Tuesday, Apr 5, 2011 18:01 ET
Andrew O'Hehir
The subversive legacy of comic Bill Hicks
A new film explores the career of the comedy cult hero, whose legend continues to spread 17 years after his death
By Andrew O'Hehir
http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/our_picks/index.html?story=/ent/movies/andrew_ohehir/2011/04/05/bill_hicks
When Bill Hicks died of pancreatic cancer in 1994, he was just 32 years old but had been a working comedian for more than half his life. He was somewhere on the outer fringes of stardom, having done an HBO special, appeared a dozen times on Letterman and been offered a weekly column in the Nation. But Hicks was also seen as a "comic's comic," someone who was too heady and acerbic for a mass audience, and unlikely ever to top-line a sitcom or host a talk show. His last Letterman appearance in late 1993 was edited out of the show entirely, a decision for which the CBS late-night host would apologize to Hicks' mother, on the air, 16 years later.
In the wake of the first Gulf War and the federal siege of the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas, Hicks had become increasingly angry and political, focusing his comic radar on the United States government and everything it represented around the world, especially the mind-set derived from capitalism and consumerism. In an exquisite and apparently improvised riff seen in Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas' compelling documentary "American: The Bill Hicks Story," he wrestles with the contradictions of his role, oscillating between urging everyone in the audience who works in marketing or advertising to kill themselves and imagining those people's response: "Oh, I see what Bill is doing! He's going after the anti-marketing dollar, the righteous-indignation dollar! That's a good dollar! He's really smart!" Stopping to calm his breathing, Hicks repeats himself: No, he's really not kidding. Kill yourselves.
That monologue was delivered to a sold-out theater in Britain, where Hicks was far better known and more beloved than he ever was at home. (His influence on British comedy may be less obvious than his stateside influence, but Russell Brand and Ricky Gervais, among others, are big fans.) Some of Hicks' critics have accused him of cynically tapping into the profound current of anti-Americanism that lies just below the "special relationship" between the two nations. That may not be entirely fair, but Hicks certainly seemed to thrive on his increasingly adversarial relationship with American audiences, who he once said reacted to his humor "like dogs shown a card trick." He traveled across the country furiously, doing hundreds of dates a year in venues like the "Comedy Pouch in Possum Creek, Ark." (where he often claimed to have just performed). In his last club appearance, a few weeks before his death, Hicks mocked "the fat Americans in the front row" and joked: "This is the material, by the way, that has kept me virtually anonymous in America for the past 15 years. Gee, I wonder why we're hated the world over?"
Hicks obviously wasn't the first or the last confrontational comic, and on the roster of famous comedians who died young, he ranks no higher than the third or fourth most famous. (One cannot conclusively state that Hicks' career of chain smoking, alcoholism and drug abuse contributed to his cancer, but it's certainly plausible.) But Harlock and Thomas' film, based on extensive interviews with Hicks' family and close friends and constructed out of cool-looking, postcard-style animations, makes a strong case for Hicks as a highly original practitioner of the form, who came out of Bible Belt suburbia and pushed stand-up into arenas of political commentary and philosophical speculation most comics had abandoned by the '80s.
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