Dave Hill: Highly Explosive

There is a protest occurring outside the recently closed St Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan's West Village. An almost comically American moment in time, with the hordes exercising their First Amendment right on a sunny 25-degree Memorial Day weekend, it feels strange to be sitting with comedian Dave Hill, discussing his impending journey to foreign shores. In May, Hill had yet to visit, let alone perform in, Scotland.

Presently, we are on the subject of mimes. “Someone told me this story – I don't know if it's true, but I loved it,” Hill begins, giddily. “It was late at night or early in the morning, and everyone was coming home and there was this group of drunk comedians and a group of drunken mimes, and the comedians started taunting the mimes, and the mimes kicked their asses.” A tale as old as time. “I don't know if it's true, but that would be incredible if it was.”

Hill, a rising star in New York comedy who has been branded the king of gentle absurdism, is now close to three weeks into his Fringe run. Quickly establishing himself as one of 2010's most celebrated festival comedians, Hill's style appears to have translated overseas with brilliant success. At the time of our interview, however, his aims were decidedly humble. “I want to get up to trouble,” he explains. “When I go to London I come back a wreck every time. I want to see how I'll survive.”

Having spent his youth studying music in Cleveland, Ohio, his transition into comedy occured accidentally. “I was never the singer in the band,” he says, “Then at one point I started singing, even though I was terrified to, just because being your own singer is easier than finding and having to deal with someone else. Sort of simultaneously, I was getting into writing, and while playing, I realised I liked talking on stage. I'd talk for as long as I could, and the guys in the band would get all irritated with me. I realised that I liked that as much as I liked playing the songs."

Hill made his Fringe debut with The Dave Hill Explosion, an improvised multimedia chat show which, when performed in New York, typically featured eclectic (and often bizarre) sets from guests and musicians. He has become a regular guest at Manhattan's legendary Upright Citizen's Brigade Theatre, a comedy collective whose performers include Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman and Demetri Martin. America's answer to the Cambridge Footlights, UCB became the home of The...Explosion.

Largely responsible for the show's success are Hill's video accompaniments to the show: some include Hill interviewing guests at red-carpet events like New York Fashion Week. More Louie Theroux than Ali G, Hill's interactions with the characters at these gatherings vary in comic discomfort and irony. “What's good about those events is getting someone who's passionate about something. When I go there, I'm not doing it to make fun of people,” he says. “I try to aim to be retarded, and in doing that point out what's fun or stupid about what's going on. It also shows how if you have a camera and a microphone people will instantly give you credit for being knowledgeable.”

It is difficult to imagine Hill—a self-professed "non-extrovert" with the conscientiousness to apologise several times for "getting rambly" during our interview—as even remotely confrontational. “There's one that I felt bad about at the time,” he admits. “I was smoking while interviewing people, just to see who would put up with it. I don't even smoke, and it's something I don't think anyone should put up with, but the guy we interviewed totally did,” he says. “It's just interesting to see what people will go along with.”

In addition to The...Explosion, whose guests at the Fringe have thus far included Charlene Yi, Des Bishop and Jennifer Coolidge, Hill is performing Big In Japan, a one-man show detailing his experience in a country in which his down-and-out band was inexplicably, well, big.

“This was the band in which everyone had previously had tours and record deals and all that, but at the time we weren't really trying to do anything at all,” he says. “We decided we were just going to play and record once in a while and it'd be fun, but it was really meant to be just that. And all of a sudden we got signed to this record label in Japan, and we started touring over there. It was like this fantasy world where everyone knew our band and at the shows everyone was singing along."

Beyond mere anecdote, there's a poignancy with which Hill describes his time in Japan, and his relationship with music. "It was the ultimate rock experience. It was going from this defeatist stance of thinking that absolutely no one liked us, to going to the other side of the world and finding that everyone thought we were awesome.”

While Big in Japan's is truly a theatrical punchline to the globalisation of entertainment, Hill sees the show conveying a very human experience. “It's part travelogue, and part wrestling with doing what you love versus what you think you should be doing. It's about realising that none of it matters, really, and the original reason you get into doing whatever you're doing is the only reason to be doing it."

Simply put, "It's just about having a teenage will to rock that you can't get rid of.”

At the time of our Manhattan rendezvous, we continually returned to the prospect of the as-yet-unknown Edinburgh, when only days prior Hill had returned from a European tour with the Walter Schreifels Band, in which he plays guitar. “There's such a range of people who come over [to the Fringe], from people who are just scraping money together, to people with a team of promoters,” says Hill, whose friends Kristen Schaal, Janeane Garofalo and Rich Fulcher are Fringe veterans. “The consistent thing I've heard is that it's a total blast,” and, surely in the most optimistic sense imaginable: “I'm just a little worried about surviving.”