Bill Hicks

Are you in marketing? You know what to do.

By Simone Ubaldi

Twenty years since he started screaming in America, the legacy of Bill Hicks, stand-up comedian and voice of a generation, has been distilled in a three and a half hour DVD, featuring One Night Stand, Relentless and the evangelical Revelations, plus the documentary on Hicks’ influence It’s Just A Ride.

The days of passing worn out VHS copies of Relentless around and down to the kids who hadn’t heard the Prophet of Rage are over, and with them pass the illusion that Bill Hicks’ message is timeless. Politicians still lie and non-smokers are still militant, but the comedic value of a sweaty fat man miming forcing a girl to such his cock is a little worn. Bill Hicks was brilliant, but he was a fucking pig, too.

Bill Hicks was also not the only voice of dissent in the 20th century. He borrowed his glimpse of the true America from Lenny Bruce, Hunter S. Thompson and the Beat generation; he just sucked the poetry out of it. But this is why he was loved: his bluntness and simplicity seemed more honest than poetry. Honest and uncomplicated, Hicks taught us that drugs are great, rock and roll is pure, advertising is pornography and fundamentalist Christians are ignorant. The only problem is that when you grow up, you figure out that the world is naturally complicated, and anyone who takes as blinkered a position as life according to bible of Bill Hicks is likely to be wrong about a lot of things.

So despite what his audience were schooled to believe by his own endorsement, his stand-up was political and cultural theory for simple people. It may have been, and may still be, perfect comedy for nascent intellectual teenagers, but it isn’t a coherent philosophical position, it’s just clever rage. There is something in that, granted, but it’s not genius. If he hadn’t died in 1994 and been martyred and deified for failing to cross-over into mainstream consciousness, if he had lived long enough for his head-job reenactments and his homophobia to fall out of fashion, Bill Hicks would never have become the cult figure he is now. He’d probably still be bailed up in a waffle house in Fife, Alabama, picking on the waitress.