Bilious brilliance
Bill Hicks
Meet the man who made stand-up a religious experience.
For many of us, a lifelong devotion to Bill Hicks began with a worn VHS tape. In the early nineties, copies of his stand-up show Dangerous were circulated among teenagers and alternative music fans, passed hand-to-hand with a kind of gleeful reverence.You won't believe this, your friend would say, this guy is something else. And man, was he something else.
Hicks was a comedian, a prophet, a pornographer and a poet. He looked at the world and saw decay and deception; capitalism gone mad with power and ignorance run amok; lying politicians, puritanical Christians and a media landscape dominated by advertising agencies and manufactured pop stars. "I don't mean to sound bitter, cold or cruel," he once joked, "but I am, so that's how it comes out."
Hicks channelled his rage into the microphone and his material, to borrow a line from The Simpsons, was funny because it was true - for a certain kind of intellectual misanthrope, anyway. "People suck," he once said, "That's my contention. I can prove it on a scratch paper and pen. Give me a f*cking Etch-a-sketch, I'll do it in three minutes... I'm tired of this back-slapping 'Isn't humanity neat?' bullsh*t. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are." But it's not all we can be, Hicks maintained.
While he was famous for unmasking the rot at the core of modern civilisation, Hicks was actually a dreamer, filled with hope that we would one day grasp the beauty lying just outside of humanity's reach. At the end of his derisive diatribes and soapbox comedy, there was always a plea for a better world. "Folks, it's time to evolve," he said in 1993, just a year before his untimely death, "Evolution did not end with us growing opposable thumbs. You do know that, right? There's another 90 percent of our brains that we have to illuminate."
Sadly, Hicks didn't live to see the wheels of enlightenment turn, but when and if it happens, he'll be at least partially responsible.
Want to learn more about the life of a legendary cult comedian? American: The Bill Hicks Story screens at ACMI Cinemas from Thursday 4 November until Tuesday 23 November.
Published Thursday, 4 November 2010
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