No Excuses For Comedian Greg Hahn
Comedian Greg Hahn is so manic, so wired, so crazy with the arm-waving and fast with his jokes, he’s like a human energy drink. He hits the stage running, mouth at full motor. “Thursday, start of the weekend!” begins a clip of him on YouTube. “Come on! All right! Hey, who are you; where are you from; what do you do? Back to me! Let’s do the wave, starting with this man with the large prostate!”
Then come the jokes, silly and slap-happy: “How do crazy people walk through the woods? They take the psychopath!” He’s relentless, like a comedy stalker. You have to wonder: Was he always like this? When he was born, did he slap the doc’s face and do a Curly dance? Were his parents NASCAR drivers?
“I have a very nice mother, very great parents, still married,” Hahn said. “Very stable family. I have no excuse for my behavior. I mean, other comics are brought up in a tough atmosphere and can point to it, as far as why they’re developmentally arrested. “Me, no excuse!”
His kinetic style makes him unique; he’s the anti-Steven Wright. Since Hahn quit Lockheed — can you imagine him in an office? — he’s done “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and “Comics Unleashed.” He’s a regular guest on the syndicated morning-radio smash, “The Bob & Tom Show.” “They’re big career-makers,” Hahn said. “They’re great.”
He’ll do many of his best “Bob & Tom” bits at Jr.’s Last Laugh this weekend, including a special Mother’s Day brunch on Sunday. You may not catch every joke because they fly by so quickly. But that’s to his advantage, if not his plan. “I talk so fast and I don’t annunciate that well, so I think they miss half the jokes,” Hahn said. “They forget them, so they come back and see me again and catch the other half of my act. That’s another thing about going really fast. You gotta see me three times to see what happened.” He’s a joke-teller, not a storyteller. That goes way back. As a kid, Hahn said he gravitated to fast-paced comedians like Rodney Dangerfield.
“I never had a good attention span or felt like waiting too long for the funny,” he said. “I want the funny to happen quickly. I’m impatient with comedy. I want it right away. So, I guess I developed a routine so it’d be funny every second.” Part of his funny involves physical humor: While he’s spewing, he’s flailing, tilting and making crazy faces.
“Nuts and exciting is what I go for,” Hahn said. “To prepare for the show, I sit in a hotel room with the air conditioning on frostbite and hold perfectly still. Then, I go up on stage and just go nuts.” Afterward? “I wind down pretty quick,” he said. “Then I wind back up again.”
Author: Dave Richards