William Melvin Hicks (December 16, 1961 – February 26, 1994) was an American stand-up comedian.
Bill Hicks was a comedian in the 1980s and early 1990s who challenged mainstream beliefs, aiming to "enlighten people to think for themselves."[1] Hicks used a ribald approach to express his material describing himself as "Chomsky with dick jokes."[1] His jokes included general discussions about society, religion, politics, philosophy and personal issues. Hicks' material was often deliberately controversial. In both his stand-up performances, and during interviews, he often criticized Media and popular culture as oppressive tools of the ruling class, meant to "keep people stupid and apathetic."[2]
Early life
Born in Valdosta, Georgia, Bill Hicks was the son of Jim and Mary (Reese) Hicks, and had two elder siblings, Steve and Lynn. The family lived in Florida, Alabama and New Jersey, before settling in Houston, Texas, when Hicks was seven. Hicks has two school-age stories on the Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1 album. He was raised in the Southern Baptist faith, where he actually first began performing as a comedian to other children sent to Sunday School. One pupil told Hicks' mother that "he was the funniest thing he had ever seen," which prompted Hicks' mother to question the reverend about what Hicks had been saying. The reverend replied. "He's very funny but you might look at how you raise him." Hicks never subscribed to the "valuable morals" that were preached to him. The Sunday school education he received gave him an unwavering distrust of religion which led to him adapting his own philosophy, much of which focused on ridiculing what he perceived to be the contradictions of the brand of morality preached by institutionalized religion.
At an early age, he was also given permission by one of his teachers to pass the time by telling jokes while she fetched the register to take roll. This subsequently prompted a phone call to Hicks' mother from the teacher who asked for advice on how to prevent Hicks from performing jokes, as he was taking up valuable "teaching" time and children in the class were protesting against him being removed from the front of his class to his seat. Hicks' mother replied, "That's your problem, you should have never let him up there." He was drawn to comedy at an early age, emulating Woody Allen and Richard Pryor, and writing routines with his friend Dwight Slade. Worried about Hicks's behavior, his parents took him to a psychoanalyst, at age 17, but the psychoanalyst could find little wrong with him. The therapist apparently joked that Hicks' parents would probably benefit more from a few sessions than Bill himself.
The Comedy Workshop opened in Houston, in 1978, and friends Hicks, Slade, John S. and Kevin Booth began performing there. At first, Hicks was unable to drive to venues independently and was so young that he needed a special work permit to perform. He worked his way up to performing once every Tuesday night, in the autumn of 1978, while still attending Stratford High School, in Houston. He was well received and started developing his improvisational skills, although his act at the time was limited. Kevin Booth and Jay Leno reminisce about the Comedy Workshop years in the It's Just A Ride documentary, made after Hicks' death.
California and New York
In his senior year of high school, the Hicks family moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, but after his graduation, in the spring of 1980, Hicks moved to Los Angeles, California, and started performing at the Comedy Store in Hollywood, where Andrew Dice Clay, Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, and Garry Shandling were also performing at the time. He briefly attended Los Angeles Community College, mentioning the unhappy experience on Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1. He appeared in a pilot for the sitcom Bulba, before moving back to Houston in 1982. There, he formed the ACE Production Company (Absolute Creative Entertainment), which would later become Sacred Cow Productions, with Kevin Booth, and worked at local Houston comedy clubs like The Comedy Workshop. Hicks also attended the University of Houston for a short time.
In 1983, Hicks began drinking heavily and using an array of different substances, including LSD, psilocybin, cocaine, MDMA, poppy tea, diazepam, Quaaludes and methamphetamine. He continued to attack the American dream, hypocritical beliefs, and traditional attitudes. Hicks' success steadily increased, and in 1984 he made an appearance on the talk show Late Night with David Letterman, which was engineered by Catch a Rising Star MC Adrianne Tolsch, who saw him in Houston and had him come to New York and audition for producer Robert Morton. He made an impression on David Letterman and ended up doing eleven more appearances, presenting bowdlerized versions of his stage shows.
In 1986, Hicks found himself broke, but his career received another upturn as he appeared on Rodney Dangerfield's Young Comedians Special, in 1987. The same year, he moved to New York City, and for the next five years he did about 300 performances a year. His reputation suffered from his negative (non-psychedelic) drug and alcohol use. He began going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in 1988, the same year he obtained a real manager, Jack Mondrus. Hicks recounts his quitting of alcohol in the One Night Stand special and on Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1. On the album Relentless, he jokes that he quit using drugs because "once you've been taken aboard a UFO, it's kind of hard to top that", although in his performances, he continued to extol the virtues of LSD, marijuana, and psychedelic mushrooms.[3] He fell back to cigarette chain-smoking,[4] a theme that would figure heavily in his performances from then on.
