Magnificent Bastards

Rich Hall sees the world as fundamentally mad, and getting madder by the minute, wherever you look. His tacit advice for coping with this insane universe is don't try and understand it, just go with the flow. Because if you try to fight insanity with sanity you simply won't win. And think twice before you become involved. It's all too' easy to find yourself sucked dangerously into the madness, whether that involves inflaming international relations by inadvertently beaning an Imam with a baseball in Regents Park, or getting suckered into helping a neurotic locksmith into committing suicide.

Magnificent Bastards is peopled with vivid characters whose paths, with luck, will never cross with ours. There's the hapless Eppy Cloppinger, who writes e-poems to his needy girlfriend; Russ, the reclusive and antisocial Montanan with an imaginary cancer; Rich's own dad, a hard-drinking, dodgy insurance selling schmoozer, whose greatest gift of fathering is to give his son a copy of Roget's Thesaurus; Ryvita Graves, for whom nothing is real unless she's seen in on TV. Rich Hall doesn't ask us to like, dislike or judge these characters. He just wants us know they're there.

Coming from someone better known to most of us as a TV entertainer, you might expect the pieces in Magnificent Bastards to be extended jokes, material that didn't quite fit into a stand-up routine or comedy show format. But most of them are skilfully written, well-structured genuine short stories, full of wit and surprise and - in many cases - wisdom. They just also happen to be very, very funny.