Too cowardly to confront my anxieties, I had life’s black comedy explained to me by the Comedian himself. [He] opened my eyes. Only the best comedians accomplish that.

—Adrian Veidt, in Alan Moore’s Watchmen

             While the odds are firmly stacked against comics genius Alan Moore ever having met the late comedic genius Bill Hicks (1961-1994), the above still seems a fitting epigraph to Hicks’ career, his personality, his ideas, and most importantly, his genuine concern for his fellow human beings. Moore’s character of the Comedian has ties with the best tradition of stand-up social satirists like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and (though unintentional) Bill Hicks; not only in their cutting sarcasm and truthful attitudes, but the duality and essential ambiguities of their personal lives.

            Hicks’ comedy is a divisive proposition. His unrelenting, no-bullshit attitude is viewed by fans as a man whose contempt for "harmless" stand-up forced him to tell the brutally honest, painful, ugly truth at all times. To the uninitiated, however, this same attitude is easily viewed as excessive negativity and endless contempt for his fellow man; much in the same way that many jazz fans, upon hearing avant-garde tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler for the first time, simply dismissed his music as noise.

            To both camps, Hicks seems to see the world through a shit-colored lens, and is able to laugh at the incredible stupidity, absurdity, and rampant egomania running loose in his America. This ability to take in all the horror, all the stupidity, all the fear and deception he saw and alchemically turn it into comedy gold makes you either love or hate the man and his work—it is inevitable that you will laugh along with him and get riled up with him and understand the cosmic joke that is the universe with him, or you will feel insulted by him and get riled up at him and resent the misanthropy and negativity you perceive to be embodied by him.

            The video division of Rykodisc recently released Hicks’ legendary Sane Man performance on DVD. The set is a revelation for Hicks fans, and a great starting point for those who are simply curious about his work. Filmed in Austin, Texas in 1989, Sane Man presents Hicks at the height of his powers. He stalks the stage back and forth like a recently-uncaged tiger, sparing his audience no mercy in terms of the sensitive subjects he riffs on or the verbal beatdown they receive should they catch his ire in passing.

            The title of the film, it should be noted, was Hicks’ idea for a superhero. Sane Man wasn’t the type of hero who needed a ridiculous costume or an excess of gadgets or even a superpower to fight what Hicks saw as Crime. Bedecked in jeans and a T-shirt bearing his name and the infinity symbol (whose cosmic implications of rebirth and of time having a cyclical nature are themes that would resonate throughout his work), Hicks’ hero did what he felt a real superhero should do—educate people about the way the world truly works, so that there would not even be a need for crime.

            Some might say this is a hopelessly naive, pie-in-the-sky attitude that doesn’t jive with the doom and gloom of most of his comedy. Indeed, some of his fans dismiss the rare ray of hopeful sunshine that occasionally penetrates the cloud. As a Swiss fan (identified only as “Robert from Zürich”) expresses in response to an article on the BBC website: “I find his ‘spiritual’ stuff trite and simplistic—I find myself thinking, ‘Come on, Bill, you're smart enough to say something more interesting than that.’ But he is still Great.”

            What many people don’t know (or if they do know, have a hard time believing) is that Hicks insisted that his comedy came from his love of humanity. Many of his comedian friends—who are the closest resource we have to learn about the man, in absence of a wife or progeny—say that Hicks saw himself as a Christ-like figure, someone who would and could change human actions and attitudes with an overwhelming message of love.

            In the UK, where Hicks’ comedy caught on much faster and was met with far less audience hostility, their Channel 4 produced a TV biography of Hicks called “It’s Just A Ride” (available on the other Bill Hicks DVD release by Rykodisc, Bill Hicks Live [2004], which also features his standout performances filmed in Chicago, Montreal, and London). It contains some telling testimonials from contemporaries about Hicks’ real goals with his comedy, his desire to enlighten his audience rather than browbeat them. Comedian Brett Butler states explicitly that Hicks wanted to be Jesus. “Bill wanted to save us all,” she says.

            But Hicks’ desire to raise his audience’s consciousness, to show his unbridled love for all of humanity, to really, honestly, work toward saving the human race, was not practiced in a manner that could be called “pragmatic.”

