Bill Hicks C or D

twenty-three

Dude had some moments, but his popularity with the stoner libertarian crowd makes me crazy.

i always kind of wish he'd have set his sights a little higher when it came to picking targets. he did seem to be moving toward that at the end of his life. (if you're gonna get THAT worked up, rush limbaugh and jesse helms are probably better choices than, you know, billy ray cyrus. a lot of the early stuff really is dude ranting [without a joke in sight] for 20 minutes straight about the terrible aesthetic choices made by 14 year old girls and how george michael just isn't as real as hendrix, man.)

(like that's the big cliche about him, but then you go back and listen to some of those earlier tapes ryko put out during the first wave of reissues, and yes, it is a grown man positively furious over the existence of debbie gibson.)

jay leno was a suitable target. the leno stuff made me laugh out loud! ha!

furious and also creepily interested in the space between their legs

I loved the guy

undeniably awesome

like the whole "marketing & advertising" bit just reads as so absurd to me now. i fist pumped to it when i was 17 but now i try to imagine a middle aged man really feeling that way about the concept of marketing and it's like damn dude

Ha well he must have been like the age I am now when he came up with that marketing routine, idk how I feel about that being 'middle-aged'

he was right about a lot of stuff

I still quail at hoe totally omnipresent advertising/marketing is, it's fucking obnoxious

how

Hicks was 32 when he died - fuck "middle aged". I think it's easy to be put off by the cult of Bill and to find fault with the lamer, more dated material (the rockist rants) but the political stuff was dynamite. The combination of savagery and idealism was so potent and so brave - the idealism braver than the savagery. He believed in something far bigger than making people laugh. I saw him in a tiny college bar in 1992 and he was electric. I remember him doing this long, serious monologue about society or politics or something and the whole room went very quiet and a bit confused and then he said, "Don't worry. There'll be some dick jokes in a minute." Those unexpected gear shifts were what made him classic.

I dont mind the rockist rants either.

they were only a small part of his routine anyway. to single him out for that is a bit ridiculous since you could feasibly point out attributes of many great comedians that you don't like.

his rants on Waco, Iraq, G. Bush I, marijuana, et al are classics....

his delivery was fantastic too.

Never been able to understand what the problem with "rockism" is anyways.

You surprise me, Bill

I found his funny, if it even was rockism. I mean he insulted Michael Bolton, who here is going to stan for him?

i guess the point is - he made fun of michael bolton - wow what a challenge

Fuck a challenge, was it funny?

blasting a barrel of fish with a machine gun can be hilarious if you do it right

at his best, the ridiculous depth of bill hicks' bile and frustration was part of the joke

@just sayin: if that's yr point, might as well delete all of ILX then

that might be why one of my favorite shows of his was "I'm Sorry, Folks"

Fuck a challenge, was it funny?

― tom d: he did what he had to do now he is dead (Tom D.), Tuesday, August 17, 2010 10:02 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

^exactly

I didn't realize comedians all needed to be issuing televised threats to Kim Jong-Il to be funny....

fuck this guy. the worst is dudes in their 30s whose sense of humor/jokes is still totally derived from bill hicks routines. also A+ for being all antimarketing and anticorporations but still smoking, good job putting your money where your precious ideology is.

^ quite funny

cuz cigarettes aren't like addictive or anything....

i guess the point is - he made fun of michael bolton - wow what a challenge

― just sayin, Tuesday, August 17, 2010 9:00 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

to be fair, you could also say that making fun of bill hicks/bill hicks fans isn't really much of a challenge either

also A+ for being all antimarketing and anticorporations but still smoking, good job putting your money where your precious ideology is.

dude wasn't ian mackaye - mocked himself for smoking/drinking plenty

oh ok nevermind then

sorry just usually don't see people go "j'accuse hypocrite" against comedians who call themselves out on that shit like they were zack de la rocha or something

Bill Hicks making fun of Bill Hicks - wow what a challenge

"They said Koresh was a frustrated rock musician who had a messianic complex and wanted to sleep with underage girls. I don't know how to break it to you but that sounds like everyone I know in Austin. This may not be an isolated incident."

Hicks probably hated advertising because he was a victim of it due to his cig smoking.

he quit at some point (i think) (if that makes a difference to how you think of him)

I mean what next are we gonna call out comedians that tell stories that iddn't really happen?

da croupier dropping truth bombs.

I know it's important to distance yourself from dude since his diehard fans are 20,000 leagues below embarrassing, but let it be said that no one could craft a laser-guided rant like this guy, even if you didn't agree with it or thought his targets were too easy.

Also, I wish this box set was like a real, actual box set and not a two-disc best of packaged with some DVDs I'd never watch

maybe I'd be more tolerant of him if he were marketed as like a monologuist or something? because maybe he writes awesome "laser-guided rants" but that's not really something I care about when I'm watching comedy, I mainly want like well-crafted, funny jokes.

he was hilariously funny and his delivery was faultless.

oh

funny to complain about mindless fans and then say your problem with grokking his work is how he's marketed

His criticism of bad music types might still stand up if his own music wasn't unfotunately lame, I wonder who actually cares whether they include it in a box set or not.

i mean its no crime to not want bill hicks venting in your ear, but c'mon every dead person's cottage industry and cult is insufferable

Agreed, the guy was fucking hilarious.

Dont agree with this at all:

"I know it's important to distance yourself from dude since his diehard fans are 20,000 leagues below embarrassing"

xxxpost

i dunno, there are a lot of hicks wanna-bes who were set afire by his righteous bile and missed the self-aware self-deprecation