“Chomsky with dick jokes”
I’m watching a ghost – and a funny one as far as ghosts go. A black-garbed comic puffs on a cigarette and paces the stage, launching into a tirade against America. Outrage building, the pudgy-faced Texan berates his US audience for their inferior grade eight education, and spits venom about the Oz-like public relations machinery that fronted for the “fascist” Ronald Reagan.
Much of Bill Hicks’s late eighties and early nineties material took on even greater relevance a decade after his death. “You know we armed Iraq,” he told the audience in a 1992 routine. “I wondered about that too, you know during the Persian Gulf war those intelligence reports would come out: “Iraq: incredible weapons – incredible weapons.” How do you know that? “Uh, well...we looked at the receipts.”
“I’ll show you politics in America,” he added. “Here it is, right here. ‘I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs.’ ‘I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking.’ ‘Hey, wait a minute, there’s one guy holding out both puppets!’ ”
Once describing himself as “Chomsky with dick jokes,” the motormouth Texan reviled comics who blunted their edge to become court jesters at the throne of commercialism. He hated the sell-outs who cranked out inoffensive routines about airline flights, cats and McDonald’s. Shills like Jay Leno came under his withering attack for urging “bovine America” to inhale more Doritos. He frequently pleaded with people working in advertising or marketing to kill themselves for the good of the species.
Although his material was always blue and often misanthropic, it was more shock than shlock. The frequent comparison of Hicks to Lenny Bruce still holds. And like Bruce, Hicks would eventually outwear his welcome in his homeland.
Years ago, you could only find Hicks’ shticks on file-sharing networks, but today he’s all over YouTube. His favourite personal targets - among them Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush Sr. and country singer Billy Ray Cyrus - are now far enough in the past that bowdlerized films of Hicks gigs are considered safe for Netflix.
Hicks lit a fire under the butts of comedy club patrons expecting one-size-fits-all gags from a high-school-educated comic. He burned bright and he burned fast as a foul-mouthed critic of all that white-bread America routinely blinds itself to.
Born in Valdosta, Georgia, and educated in the Southern Baptist faith, the young Bill Hicks moved with his family to Houston, hometown of the Bush dynasty. He began experimenting with comedy by repeating Woody Allen lines routines in his bedroom, By the age of 14 he was performing at a Christian camp – which gave him the interesting experience of self-censorship in his early teens. Worried about his behaviour, his parents got their 17-year old into therapy, but the psychoanalyst could find little wrong with him.
Houston’s Comedy Workshop opened in 1978, a club where Hicks started performing while still in high school. In his first brush with the big time, the 23-year-old Texan landed a 1984 appearance on the talk show Late Night with David Letterman. Impressing the host, Hicks appeared 11 more times on the show. But as his star rose, so did his drug consumption. By 1986, he was in bad financial straits, but an appearance on Rodney Dangerfield’s Young Comedians Special in 1987 revived his flagging career. Moving to New York City, Hicks performed nonstop and quit drugs, leaving a cigarette habit his only vice, which figured prominently in later skits in which he baited non-smokers in the audience.
Starting with an appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe, Hicks became a fixture in the comedy scene in the UK, where he was hailed as a prophet of American excess. His British audiences had the benefit of cultural distance from Hicks’s topical targets, but his US audiences had no such chicken-wire for the soul.
His take-no-prisoners routines were meant to shock the audience out of their media-mediated trance. He explained his comedic philosophy to the New Yorker theatre critic John Lahr in 1993: “The best kind of comedy to me is when you make people laugh at things they’ve never laughed at, and also take a light into the darkened corners of people’s minds, exposing them to the light. I thought the whole point of it was to make you feel un-alone.”
Hicks didn’t suffer fools gladly, and the feeling was sometimes mutual. After one gig in the early eighties, two unimpressed Vietnam veterans followed him outside and broke a leg. “Sufficiently provoked, he would fire rounds of invective, his soft Texas accent hardening with contempt,” wrote Dennis Perrin in Flak magazine. The article quotes a standard Hicks response to hecklers: “Fuck you, you inbred, mouth-reading, American Gladiator-watching cracker piece of shit! Evolve!” Perrin adds that the comic “warned those who heckled him that he had 23 hours a day to concentrate on his arguments and “webs of conspiracy,” and so they would be no match for him during the 24th hour on-stage.” Hecklers rarely had comebacks to that.
Hicks frequently assailed television and the forces of mediocrity that offered up newly minted entertainers without talent or fire. In one scabrous routine, singer John Davidson is raped by Satan and spawns Debbie Gibson and The New Kids on the Block. By the time of his death in 1994, the comic had honed his comedy into lethal sharpness, using it as much as a scalpel as a knife. The Letterman-friendly jokes were sidelined by material savaging the Bush Senior administration and corporate USA.
Gnostic Nyuks
Hicks questioned many of the comfortable middle-class beliefs of his audience about education, politics, television, and drug use. “I’ve had some killer times on drugs,” he would tell his audience. After ingesting a “heroic dose” of psilocybin mushrooms with friends on a remote ranch, the Baptist-baiting comic understood why this fungus remained against the law:
"I'm glad they're against the law [psilocybin mushrooms],'cause you know what happened when I took 'em? I laid in a field of green grass for four hours, going "My God, I love everything." The heavens parted, God looked down and rained gifts of forgiveness onto my being, healing me on every level, psychically, physically, emotionally. And I realized our true nature is spirit, not body, that we are eternal beings…Now, if that isn't a hazard to this country... Do you see my point? How are we gonna keep building nuclear weapons, you know what I mean? What's gonna happen to the arms industry when we realize we're all one. Ha ha ha ha ha! It's gonna fuck up the economy! The economy that's fake anyway! Ha ha ha! Which would be a real bummer. You know. You can see why the government's cracking down on idea of feeling unconditional love."