            “I love you all, and you know that,” Hicks states toward the end of the extended version of the Sane Man performance. An audience member can clearly be heard immediately afterward saying, “Do you?” with an incredulity in his voice that illustrates how Hicks’ work alienated many, probably those who needed to listen most. Hicks’ stated message of love can seem tacked-on, a footnote to a solid hour of unceasing vitriol and contempt for his audience, the entire American South, the dogma and machinery of organized religion, the state, the flag, the soldiers who fight for it, politicians and other leaders, women, “family values,” and everything else the bulk of Middle America holds sacred. If you aren’t paying real attention (or choose not to pay attention), it’s easy, then, to identify with this disembodied questioner, to simply wonder aloud, “Well, then, why don’t you show it once in a while?”

            Hicks railed against the anti-intellectual climate so prevalent in the Reagan/Bush I era (a climate which seems to be on the upswing again in our own) to the degree that he seems almost desperate and compulsive in his diatribes against chosen ignorance. A telling anecdote early on in his performance illustrates Hicks’ very real hatred for stupidity, sloth, satisfaction with the status quo, and having no aspirations beyond what life has handed to you:

I was in Nashville, Tennessee last week and after the show I went to a Waffle House, right? And I’m sitting there eating, and I’m reading a book—I don’t know anybody, I’m alone—I’m eating, and I’m reading a book, and this waitress just comes over—‘Whatchu readin’ for?’ I thought ‘Wow, I’ve never been asked that.’ Not what am I reading, but what am I reading for? Well, goddammit, you stumped me. I guess I read for a lot of reasons, but the main one is so that I don’t end up being a fuckin’ waffle waitress. Yeah, that’d be real high on the list. And then this trucker in the next booth gets up, stands over me, and goes ‘Well ... looks like we got ourselves a reader.’ What the fuck’s going on? It’s like I walked into a Klan rally in a Boy George costume or something. Am I stepping out of some intellectual closet here? I read. There, I said it. I feel better.

             Hicks hated what he thought of as “safe” comedy, and predictably his desire to avoid “safe” jokes and routines about “safe” subjects eventually made him a pariah in the entertainment industry at large (David Letterman claims that he loved Hicks and kept trying to give him “breaks,” but was finally “overruled” by NBC—infamously cutting him entirely from an episode of “Late Night”), and often even with his audiences.

            “I feel like a UFO,” he tells the Austin crowd early on, in one of the most memorable bits that he would repeat throughout his career, “because just like UFOs, I too am appearing in small, Southern towns in front of handfuls of hillbillies. And just like UFOs, these hillbillies find me equally incomprehensible.”

            Any good rhetorician, public speaker, philosopher, or politician can tell you that the quickest way to get people to stop listening to you is by insulting them. And insulting his audience was unfortunately (and unfairly) one of Hicks’ best-known characteristics, as easily identifiable as Gilbert Gottfried’s trademark screech or David Cross’ slightly nasal, low-key but biting sarcasm.

            Hicks pulls no punches on the Austin crowd—calling one woman who has a less-than-stellar view of his routine a “schizophrenic ventriloquist bitch,” spending a good five minutes making fun of a young guy in the front row who is wearing sunglasses in a nightclub (though it should be said that this segment is both fall-down hilarious and eye-poppingly incisive), and berating a man who “only” smokes a pack of cigarettes daily as, “A little puss. Why don’t you just put a skirt on and swish around for us? I go through two lighters a day, dude.”

            Hicks’ obsession with smoking, his last vice after he quitting drugs and drinking, occupies such a huge part of his routines that it’s impossible not to note the irony of his all-too-premature death from pancreatic cancer in February of 1994. He bore nothing but anger for non-smokers, or at least the preachy ones, and when assuming the non-smoker persona he would roll his eyes into the back of his head and affect a "stupid voice,” not unlike one used on the playground by every grade-schooler. His hatred for those who would tell him how to live his life, those who would tell him what he could and couldn’t put in his body, is palpable, and plays a strong role in not only his routines about smoking but those relating to drug and alcohol use as well.

            His probably facetious love for the aura of “coolness” surrounding smoking led him to play fast and loose with the very real and very dire consequences of tobacco use, and as he tells his hometown audience, “I’m willing to die seven years before my time just so I can be cool every last fuckin’ day. I’ll smoke, I’ll cough, I’ll get the tumours, I’ll die. Deal?”

            The universe seemed all to willing to accept this deal, though cancer would ultimately take a lot more than seven years off of his life.

