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Bill Hicks DVDs

By Jesse Hicks

The pantheon of truly great stand-up comics is a pretty small one. Sure, you can work your way up, start on the JV team with Sam Kinnison, Rodney Dangerfield, George Carlin, Woody Allen, etc. You can make a case for the modern talents: Chris Rock, Roseanne, Jerry Seinfeld and so on. Like any list, it's entirely subjective, but once you start culling, you end up with a small handful of true greats. Lenny Bruce. Richard Pryor. And perhaps the most incendiary talent to ever walk the fine line between comic and preacher, Bill Hicks.

Two new collections celebrate Hicks, who spent most of his career ignored by an America that preferred Andrew Dice Clay's dick jokes over challenging social satire. The first, Rykodisc's "Bill Hicks Live DVD," features three of Hicks's most famous appearances - two of which, not surprisingly, were filmed outside the US . The third, HBO's "One Night Stand" filmed in Chicago , is a good introduction to Hicks' pioneering comedy style, but the man himself has admitted it wasn't one of his best shows. The material feels rushed to fit the 30-minute format, and it's easy to tell Hicks is not in his environ. Still, as rare as filmed Hicks material is, the HBO special is a welcome addition.

Watch either of the other two, though, and you'll understand why Bill Hicks continues to be revered by comedians. He sometimes called his act, "comedy of hate," but for all its anger - directed primarily at the media, government, and corporations who keep people from evolving - the work was more about catharsis, about excising fear and irrationality in order to move forward.

He took aim at stupidity wherever he found it - and most often it was stupidity at the highest levels that bothered him most. Eschewing the "What's the deal with airline peanuts?" routine, he took dead aim at the misperceptions surrounding the (first) Iraq war, through, "A war ? Wasn't really a war, you know. A war's when two armies are fighting. So. I don't know if you could call it a war exactly, you know." Calling the US to task for its arming of Saddam in the first place, Hicks disassembled the recently again-fashionable WMD argument, "The intelligence reports would come in, ' Iraq : incredible weapons. Incredible weapons.' How do y'all know that? .Well.we looked at the receipt."

Unfortunately, there are plenty of other parallels in Hicks's decade-old act: "Another great thing about Bush being gone: it ends twelve years of fundamentalist Christians in the fucking White House. Thank you, God. Finally my prayers got through. This B-actor idiot, fucking illiterate, bozo-looking fuck can't really be the President of the country, can he God? Not really! Reach Your hands down from the clouds and pinch my little butt and make sure I'm not dreamin'!"

You're not dreaming, Bill. Actually, you're dead. As America finally began to take notice of his work, Hicks was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told he had three months to live. When his doctor broke the news, according to Softskull Press's excellent new book, Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines - a compilation of Hicks's routines and previously unpublished work introduced by John Lahr's excellent New Yorker profile, Hicks took his five minutes to be stunned. Then he asked, "What's the battle plan?"

Comedy was his calling. While Bill Hicks Live showcases the greatness of which he was capable, it's Love All the People that offers real insight into the man's passionate creativity. He believed himself an incarnation of Shiva the Destroyer, whose cleansing flame burns away all that threatens to obscure reality. When Hicks took on our backward, forced-consensus attitudes on drugs, sex, and pornography, he did so with the aim of tearing us apart in order to put us back together again - better this time. Touring incessantly, he was a true believer in bringing enlightenment to whoever he could. He never opted for the easy way, the sitcom or movie deal, and savaged anyone who did. Jay Leno was "a corporate whore," and MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice were merely the newest in a long train of mediocrities, "ball-less, soulless suckers of Satan's cock."

He could be that vitriolic not because he saw himself as being better, but because he believed everyone could be better. His act is about nothing if not the gap between the world that is and the world that is possible. In one example, he asked, "Why not a positive story about drugs?" Picking up his newscaster voice, he intoned, "Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather."

It was that idealism - he genuinely believed the "one consciousness" philosophy - that allowed Hicks to transcend the lame comedy that surrounded him. He called himself the antidote to Andrew Dice Clay, whose popular, racist, misogynist, homophobic comedy was the exact antithesis of Hicks' inclusiveness. In the last months of his life he continued to tour, telling only a few close friends of his illness. He was at a creative peak, with two albums coming out and a BBC pilot in development. He didn't need to tour, but he did.

A fter an hour of tearing Western civilization a new one, Hicks would close with, "The world is like a ride in an amusement park and when you choose to go on it you think it's real, because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and around and around and it has thrills and chills and it's very brightly coloured and it's very loud. And it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question, is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, and they say, 'Hey, don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because... this is just a ride.' " He died on February 26, 1994, at age 32.

The Essential Bill Hicks CDs -

Arizona Bay

Dangerous

Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1

Rant in E Minor

Relentless

All available on Rykodisc:

The Essential Bill Hicks DVD/Videos -

Bill Hicks Live - collects Relentless, Revelations, and the HBO One Night Stand appearance. Includes the tribute documentary It's Just a Ride.

Sane Man - First feature-length comedy concert.

Available at www.billhicks.com.

The Essential Bill Hicks - Books: