I agree with many of the posters above insofar that your political views might colour your view of Hicks as an artist.
That said, he wasn’t all that funny and his routines tended to be derivative and repetitive. Further, some of his views were simplistic at best and appealed to the lowest commond denominator on the left (that attitude that we are smarter than anyone else and you’re just stupid to know that we are right). It was this sort of wink-wink attitude he had with the audience that was annoying.
I saw him in Dublin in 1992. My sister took me to see him and it was probably one of the ever few things we had ever done together as “adults”. Hicks was sharp, amusing and passionate. He gave a great show and, whether you like him or not, he appeared to leave everything on that stage.
It would have been fun to see his take on Clinton and on Bush II. If nothing else, it would be nice to see someone with such passion and drive on tv or in concert again.
I wish I had the opportunity to see Bill Hicks when he was alive but unfortunately I was born too late. If he were alive today I doubt he would be as great as he was before. It is an unfortunate circumstance that people change and in the case of his comic career it could have only been downhill. But then like all the greats, they all die before their time. It’s just nice to imagine him up in heaven…sniffin’ Yul Brynner’s noggin.
Yeah, I can easily imagine him going the way of Bill Maher. His instinct was to question received wisdom and the official "truth. That could have gotten him into real trouble in the months immediately following 9/11.
One my favorite bits of all time was him talking about porn, and how the porn actresses are called “models” in the credits. Models? What are they modeling? “How are they wearing semen this season, is it back? To the side?”
For what it’s worth; he’s STILL huge in England. Probably more so now than when he was alive.
I suspect that he would still be a big noise over here (if he stayed basically the same) as he played right into the snooty British feelings of superiority over the yanks that we have here. To hear our own prejudices repeated back to us by a yank is always going to go down well. (We have plenty of shouty lefty “comics” of our own but that’s not the same thing)
Students still wear t-shirts with his name on, and a book of his routines is a huge best seller.
Isn’t that just it though? He was always unpopular, but his work called out to the very strong feelings of a passionate minority. God how I wish my feelings and opinions about 9/11 could have been expressed by the genious of Bill Hicks. That was a time when I really felt isolated in my views, I felt like a freak of nature for having logical postions on the 9/11 issues. Hicks was to the entertainment world what Chomsky is to academia, deemed a hertic by the establishment but a ray of light by the frustrated far-left.
After 9/11 they would have kept Hicks off TV, but there would have been enough of people like me to keep him going, doing radio shows, doing stand-up. There always was.
Do we? Like who?! I think you’d be hard pushed to find “shouty lefty comic” in Britain anymore. Eddie Izzard describes himself as a radical liberal - “Storm the Houses of Parliament, just budget for it”. Billy Connelly may have made some unbelievably stupid remarks recently, but I suspect they were said to get an reaction rather than to make a political statement. There’s no Spitting Image anymore. Have I got News For You has lost it’s bite. In truth I can’t think of a single British comic with a political agenda, of any colour (I don’t count reactionary bigots like Jim Davidson as comics or political), probably because they’ve realised the majority of the British public simply aren’t interested in politics.
For me, the person who springs to mind with the phrase “shouty lefty comic” is Ben Elton, who may have talked the talk for a while back in the eighties, but now, as the friend and “creative” (see, I can use pointedly placed speech marks too) partner of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, is about as left-wing as you are, Owl.
On any given subject, from drugs to Iraq to pornography to smoking to Christianity, it often seems like the routine on that subject which Bill Hicks conceived was far and away better than that conceived by any other comedian I have ever seen. Sure, other kinds of comedian might do great stuff on other subjects, but for a “political” comedian I’m not sure one really could do much better without largely paraphrasing some of his routines (which, IMO, were only derivative of the style of Lenny Bruce and Sam Kinison) - they just seem so concentrated.
Perhaps it is partly a blessing that he died so young. I saw him in Edinburgh soon after a dope-smoking saxophonist beat Bush (“all me and Saddam wanted was to see Bush’s head kicked down the street like a football”). He would surely simply be plying the same routines but with the names changed (Debbie Gibson=Britney Spears, Sharon Stone=Janet Jackson). Or, of course, not changed at all.
