was a great idea - that he could burst into song at any given moment and affect the outcome of the plot. Otis, too, has the power musically to stop a fight, or get himself out of jail."

Hall, an American who lives in London, is delighted with the award because "comedians in America are really low on the evolutionary scale, and there's no reward for live performing. In Britain this shows they appreciate what you do. It elevates comedy to the same status at least as juggling." Hall told the crowd at the riotous Perrier bash, thrown by top party-giver Lawrence Miller, that: "I will make it my business to get the Perrier Award well known in the States. I'll nail it to the roof of my truck."

Like Otis, Rich Hall has lived an itinerant life. London-based American comics are often suspected of coming here because they can't make it back home - but back home Rich Hall wrote best-selling books and won an Emmy for his writing on the David Letterman Show. "They mailed it to me, and I had to pay three dollars to collect it. I opened it up and I was telling everyone in the post office, 'Look, an Emmy!' But it was Los Angeles, so everyone was getting Emmys in the mail."

Hall keeps a home in Montana because "the majestic backdrop is inspiring. Even if you're going to the dry-cleaners to complain about them screwing up your jacket, it's like going to the dry-cleaners in a Sam Peck-inpah film." As a child in North Carolina and Kentucky, "we spent a lot of time drifting around and I still have a travelling streak. My dad had dozens of different jobs before he eventually became a welder. I think he was like ... 42 or so before he really found his career in life".

Interesting that, casting around for the age his father might have been when he found fulfilment, Hall picks 42 - the age that he himself is now. Perhaps Douglas Adams is right when he says that 42 is "the answer to life, the universe and everything".

Rich Hall never knew his mother, who disappeared when he was a baby. "I don't really know what happened. My dad was in the army when they got married, then they had me and I think she just decided she couldn't handle it or something. But because I was only one year old, and my dad remarried right away, I don't feel any big void. I guess she just... you know... didn't want to be a mom." It gives a rather poignant ring to one of Otis's funniest lines: "I been married seven times, all to women called Brenda. I don't know why, it's a strange coincidence. But as my mom, Brenda, used to say..."

Hall is unmarried, but at the Perrier party he thanked Catherine Porter, "the love of my life". Porter is the former girlfriend of comedian Alan Davies, who recently made some rather ungallant comments about her to a newspaper, but she and Hall (who introduced her to Davies in the first place) seem to make a great couple. They wander around hand in hand and she joins him on stage, looking like a third Appleton sister, to sing a duet in her beautiful country-music voice. For an encore, Porter occasionally sings the Rich Hall classic You Said You'd Love Me Til The Cows Come Home; Well, I Think I Just Heard A Moo.

"When you see her sing, you do fall in love with her," admits Hall, something like a blush crossing his craggy face. "She's also an American who's not an American. I'm sorry, but American women are usually far too unmysterious."