Bill Hicks
William Melvin Hicks was an American stand-up comedian and satirist. His material— encompassing a wide range of social issues including religion, politics, and philosophy— was controversial and often steeped in dark comedy.
At the age of 16, Hicks began performing at the Comedy Workshop in Houston, Texas. During the 1980s, he toured the United States extensively and made a number of high-profile television appearances, but he amassed a significant fan base in the United Kingdom, filling large venues during his 1991 tour. He also achieved some recognition as a guitarist and songwriter.
Hicks died of pancreatic cancer on February 26, 1994, at the age of 32. In subsequent years, his work gained significant acclaim in creative circles—particularly after a series of posthumous album releases—and he developed a substantial cult following. In 2007, he was number six on Channel 4's list of the "100 Greatest Stand-Up Comics", and rose to No. 4 on the 2010 list. In 2017, Rolling Stone ranked him number 13 on its list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time.
Early life
Hicks was born in Valdosta, Georgia, the son of James Melvin "Jim" Hicks and Mary Hicks. He had an older sister, Lynn, and an older brother, Steve. The family lived in Alabama, Florida, and New Jersey before settling in Houston, Texas, when Hicks was seven years old. He was drawn to comedy at an early age, emulating Woody Allen and Richard Pryor, and wrote routines with his friend Dwight Slade. While attending Stratford High School and the University of Houston, he began performing comedy for his classmates. At home, he wrote his own one-liners and slid them under the bedroom door of Steve, who he thought was a genius, for critical analysis. Steve told him, "Keep it up. You're really good at this."Early on, Hicks began to mock his family's Southern Baptist religious beliefs. He joked to the Houston Post in 1987, "We were Yuppie Baptists. We worried about things like, 'If you scratch your neighbor's Subaru, should you leave a note?'" Biographer Cynthia True described a typical argument with his father:
He was close with his family his whole life, though, and he did not reject spiritual ideology itself; throughout his life, he sought various alternative methods of experiencing it. Kevin Slade, elder brother of Dwight, introduced him to Transcendental Meditation and other forms of spirituality. Over one Thanksgiving weekend, he took Hicks and Dwight to a Transcendental Meditation residence course in Galveston. Worried about his rebellious behavior, his parents took him to a psychoanalyst at age 17. According to Hicks, the analyst took him aside after the first group session and told him, "You can continue coming if you want to, but it's them, not you."
Career
Beginnings
Hicks was associated with the Texas Outlaw Comics group developed at the Comedy Workshop in Houston in the 1980s.California and New York
By January 1986, Hicks was using recreational drugs and his financial resources had dwindled. His career experienced an upturn in 1987, however, when he appeared on Rodney Dangerfield's Young Comedians Special. The same year, he moved to New York City, and for the next five years performed about 300 times a year. On the album Relentless, he jokes that he quit using drugs because "once you've been taken aboard a UFO, it's kind of hard to top that", although in his performances he continued to enthusiastically praise the virtues of LSD, marijuana, and psychedelic mushrooms.He eventually fell back to chain smoking, a theme that figured heavily in his performances from then on. His nicotine addiction, love of smoking, and occasional attempts to quit became a recurring theme in his act throughout his later years.
In 1988, Hicks signed with his first professional business manager, Jack Mondrus.
On the track "Modern Bummer" of his 1990 album Dangerous, Hicks says he quit drinking alcohol in 1988.
In 1989, he released his first video, Sane Man; a remastered version with 30 minutes of extra footage was released in 1999.
Early fame
In 1990, Hicks released his first album, Dangerous, performed on the HBO special One Night Stand and at Montreal's Just for Laughs festival. Hicks was later engaged to his manager, Colleen McGarr, who booked him there. He was also part of a group of American stand-up comedians performing in London's West End in November. Hicks was a huge hit in the UK and Ireland and continued touring there throughout 1991. That year, he returned to Just for Laughs and filmed his second video, Relentless.Hicks made a brief detour into musical recording with the Marble Head Johnson album in 1992, collaborating with Houston high school friend Kevin Booth and Austin, Texas, drummer Pat Brown. During the same year, he toured the UK, where he recorded the Revelations video for Britain's Channel 4. He closed the show with his soon-to become-famous philosophy regarding life, "It's Just a Ride." Also in that tour, he recorded the stand-up performance released in its entirety on a double CD titled Salvation. Hicks was voted "Hot Standup Comic" by Rolling Stone magazine in 1993.
Hicks and Tool
band Tool invited Hicks to open a number of concerts in its 1993 Lollapalooza appearances, where Hicks once asked the audience to look for a contact lens he had lost. Thousands of people complied.Members of Tool felt that Hicks and they "were resonating similar concepts". Intending to raise awareness about Hicks's material and ideas, Tool dedicated their triple-platinum album Ænima to Hicks. Both the lenticular casing of the Ænima album packaging and the chorus of the title track "Ænema" make reference to a sketch from Hicks's Arizona Bay album, in which he contemplates the idea of Los Angeles falling into the Pacific Ocean. Ænimas final track, "Third Eye", contains samples from Hicks's Dangerous and Relentless albums.