            Later on in the routine, Hicks expresses a bit of discomfort with and worry about glorifying cigarettes in his act. “I’ve got this big fear of doing smoking jokes in my act, right? Showing up five years from now, going (puts microphone to throat in imitation of voicebox), ‘Good evening, everybody. Remember me? Smoking’s bad.’”

            Five years after he made that joke, he would be in a much worse situation than merely needing a tracheotomy and smoking through a stoma in his neck; he would sadly be dead, cut down years before his time.

            It is this sense of tragedy, coupled with the shining wit and understanding and self-righteous anger and loathing for all things stupid that have led some to reexamine Hicks’ work. Some feel that Hicks was no better than many other unrecognized comedians, and simply by virtue of his dying young he has been prematurely canonized, his work put on a pedestal more by virtue of his life story than by the power of the comedy itself. In a BBC News Magazine article titled, “Bill Hicks: Why All The Fuss, Exactly?” writer Brendan O’Neill illustrates just such a view:

Some of his fans go so far as to talk about Hicks with religious awe, describing him as some kind of latter-day Jesus. Hicks certainly had some good gags and excellent comic timing—but is all of this posthumous fuss justified?

For the UK comedy writer Timandra Harkness, it is not the strength of Hicks' comedy that explains his long-lasting appeal. "The videos I have seen of Hicks show somebody who was charismatic, angry, witty—in other words, a talented comedian. But he was not necessarily greater than others, including some who are still working today.

"His unique status seems to stem from the fact that he died tragically young, and therefore retains the seductive perfume of unfulfilled promise. It's the Princess Diana syndrome," says Harkness.

             Indeed, Hicks’ star has done nothing but rise since his death: he is name-checked by pop groups from Radiohead to Tool, serves as an inspiration to many comedians who bear ill will toward the status quo, and even had a play about him, “Bill Hicks: Slight Return,” staged in Edinburgh to much critical acclaim. While one might question the ethics of an actor and writer creating a bunch of new material in Hicks’ style, learning Hicks’ mannerisms, dressing up as Hicks and then pretending to be him onstage—essentially appending Hicks’ name (without cooperation of his estate) to what amounts to the writer’s own work and presenting and selling it as Hicks—the influence on today’s comics is undeniable.

            But for all the posthumous acclaim Hicks receives, there’s a strong argument that other, less-talented comedians have profited even more from Hicks’ life and work. Accusations of grave-robbing Hicks’ material have been slung at everyone from George Carlin to Dennis Leary, but it is the latter whose outright theft is most odious.

            Leary’s 1993 HBO special and comedy album No Cure For Cancer shows a man living in Hicks’ shadow, feasting on the material of someone both funnier and lesser-known than himself. In a sick twist of irony, it is almost to Hicks’ benefit that he died so young; had he been alive today, toiling away, his eventual recognition may have seen him dogged with accusations of stealing from Leary!

            There is a tendency in many people to side with the underdog, and no one wants to speak ill of the dead, so siding with Hicks on the matter of who did what material first is almost a reactionary and reflexive move. However, an examination of the evidence Ryko presents on Sane Man undeniably sways things in Hicks’ favour: he did routines about the same material, in the same style, often with the same punchline, at least a full four years before Leary’s “comedic salvo." And while Leary can be entertaining as an actor (his portrayal of a burglar-cum-kidnapper in 1994’s The Ref is actually pretty funny, and his recent turn in a dramatic role on the firefighter series, “Rescue Me,” is also convincing), the simple fact of his having stolen material from a dead man will forever damn him in the eyes of many.

            There are several instances on No Cure where Leary simply recycles old Hicks bits; slightly reworded, of course. Leary’s line, “We live in a country where John Lennon took six bullets in the chest.... Yoko was standing right beside him, not one bullet,” is a dead echo of Hicks’ rant on the same subject—“The fact that we live in a world where John Lennon was murdered, yet Barry Manilow continues to put out albums.... Man, if you’re gonna kill somebody, have some fuckin’ taste. I’ll drive you to Kenny Rogers’ house.”

            Hicks’ commentary on the death of jogging guru Jim Fixx would be ripped off by Leary in the same routine. Consider Hicks, in 1989: “Keith Richards outlived Jim Fixx, the runner and health nut. The plot thickens. You remember Jim Fixx? This human cipher used to write books on jogging. Now, what do you fuckin’ write about jogging? ‘Right foot, left foot, faster, faster, oh hell, I dunno, go home, shower.’ Pretty much covers the jogging experience, I do believe. Then this doofus goes out and has a heart attack and dies.... while jogging. There is a God. ‘Right foot, left foot, hemorrhage.’”

