Warren B. Hall Fighting Wars with Comedy

Comedian Warren B. Hall has the type of spontaneous energy that, if bottled, would outsell Red Bull by landslides. He doesn’t just give you wings – he makes the rest of the world disappear with the power of his performance.

Over the past four years, Hall has been overseas to Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan, and Korea to perform for American troops – in places so dangerous, other comedians refuse to venture near.

Hall confesses that he enjoys these overseas performances the best. “It seems like the further you are from danger,” he says, “The less love you get. It’s sad that you have to go overseas to get so much love.”

At Hall’s last performance in Iraq, a couple hundred troops lined up afterwards, just to shake his hand and thank him personally.

“That’s crazy love,” the 33-year-old comedian says. “They said touching things like, ‘You made me forget that I’m in hell for an hour and a half, and I really appreciate that.’ ”

Hall’s currently in the U.S., with shows lined up at comedy clubs, military bases, and universities all across the country. Acting as his own agent, he manages to keep his schedule impressively full. In the next several months, Hall has shows booked in six states, as well as another trip to Iraq and Kuwait this month, before heading back to Afghanistan next October.

Hall has recently moved to Dublin, Texas, where he lives with his girlfriend.

“We have real, real old-school neighbors,” Hall says. Soon after moving in, one of his neighbors, a schoolteacher, approached him to “welcome” him to the neighborhood.

Hall continues: “She says, ‘I noticed you were colored, so I called the other colored girl in the neighborhood and was like, ‘Girl, there’s more color in the neighborhood.'”

Appallingly enough, this neighbor wasn’t kidding. However, Hall has made this experience a useful one by including the story in some of his acts, surrounded by an obvious surplus of jokes.

Hall was born in Boston, grew up in Brockton, and then moved to Phoenix by the start of high school. After graduation, he did comedy part-time while working odd jobs, which included DJing at strip clubs (“I was known as the nicer of the guys there”) and filling phone-order prescriptions, a job which ended on a more tragic note (“What helped [set me free] was that I got into a fist fight with a co-worker.”)

Some other side-projects of Hall’s include acting in commercials for Subaru and the Harlem Globetrotters. Eventually, he got fed up with friends asking, “Hey, man, you still doing that comedy thing?” This frustration pushed his decision to focus on the career of his choice.

Hall began exclusively doing stand-up when he was 29. He’d known that he wanted to be on television since the age of three, when he had a dream that he was in “Scooby Doo.” Then, when he was ten, he saw Eddie Murphy on “Saturday Night Live,” and decided that he wanted to follow in his footsteps. Murphy became a huge influence on Hall, as well as his mother.

“I liked [Murphy’s] fast-talking style,” Hall explains. “And I didn’t realize how funny my mom was before, but she’s a funny gal!”

Hall would like to see his mom running the country. “She’ll whoop ass, but she’ll find out the facts first. Most presidents just want to fight.”

Hall’s mom is a Sergeant Major in the Army. She raised him by herself, and Hall pays her endless respect. This is also another reason why he chooses to devote much of his career to entertaining troops as part of Comics on Duty.

According to Hall, the American soldiers don’t get enough distraction from violence and death. During his last trip, he picked up on some disturbing fads.

“[The troops] watch a lot of Black Hawk Down,” Hall recounts, “[Also,] they come off a 12-hour shift of shooting people, and play Halo. Those guys play Halo like nobody’s business.”

While Hall does play with Airzookas and video games in his down time, he spends most of his time bouncing between older and younger crowds here in the States. He embraces diversity in his influences, as well as his crowds and material.

“Sometimes I get the question, ‘How are you with urban crowds?’ or ‘How are you with white crowds?'” Hall says. “I like mixed crowds the best, a little bit of everything.”

He admits that the material he chooses to use changes with the crowd. “With the college crowds, it’s better to go with physical material, or pot jokes,” Hall explains. “You make jokes about living with a lady, and they’re like, huh?”

Hall is determined to try to avoid the all-too-common black vs. white comedy-routine themes, which have been played out by comedians like Chris Rock.

“I have color issues for different reasons,” he says. “I was always the only black kid. I’ve been in situations where I’ve been judged by my color. When I’m performing for certain crowds, I can tell they want me to open with a color joke. There are many ways of being funny, though, you know?”

Hall may seem daring in his ability to deliver comedy in camps under fire, filled with stormy-faced soldiers – but some things still put him at unease.

“I don’t like cats,” Hall says, laughing. “It’s like prison, they just mess with you. I don’t like that kill-or-be-killed prison mentality.”

Other than that slight eccentricity, though, Hall fearlessly enjoys the freedom of being a stand-up comic.

“If there’s a girl in the front row with cleavage,” Hall says, “I can talk about it and it’s ‘funny.'”

So he continues, fully charged and loaded on his pursuit of ultimate success. “I want my Mercedes while I can enjoy it,” he teases.

Hall’s got more surprises up his sleeve. He’s been working on writing a pilot for an animated show, and he has previously published a book of poetry as well. It’s called “Pieces of Me” (Authorhouse, 2003), and it’s a charismatic blend of his humor, and the melancholy that inevitably hides inside every clown

“I just want to be funny,” Hall says. “I want to make it and bring all my friends. Kinda like Eminem did, you know? I say, let’s all make it.”