Twenty years after his death, isn’t it time we saluted Bill Hicks as the best of the goddam bunch? Shouldn’t we brace up and face facts? He came. He saw. He poured hilarious, bilious scorn. Pancreatic cancer claimed him at the age
of 32. And we shan’t see his like again – not in the USA, not anywhere – in our lifetimes.
They’re holding a commemorative tribute for him on the anniversary itself – February 26: an official tribute show in Camden, with a visitation from his folks (mother, sister, brother) and contributions from comedians such as Robin Ince and Brendon Burns. There will be chat. There will be clips, courtesy of the guys who made the superb bio-documentary “American”. Great, so far as it goes, but it will only be a small token of esteem scaled against his immense talent. The most provocative, outspoken, necessary stand-up of modern times? I’d say so.
Sure, I realise that praise of this sort might well have made the man himself cringe. I can imagine him frowning and pouting even as I write. “By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing . . . kill yourself,” ran one of his notorious asides. Much as he appreciated the fervour with which he was greeted in the UK in the late Eighties and early Nineties – a refreshing contrast to his homeland’s slow-burn take-up – I suspect he would have recoiled at glowing posthumous puffs. He would have been wary of being co-opted, irked at being labelled or neutered.
But I don’t think we should let this anniversary pass without acknowledging that Hicks is standing the test of time incredibly well. The polls? In as much as those rankings are worth anything, he’s still up there – fourth in Channel 5’s recent run-down of the top stand-ups. I suspect that my generation – lucky enough to be there at his peak – might vote for him partly out of nostalgia, the younger generation because his absence from mainstream culture affords the thrill of discovering him as if for the first time. When Russell Crowe produces his biopic, Hicks may become big news again. But I think we’ve already reached the stage where he doesn’t even much need to be championed because he has become a permanent fixture. If you haven’t cottoned onto him you’re not just missing out, you’re missing the point: he made rare sense of the world we live in.
Some people, I guess, might admire him for the superficial allure of his self-destructive antics: the drink, drugs, smoking and hell-raising years that saw him lose his way after a precocious start before getting it back together. But we should admire him because in his irascible, polemical compelling broadsides he was so clear-eyed about our collective
self-destruction. Listen to the audio recordings, watch the DVDs and I defy you not to be struck by how fresh and how prescient he sounds. Some of the references may have dated – particular personalities and technologies – but the attitude of contempt holds good. He wielded his comedy as a weapon against a zombie apocalypse of corporate yes-men, squeaky-clean conformists, sell-outs, frauds – everyone from politicians and pop-stars to, in one riff,
all of LA.
It’s take-no-prisoners stuff but not nihilistic. Hicks rebelled hard and fast against the certainties of his bourgeois Southern Baptist upbringing in Texas but he carried a preacher’s crusading zeal along with him. The ascription of “Satan” to his enemies was at once a big joke and in deadly earnest. His satire was a scourge against what Orwell called “smelly little orthodoxies”. ‘We are miserable sinners all’ was his stance – and he took aim at his own shortcomings too. How that incredulity and derision would have sustained him against the holier-than-thou tyrannies of political
correctness with which we have been afflicted since.
How you wish he might have been around to take on the banking crisis, or the war on terror – although you can extrapolate his positions from existing material. Indeed, a fine show at the Edinburgh Fringe nine years ago imagined him returning from on high to deliver judgements about current affairs. You realised with a jolt that even a pastiche of Hicks was a cut above many other stand-ups.
Who is there who comes close to what he was about? Hicks poses a problem because such was the force of his personality he at once demands emulation while being impossible to imitate. Who wants to watch Hicks-lite? He makes a
lot comedians today look insubstantial and far too craven to the corporate dollar. The best of those who walk in his footsteps now do so with their own distinctive swagger. In America, I think Doug Stanhope – cut from similar misanthropic cloth while also urging the virtues of hard-headed humanity - leads the pack. In the UK, American abroad Reginald D Hunter has acquired a rare moral authority from being a free-thinking, go-it-alone spirit, tackling taboos round race and sex.
Frankie Boyle might have the same sit-up-and-listen contempt and fearlessness but it’s too often at the service of empty cynicism. Russell Brand has been inspired by Hicks and at his fulminating best – his recent riff on McDonald’s vapid “I’m Loving It” slogan a case in point – achieves the catalytic ignition that Hicks so often managed, like potassium hitting
water. When Brand talks about higher planes of consciousness, there are clear points of comparison too. But who else except Hicks seems to have been born with such a powerful sense of mission to become the straight-talking, dumb hicks-baiting conscience of his people?
He said and I quote: “On December 16th, 1961 the world turned upside down and inside out, and I was born screaming at America. It was the tail end of the American Dream. Just before we lost our innocence irrevocably when the TV
eye brought the horror of our lives into our homes for all to see. I was told when I grew up I could be anything I wanted a fireman, a policeman, a doctor, even president it seemed, and for the first time in the history of mankind something new called an astronaut. But like many kids growing up on a steady diet of westerns I always wanted to be the cowboy hero that lone voice in the wilderness fighting corruption and evil wherever I found it, and standing for freedom, truth, and justice. And in my heart of hearts I still track the remnants of that dream wherever I go in my never ending ride
into the setting sun.”
It’s tempting, surveying the gap his death left in modern stand-up comedy, to cry: send in the clones! Gather the comics together and force them to follow in the same fiery vein as best they can, even if it’s under artificial conditions. But we have to acknowledge his irreplaceability. Most of what he did is out there. Look at what he left, people. Study, learn, recite by heart if that suits. As the West heads deeper into the trash-can, we may well have further need of him.
