Funny thing with comedy – generally associated with knee-jerk laughter at some silly spectacle, a thoughtless reflex – is that at its sharpest it’s a revelation of intelligence.
Bill Hicks’ routines were like workshops on perception, ones where the audience got to see him toppling ogres of stupidity and delusion. He was also ridiculously funny: One of that rare breed of comedian whose work qualified as art.
Where jokes and sketches generally have short built-in life spans, Hicks’ material is almost inexhaustibly re-listenable. The shit just gets funnier. He was also, Lenny Bruce aside, comedy’s most rock ’n roll figure. OK, so Richard Pryor grew up in a brothel and set himself on fire during a cocaine-fueled moment of psychosis, but Bill Hicks at his best was a walking, talking M-16 assault on the authorities, and king of the conceptual middle finger.
He also tore apart the New Kids on the Block, MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice at every opportunity, and took delight in standing up for the positive aspects of recreational drugs: “I have taken drugs before and … I had a really good time. Sorry.” He was also something of a prophet.
Born in Georgia in 1961, Bill Hicks grew up with a highly conservative Bible Belt-style family who unknowingly gave him years’ worth of material. A natural stand-up, Hicks was the official class clown: As a teen, he and best friend Dwight Slade sneaked out of their homes and into the comedy circuit, where he soon built up a modest following.
Hicks had a natural talent for viewing the world askew, and for noting faults and inconsistencies in the grand design which others couldn’t even imagine. Early and passionate experiments with magic mushrooms also exposed him to increasingly unconventional perspectives on this, that, and the other. Mind you, Hicks gave up drugs, and never advocated their use. Instead, his central concern was always truth, and the epic misrepresentations of truth otherwise known as human history.
He unfailingly stood up for that which was suppressed or silenced. He slit hypocrisy’s throat wherever his words found it – which was all over the place, be it America’s denunciation of marijuana while gulping down Budweiser or her dubious relationship with “terrorists” whom she had, in fact, armed – or the peculiar sentiment of Christians wearing crosses around their necks. (“Kinda like walking up to Jackie Onassis with a rifle pendant on,” he quipped.)
Fearless in his uncompromising stance, Hicks sometimes alienated even his audiences with his views, most notably in the American South, where he never shied away from lambasting the redneck world-view, creationists (“ever notice how Creationists look really un-evolved?”), and the side-effects of long-term inbreeding.
Unfortunately, like many of the greats in whatever field, he wasn’t well-known while he was still breathing. Appropriately enough, he had quite a following in the U.K., where audiences appreciated irony above slapstick, and were more politically critical than Americans.
Hicks’ gifts really shone with tackling politics. Listening to his extensive skits on the early ’90s Gulf War, he might as well have been dissecting the American politics of the second Bush administration. His then seemingly exaggerated takes on America’s foreign policies are goose-bumpily accurate in the post-9/11 era – both before and after Obama.
For all his hilarious rage, Bill Hicks was deeply concerned about humanity and, like Frank Zappa, was dismayed that stupidity seemed to be the building block of the universe. So he stood up, proudly, and well-armed against this vast beast called Dumb, then did his bit to take it down.
[Originally published by Muse magazine.]
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