Rage against the machine

“To me, the comic is the guy who says, ‘Wait a minute’ as the consensus forms. He’s the antithesis of the mob mentality. The comic is a flame-like Shiva the Destroyer, toppling idols no matter what they are. He keeps cutting everything back to the moment.”

– Bill Hicks, to John Lahr of the New Yorker, 1992.

Sometimes the heretics are the holiest of the holies. Prophet is a weighty word, but that’s what comedian Bill Hicks was. Born in Georgia in 1961, Hicks, like any prophet worth his salt, went largely unrecognised in his own land until shortly before his death from pancreatic cancer in February 1994. Contemporaries and critics have since come to regard him as the most important American comedian since Lenny Bruce.

Going by Cynthia True’s new biography American Scream – The Bill Hicks Story, Hicks might’ve seemed unlikely prophet material, being vehemently anti-church and state, devoted to drugs, drink and the devil’s music for much of his life. His line in stand-up was once tagged the Comedy of Hate – a nice catchphrase, up there with the Theatre of Cruelty and the Cinema of the Absurd – but it only tells half the story. The son of strict Southern Baptists, he was as much an evangelist as the Jimmy Swaggart-style TV preachers he so loved to lampoon.

Besides, sometimes the unbelievers protest too much. As was pointed out by Hazel Motes, the crackpot preacher in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, blasphemy requires believing in something to blaspheme. Despite (or maybe because of) the pro-lifer jokes and Christ-on-a-cross routines, Hicks was on the side of the angels.

“For all the talk about Bill being like Hendrix or Dylan or Jim Morrison or Lenny Bruce, it was Jesus Bill wanted to be,” comedienne Brett Butler said in Totally Bill Hicks, the 1994 documentary made by Channel 4. “Bill got freeze-framed in the scene where Jesus went through the temple and said, ‘This is my father’s house and you’ve turned it into a den of thieves’. That’s what Bill always wanted to do – he wanted to be Christ at his angriest.”

In other words, Hicks was the shaman who got laughs, a stand-up version of the African griots who had a license to say anything they wanted, but were condemned to exist on the fringes of society.

“He was taking fully the role of the kind of witch doctor in front of the audience,” reckoned actor Eric Bogosian. “Really you’ve got a performance going on here and it’s like a giant exorcism of all the evil shit that’s inside of us that poisons us day to day to day.”

Those performances were usually based around subjects like pornography, smoking, the Gulf War, drugs, fundamentalist Christians, family values promulgators, and of course, Hicks’ favourite ranting points, rednecks (“What does their family tree look like – a stump?”) and the one-party political system: (“Go back to bed America, your government is in control. Here’s Love Connection – watch this and get fat and stupid.”)

But not all of his targets were as obvious. One of this writer’s favourite Hicks routines entitled ‘Children Aren’t Special’ took a pop at pain-in-the-ass parents doting over their spoiled devil-spawn:

“You know when a guy comes, he comes 200 million sperm, did you know that? And you mean to tell me you think your child is special? I have wiped entire civilisations off of my chest with a grey gym sock – that is special.”

By the time Hicks’ cancer was diagnosed, his shows had become dark and cathartic affairs, fuelled by rage at the church, the military-industrial complex and even rock ‘n’ roll (he performed the by now legendary ‘Corporate Rock Sucks Satan’s Cock’ skit in front of Jon Bon Jovi and a cast of hundreds at a music industry seminar in the early ’90s).

Many found the undiluted bile of this period hard to take, but Hicks was not the kind of comic who cared much whether you laughed with him, at him, or not at all. Rather, he was walking proof of the old chestnut about humour being a deadly serious business. He steered clear of letting the audience off the hook with a punch-line, just kept on – to quote another grand American oddball – pounding, pounding, ’til it seemed that sense was breaking through.

Watching the concert video Revelations or listening to his final Rant In D Minor album is akin to witnessing a man force-feeding his audience truth serum. And the common response to truth, especially ugly truth, is involuntary laughter, like that which greets the news of some terrible accident.

And there was an element of car crash fascination about not just Hicks’ art, but also his life. From True’s biography we learn that he was precocious, a star in the Houston’s Comedy Workshop while barely in his teens, spiritually inquisitive, a voracious reader, and an avid mushroom muncher. In fact, it’s accepted that the demon drink transformed his comedy, gave it an angry edge that took him way beyond the realm of airplane food jokes and into the role of social pariah and truth teller. It also ensured he’d never rake it in alongside Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno.

Leaning heavily on John Lahr’s now-famous ‘Goat Boy Rises’ piece in the New Yorker, Cynthia True investigates in some detail the controversial no-showing of Hicks’ twelfth and last appearance on the David Letterman show in autumn 1993.

On previous occasions, Hicks felt the show – one of his biggest allies in mainstream television – “de-clawed” him. This time, he finally felt he’d reached an understanding regarding the material, which had been pre-approved. However, hours before the show was due to air, he got a call telling him his segment had been cut due to the sensitive nature of the predominantly Pro-Lifer/Christian-baiting material. At first it was believed that the CBS network had pulled the plug, although it subsequently became apparent that the programme’s producers were themselves responsible. Some weeks later, a friend called to tell Hicks they’d seen a pro-life lobby commercial airing during the Letterman show.

“I have personal regrets about how our relationship developed prior to his death,” David Letterman told Channel 4, “so it makes me doubly sad that he’s now not around so that we can correct mistakes that were made on his behalf… I feel a personal sense of regret regarding that.”

If the Letterman crew appear as Pontius Pilate Inc. in True’s book, then fellow comedian Denis Leary comes off as, if not Judas, then St Peter waiting for the cock to crow. According to the biographer, Hicks was astonished to hear similarities to his own act the first time he played Leary’s No Cure For Cancer album. From then on, he took to dismissing the Irish-American comic as the Donovan to his Dylan. When grilled on the subject by Liam Fay in 1997, Leary said,

“The truth is that when I went to England, I was the first guy to tell people over there about Bill. I was telling everybody, ‘You gotta bring this guy over here, he’s really fucking funny’. That’s hardly the action of somebody who had just stolen his act.”

Hicks was already a cult figure by the time he passed away. Over the next few years, he would be name-checked by everyone from Henry Rollins to Radiohead, foreshadowing apprentice antichrists like Chuck Palahniuk and Eminem. He was the Lester Bangs of stand-up, Hunter S. with a wit to temper the righteous indignation, a riddle-me-Dylan maintaining that to live outside the law you must be honest. Above all, Hicks was Uncle Sam’s bad conscience. He did all the talking, yet the listener was the one who felt like they’d offloaded some festering secret, some rotten glob of taboo.

“Lenny Bruce was bad,” Dylan sang in 1981, “He was the brother that you never had.” The names have changed, but the feeling remains the same.