Such psychedelic observations were the unexpected adjuncts to Hicks’s more aggressive routines, like creating a game show focused on hunting down and killing “Achy Breaky Heart” singer Billy Ray Cyrus.
If his material was limited to nailing political figures and celebrities, the tough-minded Texan might have been remembered as a talented footnote in comedy history. But a portion of his stage routine ventured into territory few nationally broadcast comics have covered before or since. The drug jokes shaded into routines about the human potential for love, transformation, and transcendence. The anti-corporate, anti-government rants were comic grenades tossed into the audience; but the real bomb was Hicks’s Gnostic nyuks about eternity and the soul. Though most of his material was dark, his “light” material was blazingly bright.
This wasn’t quite what the two-drink minimum crowd was expecting. According to an article in Stylus magazine, “right up to the end he was balancing the paradox of playing packed theatres in Europe and coming home and confronting 100-200 seat venues full of apathetic tourists.” Although his celebrity in the US had plateaued with all but a core group of rabid fans, the panjandrums of the US entertainment-industrial complex couldn’t fail to notice this international artist in their midst.
On October 1, 1993, Hicks performed his twelfth appearance on the David Letterman Show, and achieved the distinction of becoming the first comic to be censored at CBS Ed Sullivan theatre, where Letterman held court 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,” wrote New Yorker theatre critic John Lahr.
To Lahr, Hicks was “was no motormouth vulgarian but an exhilarating comic thinker in a renegade class all his own.” Not ready for prime time, in other words, or late night television for that matter. Although all his Letterman material had been previously approved, someone stepped in and deemed it offensive or problematic. Even up to the end – especially at the end – Hicks’s free speech was far too free for the USA.
Within the year, the chain-smoking comic was diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas. In one of his last appearances, “he was frighteningly skinny, wore a patchy beard, tweed sport coat and saggy khakis,” according to Jack Boulware in Salon. “Three months away from dying, and he was going for it, still in the saddle, riding the horse all the way down.” The set included a scatological routine involving Rush Limbaugh, Ronald Reagan and Barbara Bush in a bathtub. At the show’s close, Hicks played Rage Against the Machine, singing along with the chorus, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!”
Like George Carlin, the potty-mouthed comic wasn’t always subtle and often not very nice. But life isn’t particularly subtle or nice at times, and that’s traditionally been comedy gold for comics. But today? It’s easy to imagine Hicks’ material offending the trigger-thumbed Twitter mobs of Planet Woke.
It’s also easy to imagine the conspiracy-minded comic focusing on certain contemporary targets, had he lived. He would have had a fine time with Dr. Tony Fauci, who lied to Congress about illegal US funding of the Wuhan laboratory “gain of function” coronavirus research, which may well have created the very scourge that Fauci is now supposedly protecting the world from.
Hicks would also have found a goldmine in billionaire Bill Gates, who was sued in the 1990s by the US government for antitrust violations. The computer industry monopolist went on to rebrand himself as a global health care philanthropist, making billions more than he gave away. The history-conscious Hicks might have observed this was the very same PR escape hatch exploited a century earlier by Gates’ robber baron predecessor, John D. Rockefeller, who built modern allopathic medicine as we know it today.
And what would Hicks say of the vaccine passport, which less than a year ago was a fixture in so-called conspiracy theories about the “Great Reset?” Would he endorse it as a necessary health measure and comedically slam those opposed to it, or condemn it as a Trojan Horse for a western social credit system following the Chinese model?
What would Hicks have to say about government, corporate media, tech monopolies and Big Pharma uniting seamlessly in their messaging, all for your putative health and safety? Would he have said sit back, shut up, and trust the process? I doubt it. And he would have been deplatformed and censored in no time flat, in echo of his experience on the Letterman show.
“This is where we are at right now, as a whole,” the comic said presciently 30 years ago. “No one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.”
We sure could use Bill now, singing along off-key to Rage Against the Machine.
It’s just a ride
The comic’s most memorable routine, with a surprise ending, is preserved on the 1992 comedy album and film Revelations:
“The world is like a ride at an amusement park. It goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it’s very brightly coloured and it’s very loud and it’s fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question, is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, ‘hey – don’t worry, don’t be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride...’ And we... kill those people. Ha ha! ‘Shut him up. We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real.’
It’s just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. Jesus murdered; Martin Luther King murdered; Malcolm X murdered; Gandhi murdered; John Lennon murdered; Reagan.... wounded.”
“But it doesn’t matter because: It’s just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings or money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one. Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defence each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace. Thank you very much, you’ve been great.”
And with that, Hicks turned to walk off the stage. Imitating three gunshots into the microphone, he pretended to fall down dead. The lights went down and the show was over.
Thanks, Monika. This is a rewrite of something i did for Common Ground back in 2005. It resulted in the most memorable response I’ve ever had from a reader:
“Thanks for the article. You made me cry. Mary Reese Hicks, Bill's mom.”
This is a great post! has certainly made me curious about Hicks. Furious comedy with spiritual characteristics is rather rare, I believe. What a guy. Too bad his ghost can't come back; we need him for some juicy comments on the silly virus...