Bill Hicks was the first person to make me really think. It took a few years of listening to him and regurgitating his talking points in my head while I was a teenager until I learned to really understand the world through his eyes -- a brutally honest critique. Thank you for posting this reminder that one man searching for truth can survive the censorship of "liberal" media. Bill Hicks was an avowed leftist, and yet a critic of the American "left". He was "Chomsky with dick jokes".
>On October 1st, the comedian Bill Hicks, after doing his twelfth gig on the David Letterman show, became the first comedy act to be censored at CBS’s Ed Sullivan Theatre, where Letterman is now in residence, and where Elvis Presley was famously censored in 1956. Presley was not allowed to be shown from the waist down. Hicks was not allowed to be shown at all. It’s not what’s in Hicks’ pants but what’s in his head that scared the CBS panjandrums.
Note what qualified as "censorship" to The New Yorker in the 90s.
Without diminishing Bill, many have called this out for a long time. I blame the ever-bloodthirsty corporate media complex. They even applauded their avowed arch-enemy Trump as soon as he decided to lob a few missiles into Syria, that should tell you something.
Man, this is so 90s. The bland mainstream, such a big fat tempting target. The comedian as a rock-and-roll star. The sarcasm.... The vanity, the ego, the sexual entitlement. Good times, bad times!
I always liked Bill Hicks's content but couldn't get past the deadpan, unenergetic delivery. I know this is kind of heresy in Bill Hicks circles, but I think Denis Leary did Bill Hicks (from which he admittedly cribbed a lot) much better than Bill did. When I see a comedian, I guess I expect a better blend of visual humor and content. Unfortunately, YouTube videos of Bill's performances are as comedic as their text transcripts. The content is so good though, biting and sarcastic!
“Bill honey, are you still doing that ‘eat the pussy’ piece?” “Yeah mom.” – “Great… You know son, many people at Sunday school asked me when you’re gonna be performing in the area. Bill they all are so curious to see the material you’re doing now and they’re aaaaaaaaaaall sure they wanna see… the ‘suck your own cock’ bit, followed by the ‘eat the pussy’ sketch!” “Bill, I only wish your grandparents were still alive. If only you hadn’t to put them in that Chuck Norris film, baby. I wish to God your grandparents could see their grandson on stage, using his given surname… …performing the ‘suck the own cock’ bit, plus the ‘pussy eating’ sketch.” “Maybe they’re hearing it in heaven mom.” “Son, is there anyway I can ask you to type up the ‘suck your own cock’ bit, so I can pin it to your grandmother’s headstone?”
This piece was written in 1993. Bill Hicks was well-known in the States at the time. And if his TV appearance frequency is any indication, he was certainly appreciated.
In the South, where he’s from, I feel that people know him. There’s been a poster of him and other comedy greats in Midtown ATL at the Vortex since at least the mid naughts.
In the North East I haven't met anyone who knows him; I find “Yankees” to be living up to their puritan killjoy reputation. I love them, but man its harder to joke around with them.
Maybe more Atlanta proper than the South overall; despite growing up in Mississippi and Tennessee, I only heard of Hicks after I moved to Baltimore. (Then again, we're not not the South here, exactly...)
> iconic status in the UK for those of a certain age.
I remember introducing my partner to Bill Hicks around 2006.
I remember pointing out that all his Gulf War jokes were about the 1990 war.... She thought he was joking about the 2003+ conflict as, shockingly, the reasons for the war were exactly the same and the jokes all translated perfectly to the new war.
When the hell did Bill Hicks ever tell anyone to vote for anyone? It's been a minute since I listened to his shows, granted, and it's not as if he's still around to care. But don't you think it would behoove you at least to make sure you know what you're talking about here?
Hicks has been dead for almost 30 years. Its not fair to say who he’d vote for today.
He was also preforming in the early 90s where Bush Sr. was conducting a stupid war that set the stage for our current collapse and imperial hubris.
Im a staunch Republican, but Im not going to pretend that the Bushes werent a curse and half of Reagan’s team were too (the other half got purged by Bush until the Pauls helped revive them).
If you want to hear Hicks skewer Democrats, Im sure Ive heard him going on about Tipper.
That seems fairly reductive for such a wide breadth of work and influence, especially given the context that the US is and always has been essentially a two-party system. In such a system you’re either one, the other, or irrelevant.
Bill Hicks died at 32, in 1994, so he lived through 12 years straight of Republicans ('81-'93), and presumably thought maybe Bill Clinton and the Democrats would be different. Had he lived longer, I'm sure he would have been as salty about the Democrats being liars, too. Just like those who lived through 8 years of G.W. Bush in their formative years probably thought that Obama would be much different, with all of the propaganda about hope & change, etc.
