Available material of Bill Hicks....

x-post

Actually, "relentless" is probably a better starter kit.

sounds like a plan....cheers

Oh, without question, especially the Rush Limbaugh bit, and the Jay Leno bit.

It's worth mentioning that "Philosophy" is a compilation that's been edited to sound like one continuous show. I've never actually heard the disc - anyone?

Oh, without question, especially the Rush Limbaugh bit, and the Jay Leno bit.

Or the "bit" where he's just disemboweling an unruly audience member. If you laugh, it's defensive. And a lot of the bits on "Rant" are so comp[letely hate-filled, he goes way past being a comedian and social critic and into being a one-man lynch mob. It's kind of startling the first time you hear it. "Jesus, Bill..."

God bless Bill.

Without a doubt Hicks is my favourite comedian. Republicans somehow gave him cancer, and that's exactly how it happened!

Do not see this show. It is awful.

They might do, but legally there's nothing they can do about it, I don't think. I'm sure they would have done something by now if they could, the show's been kicking around for a while.

there's a hell of a lot of stuff on youtube. this story he tells about the worst gig ever is pretty amazing -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc6yCinSlZk

My fave is called "The Flying Saucer Tour" - it's a real Hicks-vs-Audience kinda show, and very good.

^dead on. fucking spectacular.

he looks like john denver in that video

that "worst gig" story is terrifying/hilarious

yeah you tube is a goldmine. that 'worst gig' clip is one of 4 clips about gigs over the years, all prove how hillarious he was without a script. Sane Man is still the best place to start for the uninitiated think, also available in full on You Tube.

:D

there is a documentary on him I'm watching this week. I've actually heard very little of his stuff, so I'll just be writing about it as a nonfan.

so I guess if you're a fan, you'll want to see this. I prefer more onstage clips, or just an entire show.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/american-the-bill-hicks-story/5402

I don't understand the "but" in this sentence - yes, the preaching often obscured the comedy, or rather made the comedy more complicated and unnerving, but why does that make him less an avatar of free expression?

The title means to paint Hicks as an avatar of free expression through his "fearless" act, but as with George Carlin's late-life anger at American sloth and ignorance, his preaching not infrequently obscured the comedy.

speaking as a fan since way back, i have to say that doc is fantastic.

on netflix they have that thing with his HBO specials and its interesting to see that show in london the year he died (i think it was the year he died?) how he has the bombastic fiery cowboy entrance and it makes me wonder if he was gonna be some sort of thinking man's andrew dice clay if he had lived. more bombastic. more rock star. or maybe this would only have happened in england. don't know how popular he was getting in the states.

DL, I guess it's cuz I see a certain 'untransformed' element in some of Hicks's stuff -- ie, along with expressing his thoughts freely, his profession made it sort of incumbent upon him to spin it into a crafted monologue instead of blurting 'raw' logorrhea. I realize this is what a lot of his followers prize in him, but to me it's just a little unfocused and even edging toward lazy self-congratulation now and then. "Yay, Hicks or Carlin think the Pentagon and the advertising industry are full of shit, just like me!"

The doc makes it clear that he was just another somewhat popular TV-exposed comedian in the US for his entire career, never a breakout success. Hell, I dabbled in standup in New York around 1989-91, and I never saw him or thought about him much.

i like hicks but that cowboy entrance (and the "i always wanted to be a cowboy" monologue before it) is cringeworthy stuff indeed.

omg, where is the youtube morbz stand-up footage???????????

it was recorded on rocks

I guess what I'm saying is "free expression" isn't enough if I can read your ideas in the anarchist newspaper or hear them on Pacifica radio, or if you're asking to be admired for lecturing when you're also expected to be funny (and he WAS funny, sometimes).

xp

also really pedestrian is "so what if rock is the Devil's music, cuz it ROCKS" -- more like Kinison than I was expecting.

The doc has some weird gaps, like mentioning that Jay Leno was friendly and helpful to him in the '80s, with no mention of Hicks's bit eviscerating Leno later on... also the final Letterman appearance edit is just huh?, and the Denis Leary plagiarism stuff is omitted entirely.

i think that leno thing is one of the funniest things he ever did. he wasd funniest when he was being mean.

was funniest

The video I had of my act has degraded and been trashed, and I've had all the live audience members from my sets killed.