An alternate version of the Ænima artwork shows a painting of Bill Hicks, calling him "Another Dead Hero", and mentions of Hicks are found both in the liner notes and on the record.
Censorship and aftermath
In 1984, Hicks had been invited to appear on Late Night with David Letterman for the first time. He had a joke that he used frequently in comedy clubs about how he caused a serious accident that left a classmate using a wheelchair. NBC had a policy that no jokes about the handicapped could be aired, making his stand-up routine difficult to perform without mentioning words such as "wheelchair".On October 1, 1993, Hicks was scheduled to appear on Late Show with David Letterman on CBS, where Letterman had recently moved. It was his 12th appearance on a Letterman late-night show, but his entire performance was removed from the broadcast. At that point, it was the only occasion where a comedian's entire routine was cut after taping. His stand-up routine was removed from the show, Hicks said, because Letterman's producers believed the material, which included jokes involving religion and the anti-abortion movement, was unsuitable for broadcast. Producer Robert Morton initially blamed CBS, which denied responsibility; Morton later conceded it was his decision. Although Letterman later expressed regret at the way the situation had been handled, Hicks did not appear on the show again. Hicks was undergoing chemotherapy at the time of his final Late Show appearance, unbeknownst to Letterman and most others outside of Hicks's family. He would die less than four months later.
Letterman aired the censored routine in its entirety on January 30, 2009. Hicks's mother, Mary, was present in the studio and appeared on-camera as a guest. Letterman took responsibility for the original decision to remove Hicks's set from the 1993 show. "It says more about me as a guy than it says about Bill," he said, after the set aired, "because there was absolutely nothing wrong with that".
Denis Leary's alleged plagiarism
For many years, Hicks was friends with fellow comedian Denis Leary, but in 1993, he was angered by Leary's album No Cure for Cancer, which featured lines and subject matter similar to his own routine. According to American Scream: The Bill Hicks Story by Cynthia True, hearing the album had infuriated Hicks. "All these years, aside from the occasional jibe, he had pretty much shrugged off Leary's lifting. Comedians borrowed, stole stuff, and even bought bits from one another. Milton Berle and Robin Williams were famous for it. This was different. Leary had practically taken line for line huge chunks of Bill's act and recorded it." As a result, the friendship ended abruptly.At least three stand-up comedians have stated on-record that Leary stole Hicks's material, and copied his persona and attitude. In an interview, when Hicks was asked why he had quit smoking, he answered, "I just wanted to see if Denis would, too." In another interview, Hicks said, "I have a scoop for you. I stole act. I camouflaged it with punchlines, and to really throw people off, I did it before he did." During a 2003 Comedy Central Roast of Leary, comedian Lenny Clarke said that a carton of cigarettes from Hicks was backstage, with the message, "Wish I had gotten these to you sooner." This joke was cut from the final broadcast.
American Scream describes an incident in the plagiarism controversy:
Material and style
Hicks' performance style was seen as a play on his audience's emotions. He expressed anger, disgust, and apathy while addressing the audience in a casual and personal manner, which he likened to merely conversing with his friends. He would invite his audiences to challenge authority and the existential nature of "accepted truth". One such message, which he often used in his shows, was delivered in the style of a news report :American philosopher and ethnomycologist Terence McKenna was a frequent source of Hicks' most controversial psychedelic and philosophical counter-cultural material; Hicks infamously acted out an abridged version of McKenna's "Stoned Ape" model of human evolution as a routine during several of his final shows.
Another of Hicks' most-delivered lines was given during a gig in Chicago in 1989. After a heckler repeatedly shouted "Free Bird", Hicks screamed, "Hitler had the right idea; he was just an underachiever!" Hicks followed this remark with a misanthropic tirade calling for unbiased genocide against the whole of humanity.
Much of Hicks' routine involved direct attacks on mainstream society, religion, politics, and consumerism. In an interview recorded after one of Hicks' shows in Santa Monica and aired as part of the six-episode BBC Two series Funny Business in 1992, Hicks was asked if audiences got upset by what he said on stage. He responded by saying that occasionally audience members did not find his material funny but that not only would it be impossible to please everyone, it was not his responsibility to do so. He recounted an instance in which an audience member snidely told him "We don't come to comedy to think!" "Gee, where do you go to think?" mused Hicks. "I'll meet you there. We don't have to do this here!" When one of the interviewers then asked whether there was not a halfway point between pleasing and offending audiences, Hicks pushed back, replying "But my way is halfway between. I mean, this is a night club and, you know, these are adults, what do you expect? What you're going to see on TV? No. This isn't TV live. And also, it's my show. What am I supposed to do? Change my own outlook and my beliefs? To be what to them?" Arguing that to simply give audiences what they wanted would be a form of condescension, Hicks explained that his approach was instead to speak to audiences on equal footing, as though they were his friends. When one of the interviewers challenged that audiences just wanted to be entertained, an exasperated Hicks asked, "When did thinking not become entertaining?... What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to go out and tickle them individually? We have to express an idea here."
Hicks was strongly against political correctness, and jokingly stated that the politically correct should be "hunted down and killed."