Chomsky still telling people to strategically vote for Democrats vs. starting a new party (like the People's Party[0], a populist-focused, anti-corporate party) is pretty inexcusable, though, but that's beside the point.
If you like Bill Hicks' far left view, you might like Jimmy Dore [1], too. Though he's more of a "pothead club comedian".
Please don't take HN threads into tedious ideological and political flamewar. This is against the HN guidelines because it leads to lame, dumb, repetitive discussion and we're trying to avoid that here. We want curious conversation.
Why does Chomsky boil down to that? Most of what he advocates is organisation and activism, which I don't think boils down to voting Democrat - perhaps it does if you think the only impactful thing an American citizen can do is vote, but that is plainly enough false.
> "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something"
I admit that the tone of my post may have been inflammatory. However I don't think that it's fair to characterise my post as a shallow dismissal. I maintain that my opening rebuke of Hicks: "For all of his criticism of the stuffy conservative establishment..." constitutes more than a superficial critique. My dislike of Hicks stems from my view that his worldview discouraged people from joining in the task of reforming the system in which they live. He did nothing to encourage people to invest in themselves, or strive for lofty goals for the sake of humanity. I really dislike his attitude, and I loathe the insinuation that there is any profound insight to be gained from his apathy, and smugness. My opinion is that if you subtracted the establishment that he so limply derides, there would be no substance remaining in him.
* In 2022 this kind vacuous, self-congratulatory pseudo-intellectualism typical to 90s stoner culture is just so stale and irrelevant*
I'd say 30 years later his material is a little more obvious but being 30 years ahead of the curve is a pretty nice compliment. In my State pot is now legal, some psychedelics are decriminalized (and small amounts of any illegal drug is no longer a felony), and my partner does intense therapy on MDMA (via legal trials). We may not be living with Bill Hicks presently, but we live more in Bill Hicks's hopeful future than ever before.
There are lots of 90's comics that are now pretty irrelevant, but Hicks ain't one of them. He wasn't trying to be universally loved, which may be what you're hitting against. He also wasn't positioning himself out as some super intellectual. He self-identified as being simply a, "dark poet". Being a comic was - and is, a pretty tough gig.
It's not pretentious if it's backed up by skill. The way he could deliver lines that he practiced and workshopped for literally a decade was masterful. Saying that that isn't hard is what's pretentious - go up to an audience - a sometimes adversarial audience, and tell a joke sometime.
And he didn't say he was a, "little dark poet" while sitting around in a comfy chair with some literally intellectual, it was part of a bit. He said it while bending down, looking through a small opening made between his thumb and forefinger, with a nasally screech in his voice. Like, "this is all I am, this little turd". And we're all that little turds too, that he's looking at, through that opening.
I'd prefer a world with poets, comedians, and artists, however pretentious they may be, rather than an unpretentious world without them. You remind me of the simple folk of the land, the common clay of the West...
I came to Hicks as a 13 year old in 2003.. when his material on the Iraq war got a second lease of life. Looking back, he was a critic of American imperialism - the "look, he had a gun" sketch for instance. That kind of criticism lasts. Not to mention the presciently pro-drugs take.
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men and women to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
It is not (always) the job of the critic to also play the advocate.
>or even mount any serious opposition to the system he claims to despise
that sounds like something that would take a significant amount of time - people who die young often do not achieve many things that take significant amount of times, especially not things that are outside their main occupation in life. His main occupation was being a comedian, it seems reasonable to limit analysis of his achievements to that field.
Apparently a lot of people around here like Bill Hicks, and why not? He was a brilliant comedian, and maybe the most viciously accurate (and just vicious!) satirist there ever was of the grossly self-satisfied smugness that typified post-1989 American culture. He was easily worthy of being remembered alongside Carlin and Williams, and I think would've been had he not died of cancer just as his career was starting to really take off.
You can find a lot of his stuff, full shows as well as excerpts, on YouTube, and I'd recommend doing so. You'll find your question better answered there than here.
After the Berlin Wall fell. That was one of Lenin's "weeks where decades happen", and the decade that happened in that week was the 90s, when the United States believed it had won the world forever and behaved accordingly.
A post is just a suggestion, a proposition. If there was no place for it, or interest, then it would die in oblivion. But apparently people like bill hicks here!
Historical material is always welcome here, and the only criterion for a good HN post is gratifying intellectual curiosity. I had no idea that the New Yorker had profiled Bill Hicks while he was still alive. That's already interesting!
Bill Hicks saw what most 30 years ago wouldn't and that has become painfully obvious today.
- The war on drugs
- Imperial hubris
- Safetism
The foresight of Hicks is evident by the fact that most Republican voters agree with Hicks on these issues; the last two maybe more than Democrat voters - at least the ones who havent been purged by the neoliberals (Tulsi, we love you!).