I would like to see a morbz standup clip if one ever surfaced :)

on netflix they have that thing with his HBO specials and its interesting to see that show in london the year he died (i think it was the year he died?) how he has the bombastic fiery cowboy entrance and it makes me wonder if he was gonna be some sort of thinking man's andrew dice clay if he had lived

I always thought of him as being kind of similar to Dice, but Dice in his prime was unparalleled. I do like Hicks and I've watched/heard nearly everything he's done but I always wished he was a little funnier.

i'm guessing there were lots of dukakis jokes

"okay, imagine yasujiro ozu, lina wertmuller, and bob rafelson are in an elevator, i think it might go a little something like this..." *morbz turns his back for dramatic impressionist flourish*

Ah, sorry Morbz, I don't know your IRL name so I didn't realise I was being all pernickety about your words rather than just something you linked to.

I base a lot of my opinion of Hicks on seeing him in the UK in 92 and the way he was willing to make the audience uncomfortable, thus avoiding the potential self-congratulation. Those are the moments I remember most strongly - the weird gaps between the jokes, which made the jokes more powerful. But there was definitely a risk of developing an unquestioning cult following just because there was an appetite for a comedian with his politics - the Gulf War bit was definitely the tipping point in the UK (well, that and the bit about being pulled over by the cops while tripping). I agree the rock material has dated very badly - you prefer Hendrix to Debbie Gibson? Big fucking deal. But I give him some leeway on the spiritual/anarchist stuff because (a) it worked on stage when juxtaposed with the dick jokes and (b) it became way more charged once he knew he was dying.

This doc does not sound essential.

Scott otm, angry Bill was my favorite Bill. I liked his stuff on religion, the whole devil + masturbation bit is one of my favorites...and in the right frame of mine, damn he could eviscerate hecklers. I dunno about the Dice comparison... honestly I can't stand Dice, I don't really see the similarity.

I was never a big fan of Hicks' whoa LSD will blow your mind stuff, throwing off the shackles of the material world etc etc...it's like, uh huh, get in line with every college student ever.

He's still one of my favorites though.

I would love to see the doc, I've heard good things.

there was never much actual stuff Leary plagiarised that's probably why the film leaves it out. Hicks never openly dissed him as far as i can recall and really there was very little overlap in the material aside from the fact that they both did 'i love smoking' bits and a bit about shooting Yoko Ono, some other vague references to stuff here and there. the average 2 comedians on the circuit at the time woulda had just about as much x over stuff imo. as much a fan as i am of Hicks, i always thought the similarity between Kinison and him was greater than Leary and him.

i mean this is pretty .. thin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWaJDF-3YhY&NR=1&feature=fvwp

"I do like Hicks and I've watched/heard nearly everything he's done but I always wished he was a little funnier."

this is true for me too. i admire some of what he did, but i do wince at times.

"it's like, uh huh, get in line with every college student ever."

yeah, this is why i was envisioning a future for him of rock star comic college draw. the brainy anti-dice really, but pushing some of the same pissed-off buttons. (i mean the blow job thing from the hbo thing that i was watching is, um, somewhat dice-ian.)

"Hicks never openly dissed him as far as i can recall"

he said he was gonna quit smoking just to see if dennis would do it too.

Denis is a terrible comedian who stole some specific, key bits from Hicks (the "smoking" routine in particular). Otherwise they bear no similarities to one another.

I see there's a side-by-side comparison upthread actually lol

from zappa thread. it rang true to my 1-day-old knowledge of hicks material:

yeah i dunno maybe zappa just sucks

honestly, he feels much less benign these days, because I really do feel like his whole worldview is pretty foundational to the whole angry nerd/Reddit atheist/gamergate/shitlord mindset that led to the alt right

― Universal LULU Nation (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, September 26, 2017 8:36 AM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

More by accident than intent but there's a thread there. Though if anything, as a couple of friends have noted, the line of descent to libertarian techbro might be even clearer.

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, September 26, 2017 10:40 AM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah what else? Obviously Bill Hicks, Dennis Miller (so then maybe Chevy Chase on Weekend Update as a precursor?), Dennis Leary...

― Universal LULU Nation (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, September 26, 2017 8:47 AM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the only alt-rightish/MRA type person i personally know is a friend from childhood who is a massive bill hicks fan

so that's sorted then he was a nazi

re-positioning him as a right-wing troll in the current context is, I think, a gross misrepresentation of the "transgressive" material he liked to do, which were a response to the right-wing puritanism of the 80s. The thing is that is pretty much dead now, the modern-day conventional image of a censoring scold is not a Moral Majority Xtian prude, it's a left-wing, "politically correct" SJW. But this was very much NOT the case in the political environment Bill was born out of.

x[

ums is wrong there imo - esp given that Dennis Miller was *always* a Republican/right-wing asshole. Hicks reveled in being offensive in his day, but the political climate/context is very different to now.

