Remembering Bill Hicks

This weekend I was at Borders and found a newly released comedy album by the late Bill Hicks. Now, if any of you out there hasn't yet heard of Bill Hicks...get off your ass.

Bill Hicks was quite possibly the funniest man who ever lived. He was fearless, crude, self-aware, honest, and fucking hilarious. Even though he died in over twelve years ago, and most of his recorded work is very topical with that time, it's so eerily relevant today. This newest release, recorded at Oxford University in 1992, rants about Bush Sr., trouble in the Middle East, and even Basic Instinct (wherein he rants about what Basic Instinct 2 should be like).

This new release is nothing too new. All of the material he uses you can find on all of his other albums. However, this is like listening to a live album of your favorite band...It's the same music you've heard before, only with a different order, a different spin, a different riff than what you've used to. Having practically memorized his other albums, I found myself starting to mouth along to the setup to each joke, but laughing my ass off hearing this alternate version.

This was recorded toward the end of his career, about a year before he found out he was dying, yet a little after he started to tire of the job. Even though he rants about how sick he was about living life on the road and having to deal with all of the brain-dead people he encountered who didn't understand his deep message and only wanted to hear the dick jokes (which he begrudgenly obliges), he still brought 100% to his performances. If Dane Cook wants to believe he's the comedic equivalent of a rock star, then Bill Hicks was the seasoned, road weary, Turn-the-Page rock legend who was tired of performing the same old hits to please the crowd when he believed his new ideas would change the world.

It's strange to think that he was only 32 when he passed away. On many of his recordings, he'd joke about his own death, not from the actual cancer that took him from this life, but from the non-smokers who beat the shit out of him. He joked about drugs from a level experience few people have ever survived. He spoke of alcohol like an old drunk hooked up to a kidney dialysis machine...he knew what risks he was taking, but had a great time doing it anyways. Even his rants about the dangers of smoking seemed less like a public service announcement and more like a desperate plea for someone to give him a cigarette.

He would talk about love and talk about hate with equal disdain for both. He would condemn racism with the same swagger as those who support it while at the same time paint broad generalizations about other races that left you to wonder which side he was on. There was never a fine line with Bill Hicks...He would jump over the line and back so much that no one cared what the line was anymore.

More than anything, he wasn't a "didjya' ever notice?" kind of comedian. He observed the world, turned in his report, and appropriately ripped it a new asshole. In the twelve years he's been gone, the world has gone to deeper levels of hell than even he could not have possibly imagined, and a great voice of dissent, honesty and BALLS like his is much needed in times like these. The bad news is, it can never be duplicated.