Throughout 1989, Mondrus began to convince many clubs to sign Hicks on, promising that the wild drug and alcohol induced behavior was behind him. Among the club managers meeting the newly sober Hicks was Colleen McGarr, who would become his girlfriend and fiancée in later years.
In a gig in Chicago during 1989, later released as the bootleg I'm Sorry, Folks, resulted in Hicks screaming possibly his most infamous quote, "Hitler had the right idea, he was just an underachiever" to a heckler shouting "Free Bird" over and over. Hicks followed this remark with a misanthropic tirade calling for unbiased genocide against the whole of humanity, suggesting that it was not an anti-Semitic comment but rather an expression of his disgust with humanity in general. Hicks often veered between hope and love for the human race and utter hopelessness. He would often unsarcastically refer to humans as "God's perfect and holy children" while in the same performance suggesting that humans were turds.
In 1989 he released his first video, Sane Man.[5] It was reissued in 2006.
Early fame
In 1990, Hicks released his first album, Dangerous, performed on the HBO special One Night Stand, and performed at Montreal's Just for Laughs festival. He was also part of a group of American stand-up comedians performing in London's West End in November. Hicks was a huge hit in the UK and Ireland and continued touring there throughout 1991. That year, he returned to the Just for Laughs festival and recorded his second album, Relentless.
Hicks made a brief detour into musical recording with the eponymous Marble Head Johnson album in 1992. In November, he toured the UK, where he recorded the Revelations video for Channel 4. The show was in contrast with the harsh and brutally frank style he had developed in reaction to the many unwelcoming and often hostile audiences of America, and shows Hicks in a playful mood and at ease with his audience. He closed the show with "It's Just a Ride", one of his most famous and life-affirming philosophies. Also in that tour he recorded the stand-up performance released in its entirety on a double CD titled Salvation. Hicks was voted "Hot Standup Comic" by Rolling Stone Magazine, and moved to Los Angeles in early 1993.
The progressive metal band Tool invited Hicks to open a number of concerts for them on their 1993 Lollapalooza appearances, where Hicks once famously asked the audience to look for a contact lens he'd lost. Thousands of people complied.[6] Tool singer Maynard James Keenan so enjoyed this joke that he repeated it on a number of occasions. In 1996, Tool released their album Ænima which contains mentions of Hicks in the liner notes and on record. The track "Ænema" references Hicks's Arizona Bay philosophy and the closing track "Third Eye" contains samples from Hicks's Dangerous and Relentless albums. Experimental rock outfit Faith No More also quoted Bill Hicks in "Ricochet" from their King for a Day... Fool for a Lifetime album, singing "It's always funny until someone gets hurt and then it's just hilarious".
Cancer
In April 1993, while touring in Australia, he started complaining of pains in his side, and on June 16[7] of that year, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that had spread to his liver. He started receiving weekly chemotherapy, while still touring and also recording his album, Arizona Bay, with Kevin Booth. He was also working with comedian Fallon Woodland on a pilot episode of a new talk show, titled Counts of the Netherworld for Channel 4 at the time of his death. The budget and concept had been approved, and a pilot was filmed. The Counts of the Netherworld pilot was shown at the various Tenth Anniversary Tribute Night events around the world on February 26, 2004.
Censored
On October 1, 1993, about five months before his death, Hicks was scheduled to appear on The Late Show with David Letterman for the twelfth time, but his entire performance was removed from the broadcast - the only occasion, up to that point, in which a comedian's entire routine had been cut after taping. Both the show's producers and CBS denied responsibility. Hicks expressed his feelings of betrayal in a hand-written, 39-page letter to John Lahr of The New Yorker.[8] Although Letterman later expressed regret at the way Hicks had been handled, he did not appear on the show again. The full account of this incident was featured in a New Yorker profile by Lahr. This profile was later published as a chapter in John Lahr's book, Light Fantastic.[9]
Mary Hicks appeared on the Friday, January 30, 2009 The Late Show. Letterman played Hicks' routine in its entirety.[10] Letterman took full responsibility for the original censorship, apologized to Mary Hicks, Bill's mother, and declared he didn't know what he had been thinking when he pulled the routine from the original show.