People around here also have drawn - not entirely unfairly, I should point out - connections from Devo to the current MRA nonsense, even though it's hard to imagine Mark Mothersbaugh subscribing or endorsing anything so stupid. Things get misappropriated or distorted and passed down in various ways all the time, but retroactively condemning Hicks or Devo for what their fans did with their shit is neither fair nor productive imo.

that sounds like a good context to better understand what I was hearing. I'm a bit too young to get there myself. but it seems he is being repositioned in that way by right wing trolls, which is so very ironic and tragic.

that was an xpost which basically repeats what you have said in the meantime ha

take this bit:

After a heckler repeatedly shouted "Free Bird", Hicks screamed that "Hitler had the right idea; he was just an underachiever!" Hicks followed this remark with a misanthropic tirade calling for unbiased genocide against the whole of humanity.

there are a bunch of ways to interpret this, but I don't think concluding he is a nazi is an accurate one (a comic nihilist = ok, and there you can see a connection to some of what goes on on like 4Chan and reddit, but at the same time I don't think Hicks would have *literally* advocated this as a political policy, the defense that he was a nightclub performing a standup comedy act does carry some weight imo)

IN a nightclub

oops

You can't politically analyse comedy material from a generation ago, not for the above purpose, not to hold the comic up to whatever current moral standard applies, not for any reason tbh.

If u do this you should be killed tbh

oh i didn't mean to imply that bill was right-wing at all. i think his wide-eyed 60s-ish routines about how we-are-all-one-so-let's-go-explore-outer-space-together are more than enough to set him apart from the alt-right crew (or the reddit atheists), and he clearly hated big business and marketing types more than anything so it's hard to see him evolving toward any sort of libertarianism. i'd been a bit worried that his conspiracymonger side would sound alex jones-ish now but it doesn't so much: his main conspiracy interest (jfk assassination) is about as mainstream as conspiracy stuff gets.

Criticism of Hicks for sexism/misogyny is totally fair imo. He wasn't just trying to rile up Christian prudes with that stuff. I think he crosses over with libertarians as well, but perhaps it'd be fairer to blame him for "brocialists"?

The "it's just a ride" bit is kind of awful in the way it's used now but "The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace" is about the least-Trumpian viewpoint you can hold.

his ranting conspiracy-and-drug-loving persona is pretty contagious. "squeegee your third eye" must have been a popular thing to say in some 90s crowds of the right age.

i also have such a clearer idea of what exactly maron was failing at trying to do in his old specials. (i don't hate new maron stand up).

the rant in e-minor bit about the orgy between conservative figureheads in the hot tub is an instance of him going so far beyond the joke that it stops being funny and then gets sorta funny again, anyway i think about that bit anytime someone mentions rush limbaugh

bill hicks routines that deserve to be buried underground: pretty much anything he said about music especially the one where he imagines jimi hendrix raping debbie gibson

hicks was enormously important to my political development when i was growing up, much as i find some of his stuff now to be crypto libertarian conspiracy theoreist garbage “he would’ve voted for trump” is pretty off the mark

I think one of the reasons things like this are so muddled is that for decades and decades censorship and cultural gate-keeping was almost exclusively the province of the right, and primarily the Xtian Right. They didn't like rock n roll, they didn't like rap music, they didn't like pornography, they didn't like foul language, etc. etc. And this was the contingent that people like Zappa, Hefner, Hicks, and Albini (to name some names currently being discussed) were reacting against. To a man (and no it's not coincidental that they were all men) they railed against any limitation on expression, speech, creativity, media imagery. And large portions of their respective fanbases, both on the left and right, took this message to heart. The key position was that *anything* in terms of speech should be permissible, "no one can tell me what to say or think" etc. This is essentially a position that cleaves between both political poles, it's got an attraction on either side.

And then from the mid-70s or so (thinking primarily about McKinnon and Dworkin on the feminist end of things here), there started to be some movement on the left that mirrored conservative arguments against various types of speech, but not from an explicitly religious angle and more from a "this speech is harmful to segment X of the population" angle. I think this distinction is important, personally, because I don't think the Xtian right really ever had anybody's "best interests" in mind as much as they were concerned about social control and maintaining a sexist and racist state.

