Bill Hicks

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Bill Hicks
Image:Bill Hicks image.jpg Bill Hicks with his trademark cigarette
Birth name	William Melvin Hicks
Born	December 16 1961(1961-12-16) Valdosta, Georgia, U.S.
Died	February 26 1994 (aged 32) Little Rock, Arkansas, U.S.
Medium	Stand-up, music
Nationality	American
Years active	1978-1994
Genres	Observational comedy, Satire/Political satire, Black comedy
Subject(s)	American culture, American politics, current events, pop culture, human sexuality, philosophy, religion, spirituality, recreational drug use, conspiracy theories, libertarianism, consumerism
Influences	Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Woody Allen, Sam Kinison, Johnny Carson, Jimi Hendrix, Noam Chomsky, George Carlin
Influenced	Lewis Black, Eddie Izzard, Denis Leary, Henry Rollins, T. Sean Shannon, Ron Bennington, Patton Oswalt, Joe Rogan, Dean Obeidallah, Russell Brand,
Website	billhicks.com

William Melvin "Bill" Hicks (December 16, 1961 – February 26, 1994) was an American stand-up comedian.

Comedian Richard Pryor figured as an inspiration and stand-up idol for Hicks, as did Woody Allen who also served as a very early influence for a pre-teen Hicks. Hicks characterized his own performances as "Chomsky with dick jokes"^[1].

Contents 1 Early life 2 1980s 3 1990s 3.1 Cancer diagnosis 3.2 Censored 3.3 Death 4 Plagiarism by other comedians 5 Legacy 6 Discography 7 Notes 8 Further reading 9 External links

[edit] Early life

Born in Valdosta, Georgia, Bill was the son of Jim and Mary (Reese) Hicks, and had two elder siblings, Steve and Lynn. The family lived in Florida, Alabama, and New Jersey before settling in Houston, Texas when Bill was seven. Hicks has two school-age stories on the Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1 album. He was raised in the Southern Baptist faith, where he actually first began performing as a comedian to other children sent to Sunday School. One pupil told Hicks' mother that "he was the funniest thing he had ever seen", which prompted Hicks' mother to question the reverend about what Bill had been saying. The reverend replied. "He's very funny but you should look at how you raise him". Hicks never subscribed to the "valuable morals" that were preached to him. The Sunday school education he received gave him an unwavering distrust of religion which allowed him to adapt his own philosophy, much of which focused on ridiculing the contradictions of morality.

At an early age he was also given permission by one of his teachers to pass the time by telling jokes while she fetched the register to take roll. This subsequently prompted a phone call to Hicks' mother from the teacher who asked for advice on how to prevent Bill from performing jokes, as he was taking up "valuable" teaching time and children in the class were protesting against him being removed from the front of his class to his seat. Hicks' mother replied, "Thats your problem, you should have never let him up there".

He was drawn to comedy at an early age, emulating Woody Allen, and writing routines with his friend Dwight Slade. Worried about Bill's behavior, his parents took him to a psychoanalyst at age 17, but the psychoanalyst could find little wrong with him. The therapist apparently joked that Bill's parents would probably benefit more from a few sessions than Bill himself.

In 1978, the Comedy Workshop opened in Houston, and friends Hicks, Slade, John S. and Kevin Booth started performing there. At first, Hicks was unable to drive to venues independently and was so young that he needed a special work permit to perform. He worked his way up to performing once every Tuesday night in the autumn of 1978, while still attending Stratford High School in Houston. He was well received and started developing his improvisational skills, although his act at the time was limited. Bill Hicks, Kevin Booth and Jay Leno reminisce about the Comedy Workshop years in the It's Just A Ride documentary.

[edit] 1980s

In his senior year of high school, the Hicks family moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, but after his graduation, in the spring of 1980, Bill moved to Los Angeles, California, and started performing at the Comedy Store in Hollywood, where Andrew Dice Clay, Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, and Garry Shandling were also performing at the time. He briefly attended Los Angeles Community College, mentioning the unhappy experience on Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1. He appeared in a pilot for the sitcom Bulba, before moving back to Houston in 1982. There, he formed the ACE Production Company (Absolute Creative Entertainment), which would later become Sacred Cow Productions, with Kevin Booth, and worked at local Houston comedy clubs like The Comedy Workshop (as did Brett Butler). Hicks also attended the University of Houston for a short time.

In 1983, Hicks began drinking heavily while using a massive regimen of illicit substances, including LSD, psilocybin, cocaine, MDMA, poppy tea, diazepam, Quaaludes and methamphetamine, which may have influenced his increasingly disjointed and angry, at times even misanthropic ranting style on stage. He continued attacking the American dream, hypocritical beliefs, and traditional attitudes. During his first experience with alcohol, Hicks viciously attacked the audience in a drunken rage. Two Vietnam veterans took exception to his statements and sought him out after the show, breaking one of his legs and cracking one of his ribs.^[2]

Hicks' success steadily increased (along with his drug use), and in 1984 he made an appearance on the talk show Late Night with David Letterman, which was engineered by Jay Leno. He made an impression on David Letterman and ended up doing eleven more appearances, presenting bowdlerized versions of his stage shows.