Death
Hicks performed the final show of his career at Caroline's in New York on January 6, 1994. He moved back to his parents' house in Little Rock, Arkansas shortly thereafter. He called his friends to say goodbye, before he stopped speaking on February 14, and died of cancer in the presence of his parents at 11:20 p.m. on February 26, 1994.[11] Hicks was buried in the family plot in Leakesville, Mississippi.
Allegations of plagiarism towards Denis Leary
Many comedians have acknowledged Hicks as an influence since his death. However, there have been some arguments made that certain comedians plagiarised Hicks' material and attempted to pass it off as their own, notably Denis Leary. Many videos have been made and posted on the internet to prove the case, and IMDB credits Hicks as an "uncredited" writer for Leary's No Cure for Cancer album.[12] Hicks himself had a chance to listen to Leary's album No Cure for Cancer during his trip to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas during 1993 to report on the infamous siege. Upon hearing the album, Hicks was angered.[13]
While he had laughed off similarities between the two comedians before, the albums' similar content (including jokes about smoking, Jim Fixx, and Judas Priest) and tone suggested plagiarism.[14] During Hicks' Judas Priest routine, he specifically says "I don’t think we lost a cancer cure." In an interview, when he was asked why he had quit smoking, he answered, "I just wanted to see if Denis would, too."[15] Hicks told an interviewer: "I have a scoop for you. I stole his act. I camouflaged it with punchlines, and to really throw people off, I did it before he did." Hicks was further incensed that Leary's album was released through A&M Records, giving the album assured publicity and sales.
At least three stand-up comedians have gone on the record stating they believe Leary stole not just some of Hicks' material but his persona and attitude.[16][17][18] As a result of this, it is claimed that after Bill Hicks' death from pancreatic cancer, an industry joke began to circulate about Leary's transformation and subsequent success (roughly; "Question: Why is Denis Leary a star while Bill Hicks is unknown? Answer: Because there's no cure for cancer").[18]
Legacy
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The Arizona Bay album, as well as Rant in E-Minor, were released posthumously in 1997 on the Voices imprint of the Rykodisc label. Those two albums were licensed to the label by Hicks' mother, Mary Hicks, for the Arizona Bay Production Company. Dangerous and Relentless were also re-released by Rykodisc on the same date.
In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, fellow comedians and comedy insiders voted Hicks amongst the "Top 20 Greatest Comedy Acts Ever" at #13. Likewise, in "Comedy Central Presents: 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time" (2004), Hicks was ranked at #19. In March 2007, Channel 4 (UK) ran a poll, "The Top 100 Stand-Up Comedians of All Time," in which Hicks was voted #6.[19]
Devotees of Hicks have incorporated his words, image and attitude into their own creations. Because of audio sampling, fragments of Bill Hicks rants, diatribes, social criticisms and philosophies have found their way into many musical works, such as the live version of Super Furry Animals 'Man Don't Give A Fuck'. His influence on Tool is well documented; he 'appears' on the Fila Brazillia album Maim That Tune (1996) and on SPA's self titled album SPA (1997), which are both dedicated to Hicks; the British band Radiohead's second album The Bends (1995) is also dedicated to his memory (and to "Indigo"). Radiohead's third album, the critically acclaimed "OK Computer" was also dedicated to the memory of Bill Hicks. The UK band Shack released an album in August 2003 quoting a Bill Hicks routine in the title - Here's Tom With the Weather. The album also included other Bill Hicks quotes in the liner notes. Deborah Driscoll of The Starfire Station wrote an ode to Bill Hicks entitled "Willy Melvin". Righteous Babe Records artist, Hamell On Trial also wrote a song entitled simply, "Bill Hicks". English breakbeat artist Adam Freeland sampled Revelations for his track "We Want Your Soul."
The British movie Human Traffic referred to him as the "late prophet Bill Hicks," and showed that the main character, Jip, liked to watch a bit of Hicks's stand-up before going out for a night to "remind me not to take life too seriously". Hicks even appears in the comic book Preacher, in which he is an important influence on the protagonist, Rev. Jesse Custer. His opening voice-over to the 1991 Revelations live show is also quoted in Preacher's last issue.
The British actor Chas Early portrayed Hicks in the one-man stage show Bill Hicks: Slight Return, which premiered in 2005.
On February 25, 2004, British MP Stephen Pound tabled an early day motion titled "Anniversary of the Death of Bill Hicks" (EDM 678 of the 2003-04 session), the text of which was as follows:
That this House notes with sadness the 10th anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks, on 26th February 1994, at the age of 32; 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 and George Carlin in any list of unflinching and painfully honest political philosophers.[20]
In the documentary Zeitgeist parts of Bill Hicks' Revelations are being played.
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