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Drink’). For a while, my girlfriend and I kept our own
‘Artistic Roll Call’ on the wall, where we would strike
through the names of ‘artists’ who’d just appeared in
an ad for family hatchbacks or a new online banking
service (“Do an ad, and you’re off the artistic roll-call
for ever.”). It was a depressing and shaming list.
Part of the sadness at Hicks’s death was the sense
that a powerful, not just a very funny, political critic
had been lost, and one who was irreplaceable. He has
cast a very long shadow for comedians since his death.
Someone that unique is always going to bring out the
imitators, the paraders of his feathers (the lamentable
British film Human Traffic has a Hicks segment on
drugs, and even has the gall to end the film with one of
his lines).
One doesn’t have to strain that hard to hear the tropes
or cadences of Hicks in any number of present-day
comedians. I saw Rich Hall, a Perrier Award winner no
less, shamelessly adapt Hicks’s Jay Leno fantasy routine
where Leno, the straw man who has the revelation
“Oh my God! What have I done with my life?”, shoots
himself and a spray of blood in the shape of the NBC
peacock is produced (with the venomous pay-off: “A
corporate man to the bitter end”). But righteous anger
is not so easily commodified or corrupted, as Denis
Leary must have realised by now. To my mind, Rob
Newman is the only comedian to have come even close
to Hicks’s level of insight and intensity.
BUY Bill Hicks books online from and
Mark Thomas said witheringly in interview, “If he
couldn’t be angry when he had a few months to live,
then there’s something wrong.” (Thomas told me rather
laughably that he felt that “Hicks is the American Mark
Thomas” and that Hicks was doing very similar material
to him when Thomas went to see Hicks at Edinburgh.)
What’s even more galling is the conflation in the
minds of some people of Hicks with Leary. Yes, they
both smoked a lot, yes, they both wore black. End of
similarity. Leary is (or should I say was?) a one-trick
hack, the one trick being No Cure For Cancer, who
ended up taking ‘cameo’ roles in films like Judgement
Night and Demolition Man while advertising pissweak
beer (“Another corporate shill at the capitalist
gang-bang”).
The appetite among his fans for all things Hicks is
partly a function of the lack of a biography – the Nick
Doody biography has been due to be published for
years – or much new material since the posthumously
released Rant In E Minor and Arizona Bay. Given that
Hicks was gigging from the age of 14 in Austin, Texas
(incidentally where Jenna Bush, Dubyah’s 19-yearold
daughter, was recently arrested for under-age
drinking) right through to his death aged 32 there must
be a lot of material that hasn’t been seen yet. Hicks’s
friend Kevin Booth, who ran Sacred Cow Productions
with him, runs an excellent website dedicated to Bill
Hicks, which occasionally adds new audio and video
268
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