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without looking at it and without his eyes straying from
us to say nonchalantly “I doubt it…” before lighting it
in one graceful movement.
Even though the act was honed and down pat
so that he could riff around it (“excuse me why I
plaster on a fake smile and plough through this shit
one more time”) when I saw him at Brighton he was
consummate in fielding questions from the audience
(on subjects as diverse as the then recently launched
Euro Disney in Paris to how Labour lost the 1992
general election).
I thought of Hicks as soon as Dubyah ‘won’ the US
election. One could simply replay the Hicks material
about George Bush from the time of the Gulf War
and apply it to Bush II. History repeating itself first
as farce and then as a Bill Hicks routine. Where was
Hicks when we needed him during Clinton’s dreadful
Presidency? The Lewinsky affair, the impeachment
hearings, the Presidential pardons – you feel that he
would of made such an incredible impact had he lived.
Who knows, perhaps he would of given direction to the
growing Western response of anti-capitalism? He was
that inspirational.
Hicks used comedy in a way that Lenny Bruce had
used it in the 60s, as a consciousness-expanding one.
The appeal was one of a manichaean righteousness that
could of course slide into savage arrogance. There is a
joke he tells about a waffle waitress who, seeing him
BUY Bill Hicks books online from and
reading a book, asks him “Why y’all reading for?” to
which he replies, and it’s hard not to blanch from the
savagery of it: “Well, I guess I read for a lot of reasons,
the main one being so I don’t end up being a fucking
waffle waitress.” So there we have it – comedy that
comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, but
which makes sure to afflict the afflicted as well.
In the evolutionary sense, a subject he was particularly
interested in, Hicks’s lines continue to be highly
successful memes: “You’re not human till you’re in my
phone book”, “Human beings are just a virus in shoes”,
etc. I can’t of been the only one to notice in the dark
poetry of Hicks’s faux heartfelt tribute to his dying
Grandma who he wants to see used in stunts in a martial
arts film, the intimation that here was potentially a
great writer too: “Do you want your grandmother dying
like a little bird in some hospital room, her translucent
skin so thin you can see her last heartbeat work its
way down her blue veins? Or do you want her to meet
Chuck Norris?”
Hicks arrived, in mass media terms, at the tail end of
those seemingly monolithic Republican and Conservative
governments of the 1980s and early 1990s and
what a fillip it was to have such a hardcore exorcism
of our anxieties and anger. We loved the fact that here
was someone you genuinely knew would never sell out
(hear Hicks’s response on Rant In E-Minor to a British
company that wanted him to advertise their ‘Orange
267
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