Bill Hicks C or D

One thing I remember - and this is something Louis CK does too - is his ability to flip between comedy and seriousness and back again with unsettling speed. It was like he could control the atmosphere in the room minute by minute.

Rob Newman's tales back in '92 of seeing him at The Wildcat in Edinburgh were amazing. He went back 4 or 5 times to see him and he just kept adding new bits, riffs night after night; whole new chunks of unscripted stuff that were better than most people's honed material. I read Brendon Burns say the same thing this week. This interview shows his innate funny-ness when totally unscripted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYPgs8aICt0

Sam Kinison was a hateful homophobic asshole who hung out with LA hair-metal bands, what's not to loathe?

Would think Oswalts rants about SW prequels would resonate with Shakey

the difference between me and Oswalt is that he is a true believer, he loves those original movies like nothing else. that, and I'll bet Patton continues to give Lucas money (I didn't bother seeing the last two prequels, somehow I bet Patton brought himself to buy the DVDs)

Bill Hicks died of cancer 25 years ago today. The Guardian ran a piece asking English comics born after Hicks' death what they thought of his act. After watching some clips, the consensus was -- you guessed it! -- negative. pic.twitter.com/jM51MpcRgu

— Dennis Perrin (@DennisThePerrin) February 26, 2019

Now, I'm not gonna shit on these kids. Their comic sensibilities were shaped in a very different time. But it's sad to see Hicks reduced to a toxic white mansplainer, lumped in with Dice Clay and Sam Kinison.

— Dennis Perrin (@DennisThePerrin) February 26, 2019

I'm sure he has some material that elevates him above Clay and Kinison, but "toxic white mansplainer" just about sums up my impression of Hicks.

Kinison is obviously Bill Hick's biggest influence.

And his material has aged terribly in that it isn't funny, and is very "trenchant"

See last year's actually trenchant Hannah Gadsby special on the "angry white male comic."

"hey, you don't like drugs? the beatles did drugs man!"

"george bush is shitty!"

oh my god, genius

English comedians are probably the least qualified group in the world to talk about comedy though tbf.

this is also true

everything i've read about Hannah Gadsby suggests that while her material has other merits, it also is not funny.

that's true also

a main theme of late George Carlin was "George Bush is shitty... and so are YOU"

I've always liked this conflicted take on Hicks:

https://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2014/03/bill-hicks-sane-man.html

No amount of claiming context ever keeps an artist relevant when the moment has gone. Obviously as individuals we all still like what we wanna like but comedians more than most artists aren't well served by insisting on their value

I had learned from preliminary research that two of his main targets were advertising and consumerism, rather disingenuous things for a professional entertainer to rail against, wouldn't you think?

Hmmm, this writer seems somewhat stupid.

I mean, to a degree all entertainers who get paid are in the whorehouse, but why would they have to like it?

I agree that the statement you quote is incredibly simplistic, but I feel like he's working his way towards a larger argument of "good" and "bad" popular entertainment: why are the "feminine" Debbie Gibson and George Michael bad and "real men" like Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones good? The reviewer's discussion of Hicks' misogyny basically reveals his rants against consumerism as bullshit.

anyone who says "mansplainer" with a straight face is a fucking idiot

I don't know if that was aimed at me, but I was just quoting Perrin's tweet. It's not the term I would have employed: "toxic white asshole" is more accurate, to me.

(also, I attended an education seminar a few years back in which "mansplaining" was discussed as an issue, and it took me a few minutes to figure out that the moderator wasn't joking)

i believe everyone uses the word with waggling eyebrows now

but thanks for your language policing, very privilege-neutralizing

God I am so over this century, kill me

I'm amazed anyone can even attempt comedy in this clenched-butthole cultural moment

theres still a huge audience for stuff that isn't woke.

like look at where bill burr is playing shows, look at how much cumtown is making on patreon per month, howard stern still has a career, dave chapelle is one of the biggest comedians on the planet and is really into talking about "trannies" in his sets, etc.

I can't imagine listening to Hicks again, but there was something cathartic about hearing his old political routines in the post-9/11-Iraq invasion era.

As utterly cheesy as it is, I can't imagine Kinison/Clay or even a Burr/Stanhope doing anything remotely as humane as his "it's just a ride" bit.

I'm amazed anyone can even attempt comedy in this clenched-butthole cultural moment

― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius)

"nancy" is pretty funny

There's a lot of great comedy out there right now. The whole "snowflakes" argument, re: stand-up at least, is generally the domain of the Bill Maher/Adam Carolla types who are bitter that they're not what's in anymore.