In 1986, Hicks found himself broke after spending all his money on various drugs, but his career received another upturn as he appeared on Rodney Dangerfield's Young Comedians Special in 1987. The same year, he moved to New York City, and for the next five years he did about 300 performances a year. His reputation suffered from his drug use, however, and in 1988, he claimed to have quit everything, including alcohol. Hicks recounts his quitting of alcohol in the One Night Stand special and on Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1. 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 extol the virtues of LSD, marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms.^[3] He fell back to cigarette smoking, a theme that would figure heavily in his performances from then on.

An infamous gig in Chicago during 1989, later released as the bootleg I'm Sorry, Folks, resulted in Hicks screaming possibly his most infamous quote, "Hitler had the right idea, he was just an underachiever" to a heckler shouting "Free Bird" over and over. Hicks followed this remark with a misanthropic tirade calling for unbiased genocide against the whole of humanity, suggesting that it was not an anti-Semitic comment but rather an expression of his disgust with humanity in general. Hicks often veered between hope and love for the human race and utter hopelessness. In the same gig, he yelled at a female heckler, calling her a "drunk cunt" and demanding that she be removed: "Take her out! Take her fucking out! Take her to somewhere that's GOOD! Go see fucking Madonna, you fucking idiot piece of shit!" ^[4]

In 1989 he released his first video, Sane Man. It was reissued in 2006.

[edit] 1990s

In 1990, he released his first album, Dangerous, did an HBO special, One Night Stand, and performed at Montreal's Just for Laughs festival. He was also part of a group of American stand-up comedians performing in London's West End in November. He was a huge hit in the UK and Ireland and continued touring there in 1991. That year, he also returned to the Just for Laughs festival and recorded his second album, Relentless.

Hicks made a brief detour into musical recording with the Marblehead Johnson album in 1992, the same year he met Colleen McGarr, who was to become his girlfriend and fiancée. In November of that year, he toured the UK. On that tour, he recorded the Revelations video for Channel 4 in England, a show which, in contrast with the harsh and brutally frank style he developed in reaction to the many unwelcoming and often hostile audiences of America, sees Hicks in a playful mood and at ease with his audience, closing the show with "It's Just a Ride", one of his most famous and life-affirming philosophies. Later that year he also recorded a stand-up performance that would become Live at Oxford Playhouse and Salvation. He was voted "Hot Standup Comic" by Rolling Stone Magazine, and moved to Los Angeles again in early 1993.

The progressive metal band Tool invited Hicks to open a number of concerts for them on their 1993 Lollapalooza appearances, where Hicks once famously asked the audience to look for a contact lens he'd lost. Thousands of people complied.^[5] Tool singer Maynard James Keenan so enjoyed this joke that he repeated it on a number of occasions. In 1996, Tool released their album Ænima which contains mentions of Hicks in the liner notes and on record. The track "Ænema" references Hicks's Arizona Bay philosophy and the closing track "Third Eye" contains samples from Hicks's Dangerous and Relentless albums.

Experimental rock outfit Faith No More also quoted Bill Hicks in "Ricockhet" from their "King For A Day, Fool For a Lifetime" album, singing "It's always funny until someone gets hurt and then it's just hilarious".

[edit] Cancer diagnosis

In April 1993, while touring in Australia, he started complaining of pains in his side, and on June 16^[6] of that year, he learned he had pancreatic cancer. He started receiving weekly chemotherapy, while still touring and also recording his album, Arizona Bay, with Kevin Booth. He was also working with comedian Fallon Woodland on a pilot episode of a new talk show, titled Counts of the Netherworld for Channel 4 (UK) at the time of his death. The budget and concept had been approved, and a pilot was filmed. The Counts of the Netherworld pilot was shown at the various Tenth Anniversary Tribute Night events around the world on February 26, 2004.

[edit] Censored

On October 9, 1993, Hicks was scheduled to appear on the Late Show with David Letterman for the twelfth time, but his entire performance was removed from the broadcast -- the only occasion, up to that point, on which a comedian's entire routine had been cut after taping. Both the show's producers and CBS denied responsibility. Hicks expressed his feelings of betrayal in a hand-written, 32-page letter to John Lahr of The New Yorker.^[7] Although Letterman later expressed regret at the way Hicks had been handled, he never appeared on the show again. The full account of this incident was featured in a New Yorker profile by Lahr. This profile was later published as a chapter in John Lahr's book, Light Fantastic.^[8]

[edit] Death

Hicks played the final show of his career at Caroline's in New York on January 6, 1994. He moved back to his parents' house in Little Rock, Arkansas shortly thereafter. He called his friends to say goodbye before he stopped speaking on February 14, and died in the presence of his parents at 11:20 p.m. on February 26, 1994.^[9] Hicks was buried on the family plot in Leakesville, Mississippi.

