Where do you get that? I didn’t see any posts that said what you’re claiming. Plenty of people can be angry at the injustice of the world and find Bill Hicks’s expression of such facile and unnecessarily obvious. Presence and righteous indignation aren’t enough to make one a comedy genius - they’ve still got to be funny, which is the really difficult part.
Rereading the thread, I was a little harsh, maybe the OP’s ‘dark one at the frat party’ rankled me a bit.
Is there any essay/speech/etc. from a comedian explaining why they liked him? I’d be interested in finding out more.
As somebody said above, if you can’t see Bill Hick’s merits as a stand-up comedian, It’d be pointless to tell you why I thought he was funny. I will hazard a guess though that those who don’t like him are probably the ones he is taking the piss out of.
Nope. Like I said, I agreed with him, and saw him live. Just didn’t think he was funny.
It’s easy to see why he was such a polarizing comedian, but underneath it all, he really was a sharp, intelligent person. This monologue is one of my favorites of all time, I recommend you watch it even if you don’t care about him.
If you’ve ever heard Patton Oswalt’s bits about comedy in the 80s, how it was a wasteland of hacky celebrity impressions, comedy-magicians, and Gallagher, and how audiences and venues were routinely awful, you’ll have a better context by which to judge Bill Hicks.
His act was certainly uneven. It doesn’t help that his best albums were released with that stupid, bullshit music between every track.
Why? The part about the “ride” was okay, but the bit about feeding the world with the defense budget is naive in the extreme.
Sure is. What a chump. Who would say something like that?
Right, which is why it’s naive - that passage was written thousands of years ago, and nothing anywhere near to it has ever come close to passing. John Lennon’s “Imagine” wasn’t a brilliant piece of political observation, either.
Not finding a ton right now, but I’ve read or heard a bunch of comments over the years.
He’s not suggesting we use the defense budget to feed and clothe the impoverished. He’s asking his audience to imagine a place not governed by fear or aggression, but instead by love and compassion. It’s allegorical. He’s making an allegory.
It’s honestly surprising how many people in this thread are taking him at his literal word (or misinterpreting what he’s trying to say). He’s a comedian. Do you not understand how comedy works? In this clip, he’s not really, actually suggesting there’s a missile that can pulverize combatants, leaving only their gold fillings, which are then used to fund the war effort. He’s commenting on the character of the U.S. military budget.
Okay, so he’s naive and unoriginal.
On the other hand, I always enjoy a good Bible quote on the Dope.
I disagree. I think he’s saying we have our priorities messed up. While we’ve certainly used our military for some fucked up reasons lately, I don’t see how spending money on a national defense is avoidable.
I don’t see many people doing that.
I agree with you that he’s saying we have our priorities confused, but he’s not honestly suggesting the entire defense budget can be done away with. You’re still literalizing his routine. He’s using allegory as a vehicle to criticize how society manages itself. None of it should be taken literally.
I’m not saying it should be taken literally. I’m saying that “Wouldn’t a world without bad guys be great?” is not a sentiment I would expect from someone who has been described as a genius. It’s something I’d expect to hear from a teenager.
Except that isn’t what Bill was saying. What he was saying was “maybe stuff we do could be changed, and then stuff we have would be different. We’d all like a world without bad guys, so maybe we should stop doing stuff that makes people angry at us (which makes them do stuff that makes us call them “bad guys”) and/or exposes us as greedy immoral hypocrites (aka “bad guys”)”.
To reduce his sentiments to sophomoric declarations takes some serious ignoring of large parts of Bill Hick’s verbiage.
Oh, nonsense. Nothing he said in that clip indicated anything of the sort. That’s all you.
To be fair, you can only “read into” Hicks’ routines so far. I’m certain if he’d fully articulated the basis for any of his bits, he would’ve developed them beyond any simplistic interpretation. But he didn’t (as far as I know) because they were comedy routines. I interpret the “life’s just a ride” bit pretty much the way you do*, but that’s not because it’s clear from the verbiage.
*[sub]If we used the money we spend “protecting” ourselves on making life better for the rest of the planet, maybe we wouldn’t need so much protection…[/sub]
I think that might be part of the problem. I am not real familiar with his work, but I watched the bit about how marketers should kill themselves, and he kept saying over and over that it was not a joke, that he was serious, and that there was no joke coming. So either he meant it, in which case he is being an asshole, or he didn’t, in which case he is denying the only reason I will pay attention to him.
Comedians have to make me laugh, or I am not interested. If they can make me think as well, that’s great, but they have to make me laugh first. They have to earn my attention. It’s not enough that they claim to have deep insights about stuff - jokes are the bribe they have to pay me to get me to listen to their insights.
And his insights, as has been mentioned, are not terribly profound.
Not every bit has to start off “two guys walk into a bar”, but they can’t start off “kill yourself” or “the world is fucked up and I hate it” either, unless you can make it okay for me to sit thru with some kind of entertainment.
Regards,
Shodan