So, I’ve been watching Totally Bill Hicks, a DVD of a documentary about hime and his last ever British performance, and I turn to Crusoe and say: “You know, it’s almost a blessing he died. If he were alive now, in the current political and social climate, he’d be permanently apoplectic with rage.” To which Crusoe replies: “Yeah. Or he’d have become resigned.”
Now, I just can’t imagine that blazing fury with the world and all it’s injustices ever petering out to the state of “Meh. It sucks, but what can you do?” that comes to most of us. But am I wrong?
God, I miss him! I saw him live in a tiny comedy club in Huntsville, AL, of all places, in about 1987. He struck me as intense. That’s probably an understatement.
You are lucky! For how talented this man was, it seems very few people actually saw him live. I just mean this as, I have never met anyone that has seen him live. Then again, I’m from Minnesota, and I beleive he played in the south more than anywhere. I’m glad that there is a lot on video!
It would have been funny yet disturbing if he had done his 1991 HBO sketch on Iraq word for word the same 12 years later. I think about 95% of that stuff would have been still relevant.
I saw Bill Hicks twice. Not deliberately, he just happened to be performning at Austin’s Laff Stop on two nights I was there.
All in all… a so-so comic. Not as funny and not NEARLY as smart or insightful as he thought he was. As long as he was telling dick jokes, he was mildly amusing. But when he went on his patented political/religious rants, he was a pompous bore.
If he were alive today (unlikely- if it hadn’t been cancer from his chain smoking, he’d have killed himself some other way, like his pal Kinison), he’d be a third-tier comic, still playing cheap dives in front of apathetic audiences, all the while boasting “I’m HUGE in England.”
While it seems that smoking can increase the rate of hereditary pancreatic cancer, his bio notes that he’d stopped smoking, booze, and drugs before being diagnosed with cancer. Way to kill yourself.
And Kinison killed himself by arranging to have his car struck head-on by a drunk driver who’d crossed the median? Oh. He made fun of anti-drunk-driving campaigns, so that’s it?
All I’ve heard is one CD but I wasn’t 100% nuts about him. I felt like I should be, but I just didn’t find him that funny. Maybe it’s the timing. One thing that made me laugh was that he was talking about Debbie Gibson and me being the idiot I am I was totally thinking of Britney Spears and then I suddenly thought, “jeesus how old is Britney Spears now how can she be older than me?” She always made me think of Debbie Gibson to the point where I remember Debbie Gibson as being Britney Spears wearing a big 80s hat. Same diff. Same goes for the Backstreet Boys and the New Kids on the Block.
I always loved comedy, especially in the late 80s and early 90s so I don’t understand how I missed Bill Hicks. I guess partly it’s because back then there was no internet to make every single passing interest available to me. Maybe I would have found him incisive in 1987? Somehow I can’t picture it though. I am just underwhelmed by him. Maybe I need to hear more.
its basically just a man on stage articulating his views about the world, and it comes out hilarious… But it is possible you have to agree with his positions to appreciate it.
the major ones:
agaisnt war on drugs
digusted with commercial culture
wary of American military
the timing comment suprised me, I thought I had never seen a comic with such good timing. it’s funny that being huge in Europe after trying your god-damned hardest your whole life in the USA still makes you a hack. I am just glad he had a group of people that appreciated and understood him during his career. I think Jeff Foxworthy is one of the biggest comics here in America.
But here in Austin, we have dozens (maybe hundreds) of HORRIBLE rock bands that have never sold a record in the U.S. These guys would be homeless if they’re girlfriends ever wised up and dumped them. But every one of them will tell you, with just a hint of superiority, “We’re GODS in Norway (or Belgium or wherever).”
Maybe so, but they still suck, and they’re still hacks. Not unlike Bill Hicks.
Who WAS very good at telling dick jokes. Not as good as Robert Schimmel, but a lot better than Andrew Dice Clay.
That probably isn’t the legacy he was hoping for, but that’s what he’s got.
Only none of your garage bands did multiple HBO specials along with eleven performances on Letterman. Also I doubt any of them will be interesting enough to spawn multiple documentaries a decade after they stop performing.
Sure, but only if you define “legacy” as “what astorian personally thinks of him.”
Thos with political objections to Bill Hicks need to 'fess up. (Or maybe even admit it to themselves. astorian, you seem strangely vehement in your dislike of Hicks.)
His comedy was brilliant. I was lucky enough to catch him one night at the old Funny Bone in Atlanta. And were he alive today, he could do the same routines about America and Iraq, and they’d still be relevant. And funny as hell.
If you’re a hardline conservative, you won’t like Hicks: he lived to skewer the ‘establishment’.
But it wasn’t always conservatives he pissed off: e.g., listen to his rants on non-smokers. Feminists couldn’t have been too crazy about him either (I loved his joke complaining to a female hotel clerk about the edited porn movies: "Can I think of anything that would have improved my stay? Yeah – cumshots!"). And his suspicions of government and corporations joining hands to run our lives crossed ideological lines.
A slightly different question: what would Bill Hicks have had to say about eight years under Clinton? Conservatives might have found more to like about him if some of his material tore Clinton up. He died not long after Clinton was elected, so we’ll never know – what little material he did have on Clinton was not unanimously favorable.
Speaking of Alabama, one of my favorite jokes is where tells of a group of guys waiting for him after the show outside an Alabama nightclub.
“Hey”, one of them says. “My friends and I are Christians, and we didn’t like that joke you told!”