[edit] Plagiarism by other comedians

Many comedians have acknowledged Hicks as an influence since his death. However, there have been some arguments made that certain comedians plagiarised Hicks' material and attempted to pass it off as their own, notably Denis Leary. A fan-made clip on Youtube suggests not only did Leary steal some of Hicks' material, but also that Sam Kinison, Eddie Griffin, Dennis Miller, Lewis Black and even comedians like Robin Williams and George Carlin, whose careers where already firmly established before Hicks' arrival on the comedy scene, were guilty of lifting certain jokes and routines, down to the same punchlines.^[10]

[edit] Legacy

The Arizona Bay album, as well as Rant in E-Minor, were released posthumously in 1997 on the Voices imprint of the Rykodisc label. Those two albums were licensed to the label by Bill's mother, Mary Hicks, for the Arizona Bay Production Company. Dangerous and Relentless were also re-released by Rykodisc on the same date.

In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, fellow comedians and comedy insiders voted Hicks amongst the "Top 20 Greatest Comedy Acts Ever" at #13. Likewise, in "Comedy Central Presents: 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time" (2004), Hicks was ranked at #19.

In March 2007, Channel 4 (UK) ran a poll, "The Top 100 Stand-Up Comedians of All Time," in which Hicks was voted #6.^[11]

Devotees of Hicks have incorporated his words, image and attitude into their own creations. Thanks to the technologies which enable audio sampling, fragments of Bill Hicks rants, diatribes, social criticisms and philosophies have found their way into many musical works. His influence on Tool is well documented; he 'appears' on the Fila Brazillia album Maim That Tune (1996) and on SPA's self titled album SPA (1997), which are both dedicated to Hicks; the British band Radiohead's seminal album The Bends (1995) is also dedicated to his memory (and to "Indigo"). The UK band Shack released an album in August 2003 quoting a Bill Hicks routine in the title - Here's Tom With the Weather. The album also included other Bill Hicks quotes in the liner notes.

The movie Human Traffic referred to him as the "late, great Bill Hicks," and showed that the main character, Jip, liked to watch a bit of Hicks's stand-up before going out for a night to "remind me not to take life too seriously". Hicks even appears in the comic book Preacher, in which he is an important influence on the protagonist, Rev. Jesse Custer. His opening voice-over to the 1991 Revelations live show is also quoted in Preacher's last issue.

The Simpsons episode "The Last Temptation of Krust" was inspired by Hicks and his disdain for commercialism and Corporate America.^{[citation needed]}

Hicks is considered a Saint by the Church of the SubGenius, with his sacred day falling on April the 13th.^{[citation needed]}

On February 25, 2004, British MP Stephen Pound tabled an early day motion titled "Anniversary of the Death of Bill Hicks" (EDM 678 of the 2003-04 session), the text of which was as follows:

That this House notes with sadness the 10th anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks, on 26th February 1994, at the age of 32; recalls his assertion that his words would be a bullet in the heart of consumerism, capitalism and the American Dream; and mourns the passing of one of the few people who may be mentioned as being worth of inclusion with Lenny Bruce in any list of unflinching and painfully honest political philosophers.^[12]

[edit] Discography

Main article: Bill Hicks discography

[edit] Notes

[edit] Further reading

• Booth, Kevin; Michael Bertin (March 2005). Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution. New York, New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-00-719829-9. 
• Hicks, Bill (2004). Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines. ISBN 1-84119-878-1 (UK edition), ISBN 1-932360-65-4 (US edition). 
• Kaufman, Will (1997). Comedian As Confidence Man: Studies in Irony Fatigue. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press. ISBN 0-8143-2657-9. 
• Mack, Ben; Kristin Pulkkinen (October 2005). What Would Bill Hicks Say?. ISBN 1-933368-01-2. 
• Newfield, Jack (2003). American Rebels. New York, NY: Nation books. ISBN 1-56025-543-9. 
• Outhwaite, Paul (November 2003). One Consciousness: An Analysis of Bill Hicks's Comedy, 3rd edition, D.M. Productions. ISBN 0-9537461-3-5. 
• True, Cynthia (2002). American Scream: The Bill Hicks Story. New York, NY: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-380-80377-1. 

[edit] External links

• Bill Hicks's Official Site
• Sacred Cow Productions
• Bill Hicks at the Internet Movie Database
• Bill Hicks's releases on Rykodisc
• GQ magazine extensive article/biography on Hicks
• BBC News
• Spike Magazine's celebration of Bill Hicks

v • d • e Bill Hicks
Discography
Official albums: Dangerous | Relentless | Arizona Bay | Rant in E-Minor | Philosophy | Love, Laughter and Truth | Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1 | Shock and Awe | Salvation
Video: Sane Man | One Night Stand | Ninja Bachelor Party | Relentless | Revelations | Totally Bill Hicks | Bill Hicks Live
Related articles
Bootlegs | Bill Hicks: Slight Return

Persondata
NAME	Hicks, Bill
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Hicks, William Melvin (full name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION	comedian and social critic
DATE OF BIRTH	December 16, 1961
PLACE OF BIRTH	Valdosta, Georgia, United States
DATE OF DEATH	February 26, 1994
PLACE OF DEATH	Little Rock, Arkansas, United States

de:Bill Hicks

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