But as this movement from the left gathered strength and impact up through the 90s, then you had a segment of the population that saw this too as a censorship movement that was in essence no different from the Xtian right's, regardless of its motivations. And that's where you get MRA and 4Chan guys picking up the arguments and attitudes of prior generation's anti-censorship icons, because they refuse to see the context or the difference. They do not actually think it matters if racist speech is racist because free speech trumps everything, and other people don't matter. But I don't think Hicks felt that way, and to place him in that context as a progenitor of that kind of shit is wrong. He had plenty of failings and I will readily admit he went over the line - willfully and explicitly - on a variety of occasions, but he was not a totally self-absorbed idiot that would have thrown his lot in with Nazis and Trumpists.

many xps

oh everybody upthread made that point better than i did, sorry

xp

tbf I only thought he'd vote trump because of hatred of the clintons + misogyny

Good post outic

yeah great post shakey

It may be also relevant to point out how quickly and completely the Xtian right's precipitous failure to censor society was - the internet basically ended that debate once and for all. The population (or enough of it anyway) wants to be able to view/read/listen to absolutely anything, and they promptly retreated and conveniently forgot that they ever held those positions at all, so much so that they are willing to vote for an amoral sex offender for president.

But on the left issues of sexism and racism are still paramount, and while next to nobody on the left is calling for state censorship, they continue to make arguments (entirely legitimate ones imo) that it's important to acknowledge the roots and nature and damage of sexist and racist speech, depictions in the media, etc. And so the free speech brigade kicks against them, because they're the only ones left to kick against.

xp

think at this point if I had to vote for one Bill Hicks joke to remain on earth it would be the one about the pigeons saying "coup"

xp yes, very good posts. I was not convinced my impression, based on one listen to rant in e-minor, was correct. But I was surprised to see it echoed the next day by a poster that (I think?) has more 90s context. I'm also not sure I care to dig deeper into Hicks after this but am glad to have a more complete take on who he was, since people seem to frequently drop his name iton current stuff.

tbf I only thought he'd vote trump because of hatred of the clintons + misogyny

Hicks would totally be a third/fourth party dude now, or possibly a BernieBro.

think at this point if I had to vote for one Bill Hicks joke to remain on earth it would be the one about the pigeons saying "coup"

― thirst trap your hare (DJ Mencap), Friday, September 29, 2017 3:19 PM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lmao i totally forgot about this one

haha yeah I can totally see him as a Berniebro

"they've got the window all set up to look exactly like it did on that day...and it's really accurate, ya know...cause oswald's not in it!"

I haven't listened to any Hicks stuff in at least 10 years but if I had to describe his POV I would place him in the context of other Texas freaks - the Butthole Surfers, ZZ Top, Willie Nelson, those kinds of guys. He was sort of a hippie at heart (see his "just a ride" bit quoted upthread) that liked drugs and being *out there* and that included "freaking out the squares" by being offensive and grossing people out or shocking them. And as a result he was also in that stand-up tradition of not wanting his audience to get *too* comfortable, if he felt they were too much on his side he would try to provoke them, he didn't want to be predictable and safe, he wanted to be dangerous. And it's the latter stuff that obviously is subject to getting hijacked for various reasons.

xp

Sam Kinison too, though he got so fucked up on coke that his “material” = “yelling” by the end

But yeah, Butthole Surfers is an otm comparison

My favorite Hicks is pretty innocuous but I love it:

https://youtu.be/BwkdGr9JYmE

“whatchoo readin for”

Haha yeah thats a good bit

god this guy is such a mean-spirited shithole

the interview piece with his brother on netflix was good. the longer bits of stand up ranting with no funny parts are a bit awkward. still, it's easy to recognize Hick's voice in following (and I suppose concurrent) generations. I watched a similar brother-interview-documentary-hybrid short on netflix for sam kinison, who I only remembered from 'Wild Thing'. If the Hicks one was occasionally awkward, it is downright surreal listening to kinison's brother/manager talk about how sam's stand up is timeless before a clip of sam simply screaming or doing probably the most poorly aged shit imaginable on a stage.

lol Kinison is an interesting figure but I would not call much of his material "timeless"

generally speaking standup is v v rarely timeless

Stand-up comedians still have a weird hard-on for Kinison.

name them

name them

― sans lep (sic), Wednesday, January 23, 2019 2:58 PM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

most of the well known gen x or baby boomer comedians

norm macdonald, chris rock, seinfeld etc.

he was well-liked by his contemporaries. later generations, idk

I'm fairly confident that there will be millennial comics who are comedy nerds and like the big names of previous generations. probably not the kind of comics that get netflix specials, but if you are in a comedy club in a random city in north america type thing

citation needed

that's a dumbass rejoinder

sic demanding receipts is a)commonplace and b) usually the harbinger of a long, possibly boring and imminent takedown

Lol otm

I appreciate sic's comedy knowledge