Keep culture wars out of comedy, say fans of bill hicks

read that guardian article the other day and thought the responses were predictable (not bad, just predictable). i relistened to all of hicks's stuff last year and thought the music stuff had aged badly, but i dunno, there was still a lot of funny material, and his timing was always sharp. to a certain extent you're going to run into offensive, dated material if you listen to any classic comedy -- i mean, there's sexist stuff in bob newhart's routines, or the marx brothers' movies. of course no one has to seek out any of that stuff if they don't want to, but not everyone is content to "get their funny fix from instagram." (and yes that's an actual quote from the article, lol.)

tbh, this part stuck with me more than the more obvious criticisms:

It’s not just the rock’n’roll stylings that seem quaint. It’s the things that got Hicks wound up: advertising, marketing, capitalism, and how they captured and sullied all things good. A generation later, advertising is the air we breathe, our selves are our product. It’s harder – for comedians and everyone else – to imagine how life could ever be otherwise. Bob seems to be understating things when she says: “Selling out has evolved in meaning.”

the hicks stuff that resonates with me most is probably also his most dated material: the anti-marketing/branding stuff. the amount of branding/self-promo that goes on basically everywhere now makes me queasy, and it's already hard to imagine life without it. i mean, someone who does a hicks-esque rant on a twitter thread now is probably trying to sell you their book.

well but we all know that's why modern life is rubbish

That very deliberate conflation of hating capitalist reality with calling out the mentality of privilege is the total MO of shitty defensive bigotry in 2019

The best bits of Hicks (anti-advertising, anti-nationist, pro-psychedelics) are out of tune with the zeitgeist of 2019, the worst bits (reactionary prejudice, violence, contempt, conspiracy theories) sound like standard kit for the iconoclastic libertarian assholes who seem to be all over the internet. Conclusion: 2019 not that great after all.

Solid material but his delivery was not as strong as it could have been. It is my firm opinion that this is why Denis Leary took his shtick (quite literally in a few cases) and parlayed it into much more success than Hicks ever had. It pains me to admit this because Leary is a Masshole tool, but there it is.

D Leary's most trenchant observation was that peak-beauty DiCaprio looked like a hot 14-yo girl

anyway, i was barely aware of Hicks while he was alive, and most of what i know of him came from when i reviewed the documentary 8 years ago:

https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/american-the-bill-hicks-story-2/

(ie don't ask me to defend my opinions, bcz i'd forgotten them)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuQC6gvWEf8

That's the only Bill Hicks thing I know other than Chicks Dig Jerks and no one has been talking about it on this thread, so.

I had never heard of him but he had an appearance on a local cable show broadcast in New Jersey called Live From Rascals, which was a nearby comedy club. It was absolutely hysterical in 1988, but he sort of believed his own hype and became a dress in leather truth teller, which is never funny.

Anyway here is the clip from the Rascals show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGl88pvfX9c

why are the "feminine" Debbie Gibson and George Michael bad and "real men" like Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones good?

a routine i hated even when i loooooved hicks

Sorry, I guess I was a 16 year old rockist

i was too! but iirc the "joke" is that jimi hendrix is raping debbie gibson with his guitar dick, it's a bad joke

i mean i know it has been established that hicks did not trade in jokes but he was capable of being funny

i should prob revisit him before really assessing the quality of his jokes. i'm guessing i would prob still enjoy the incredibly vivid jay leno suicide by uzi bit

I have a low threshold for the tellin'-it-like-it-is comics of the 80s/90s. Except for Carlin, of course, but that's not really fair because he was the best stand-up ever and could do about 10 other things (other than the truth-teller guise) better than anyone else. And his "Americans suck" bits at least had a bit of charm about them.

I recall that Lenny Bruce's stuff when i was a kid was considered dated as all hell and in the UK at least he was rarely if ever referenced by the new comedians, you really could not get hold of his stuff anywhere either, it just seemed to have vanished. This is just 'a thing' that happens to comedy? It's interesting how Louie is being called out for his 'jokes' about school shootings which were obviously not funny at all but old fans have said it's no different to his early stuff, yet there's a million things in say Eminem lyrics that could be similarly criticised which.. aren't being. Yet. Or not in Guardian articles or whatever.

Tbf nobody gives a shit about Eminem in 2019

Tbf nobody gives a shit about Eminem in 2019

There are certain ILXors who care very, very deeply about Eminem and have in fact gone so far as to write up detailed rankings of his entire catalog in the past week.

Whiney cares about Eminem in 2019 iirc

Chart stats for Eminem's last album from 2018 FYI:

Australian Albums 1
Austrian Albums 1
Belgian Albums 1
Canadian Albums 1
Czech Albums 1
Danish Albums 1
Dutch Albums 1
Finnish Albums 1
French Albums 3
German Albums 2
Greek Albums 3
Irish Albums 1
Italian Albums 1
New Zealand Albums 1
Norwegian Albums 1
Scottish Albums 1
Swedish Albums 1
Swiss Albums 1
UK Albums 1
US Billboard 200 1
US Top R&B/Hip-Hop 1

May god go with him and his loyal fans