            And Leary, 1993: “Hey, I’ve got two words for you, okay? Jim Fixx. Remember Jim Fixx, the big, famous jogging guy? Jogged fifteen miles a day, did a jogging book, did a jogging video, and dropped dead of a massive heart attack ... when? When he was fuckin’ jogging, that’s right!”

            Leary’s material about how Elvis should have died young so we’d remember him handsome and thin and at the height of his powers, his ranting and raving about being constrained by non-smokers, his hatred of Barry Manilow, his “stupid voice” used when impersonating non-smokers and parents worried about heavy metal suicides, his bit about tracheotomy voiceboxes, his concern that, “We always shoot the wrong guy,” his material about how we need to get drugs in the hands of the right people: Hicks, Hicks, Hicks, Hicks, Hicks, Hicks, and Hicks. At this point in his career, Dennis Leary was simply Bill Hicks done in a more annoying voice, with less-clever punchlines and more shouting. Leary’s irritatingly speedy delivery can perhaps be read as more than simply trying to pack the most jokes into the least time—maybe he thought that if he threw Hicks’ material out there fast enough, no one would notice it wasn’t Leary’s own.

            Many of Hicks’ fans share this contempt toward Leary. Consider this anecdote from Amy of the “After Ophelia” blog:

You can get every other flavor except coffee-flavored coffee! They got mochaccino, they got chocaccino, frappaccino, rappaccino, Al Pacino, what the fuck?! (Denis Leary)

 I sold Denis Leary a frappachino and a bottle of water once (we had plenty of hot "coffee-flavored coffee" available). Two years ago I was working at a Mobil station, and a tall man in black jeans, a tan jacket, and a pair of mirrored sunglasses came in and went over to the cooler. It was after sunset, so the sunglasses seemed odd. He came over to the counter and put the bottle of water and the frappachino (I didn't notice the flavor, but they don't come in "coffee") in front of me. I rang up the items, and turned to say the total. I stopped short when I looked up at him, because I realized the customer was Denis Leary. Not just some guy who looked like Leary, but really him. In awe, I barely squeaked out the price. “How much?” he questioned sharply, and his voice confirmed his identity. I repeated the price, he gave me three dollar bills, and I handed him his change. He left.

Since then, I have listened to Bill Hicks. I wish I had heard Hicks prior to my Leary moment. Because if I had (and I had the necessary balls), I could have said—“Wow, that's really strange. Last week I sold the same exact thing to a guy that looked just like Bill Hicks.”

             Hicks’ observation that, “We live in a world where good men are murdered and mediocre hacks thrive,” is rendered all the more poignant by Leary’s theft. But for all the posthumous canonization Hicks has received, he remains, like every human, a proposition neither black nor white. He was a great, insightful, funny comedian, devastatingly witty, bitingly ironic, deeply spiritual, filled to bursting with both love and hate for his fellow humans. The high esteem many hold his comedy in gives them license to overlook his flaws: his sometimes tiring negativity, his seeming misogyny, his defense of drunk drivers, his homophobia, his self-righteousness, and his willingness to attack people he barely knew for their beliefs, should they be different from his. Although, if you pay closer attention, many of those seeming “flaws” can easily be chocked up to Hicks’ profound affection for the facetious, the absurd, and complex self-deprecation.

            Perhaps the ultimate irony to Hicks’ career is that as hard as he worked to raise people's consciousness about the absurdity, shallowness, and hollow materialism of American culture during his time, very little has changed. Were he to somehow make it back to earth from that Big Gig In The Sky, he wouldn’t even have to write much in the way of new material, he’d just have to switch some of the names. Tiffany becomes Britney Spears, George Michael—Clay Aiken. His jokes about Bush, the “War On Drugs,” and the Iraq war wouldn’t need a single word changed.

            There are two ways to read this situation: that Hicks’ struggle was ultimately a failure, and that all his ranting and raving and hatred and vitriol and contempt and, yes, love, was for nought; or that we need Hicks’ comedy now more than ever. For the sake of the man’s memory, and my own hope for the human race, I’ll stand firm with the latter.

That this house notes with sadness the 10th anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks, on February 26th, 1994, at the age of 33; 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 worthy of inclusion with Lenny Bruce in any list of unflinching and painfully honest political philosophers.

—Stephen Pound MP, Parliamentary House of Commons