Bill Hicks wanted us to think for ourselves

 

 Thirty years after his death, the Texan who set out to ‘topple idols’ remains an outlaw truth-teller for many but his raging material can land with a clunk. 

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" The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly colored, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while."

Photograph: Andreea Alexandru/AP

 

Bill Hicks - It's Just A Ride

Mr. Fish : We Are Not Alone

Bill, 2016 Graphite on paper 

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22 years ago today, Bill Hicks died

Everything ever recorded of Bill Hicks—EVER—to be released in 2015

The premature death of Bill Hicks was one of the greatest tragedies to ever befall American comedy. His hilarious and unabashedly angry attacks on conservatism, complacency, and stupidity made him a cult figure in his lifetime, but cancer claimed him in early 1994, just as he was poised to achieve real fame, so we never got to see him continue maturing into the gifted comedic truth-seeker he seemed bound to become, a legitimate heir to Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. Like any tortured genius type worth discussing, Hicks was full of contradictions—he criticized the alcohol industry for peddling poison, but he took a perverse and boastful pride in his own cigarette consumption. He embraced a deeply moral we-are-all-as-one-in-the-cosmos philosophy, yet he sometimes took a sadistic glee in dehumanizing the rural underclass (as a conservative-raised southerner himself, he gets a pass on that). And though he constantly torpedoed commercial opportunists, he himself was seeking career visibility, and paradoxically, purity, in a milieu that necessitated rather a lot of commercial engagement.
 His career wasn’t helped, either, by his willingness to derail a performance to attack his audience, or even just a single member thereof, though that shit was every bit as golden as his prepared material.

 

Bill Hicks: His Ride Ended 20 Years Ago

Bill Hick performing live at the Dominion Theater in London. This is the entire show all on one video!
 Today, February 26, comedian Bill Hicks will have been dead 20 years. Houston's favorite son (don't try to deny it) was 32. Whether he went on to meet his version of Jesus (the guy who doesn't like crosses), descended into the infernal regions (where the Satan-worshipping family down the block with all the good albums ended up), transmuted into pure energy, or is simply moldering in the ground in the Hicks family plot in Mississippi, we'll probably never know. Still, two decades removed from his untimely death from pancreatic cancer, Hicks remains one of the most revered and influential comedians ever.

 

Bill Hicks: The most outspoken and necessary stand-up of modern times

Dominic Cavendish pays tribute to a comedian who made rare sense of the world we live in.

 

Bill Hicks on religious cults - exclusive video

In this previously unseen footage from the Hicks family archive, filmed at the Comedy Corner in Florida in October 1993, Bill Hicks riffs on 'people who snap and think they are Jesus'.

 

Bill Hicks died on this day in 1994.

“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 round and round. 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, they say, "Hey, don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we kill those people.” ― Bill Hicks