To Tell the Truth: Bill Hicks as Comedian, Philosopher, Revolutionary
By Brighid Mooney

"America's biggest failure is its inability to take comedy seriously." - HL Mencken

Dressed from head to toe in his trademark black like some kind of comedy outlaw, Bill Hicks stands on stage with a microphone in one hand, casually lights a cigarette and looks out at his audience. "I have something to tell all you non-smokers that I know for a fact that you don't know," he says in between puffs, "and I feel it's my duty to pass on information at all times. Ready? Non-smokers die ... every day." He cackles delightedly and then stops abruptly to punctuate his point. "Sleep tight."

This is Bill Hicks at his best, telling his audience things they know but often neglect to consider, forcing them to take notice of the things that most would rather ignore. For Hicks, apathy was not an option, and ignorance no excuse. He firmly believed that comedy should be a learning experience as much as a laughing one, and that the truth was always funnier than anything else, especially when it exposed the darker, more sinister realities of the world, and he took great pleasure in imparting his wisdom on unsuspecting audiences. "The best kind of comedy to me is when you make people laugh at things they've never laughed at," he told The Nose in 1992, "and also take a light into the darkened corners of people's minds. I thought the whole point of it was to make you feel un-alone."¹

Smoking was just one of many divisive issues that Hicks tackled with reckless abandon, along with jokes about drugs, abortion and pornography.  His intent was not just to make his audience laugh, but also to make them think. He usually approached topics like these from the least popular stance imaginable, giving voice to positions that were not just objectionable, but often unspoken as well. In the world of Bill Hicks, there was no such thing as taboo.

But Hicks didn't start out as the hard-drinking, chain-smoking, drug-taking prophet of comedy and rage that he later became. Born on December 16, 1961 and raised in a Southern Baptist household in Houston, Texas, Hicks was for many years a complete teetotaler, adamantly refusing to partake. But once he started experimenting with drugs and alcohol, he did so with gusto, throwing himself headlong into both with little thought for moderation. The first time he drank, he downed a bottle of tequila and went on stage, delivering an angry, belligerent set, screaming at and berating his audience for hours while lying on the floor. This all or nothing approach was the same way he took on comedy, merciless and unrelenting about everything that found its way into his routine.

Despite being a heavy drinker for many years, his drug of choice was always mushrooms, and Hicks frequently espoused their virtues, asserting that everyone should have a psychedelic experience at some point in their life because it would make them see the truth, and briefly open up their eyes to the world as it really is, rather than this false world that we often accept without question.  Hicks was the eternal skeptic, questioning anything and everything, from God and religion, government policy and social conventions, to the very reality of the world itself. Nothing was sacred and nothing off-limits. "All our beliefs are being challenged now," he would say, "and rightfully so. They're stupid."

Hicks often railed against the fact that the news only ever showed their negative side of drugs, when, as he put it, "I've had good times on drugs." In his act, he imagined a news program that dared to show the positive: "Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather!" Drugs, especially mushrooms, weren't simply a way to avoid reality; for Hicks they were a way of seeking it out. With a lifelong interest in transcendentalism and eastern philosophy, Hicks saw life as something of a puzzle.  He was constantly searching for the truth, and then sharing his visions with his audience. At certain points it becomes hard to tell where the joke ends and where Bill Hicks begins, but that may be because there is no real line between them. As Hicks put it, his personal goal as a stand-up was "less jokes, more me;" And that philosophy is evident in many of the things he said on stage, when his pro-drug rants would intersect with his search for the truth. His act was as much about discovering the truth about the world as it was about laughing at all of the absurdities that we regularly accept without giving a second thought. "I realized that our true nature is spirit, not body," he would start, "that we are eternal beings, and God's love is unconditional and there's nothing we can ever do to change that. It is only our illusion that we are separate from God or that we are alone. In fact, the reality is that we are one with God and he loves us. Now if that isn’t a hazard to this country ..."

Hicks' pro-drug rants led right into another favorite topic: the US government. "I think it's interesting the two drugs that are legal, alcohol and cigarettes, are two drugs that do absolutely nothing for you at all," he would say. "While the drugs that grow naturally upon this planet, drugs that open your eyes to make you realize how you're being fucked every day of your life, those drugs are against the law. Coincidence? I don't know." Hicks was fascinated with government conspiracies and talked endlessly about things like UFOs and the JFK assassination. He was also obsessed with modern day government cover-ups like the Waco fiasco and was one of the very few people who spoke out against the Gulf War of the early 90s. As he told John Lahr in the New Yorker, "To me, the comic is the guy who says 'wait a minute' as the consensus forms. He's the antithesis of the mob mentality."²

In the early 1990s, in what was an eerie precursor to the world's current political climate, the US attacked Iraq, while at home, Hicks watched hours of TV news, fascinated by the smart bombs and intrigued by the United States' policy of arming the world and then attacking those countries it had just armed. Amidst a torrent of flag-waving patriotism, Hicks stood out as one of the lone voices of dissent, working his political views into his comedy routines in such a way that the audience could, if not agree with, then at least accept. While politically he leaned to the left, his jokes encompassed the entire political spectrum. His imagined political party was the "people who hate people" party, but for all his vicious ranting, Hicks most believed in love and compassion, and his political views were often partially informed by his spiritual philosophies. "I'm gonna share with you a vision that I had," he would say, "cause I love you. And you feel it. You know all that money we spend on nuclear weapons and defense each year, trillions of dollars, correct? Instead -- just play with this -- if we spent that money feeding and clothing the poor of the world -- and it would pay for it many times over, not one human being excluded -- we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever in peace."

George Orwell has said that "during times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." If so, Bill Hicks was a comic revolutionary, defying the conventional rules of both comedy and patriotism to speak out against what he perceived as the wrongs of his government, in a way that made those ideas palatable to his audience. "The responsibility of the intellectual is to tell the truth and expose lies," he said. And to this end, comedy is a singularly useful medium, the sugar coating on the bitter pill of reality. Unlike many comedians, Hicks didn't underestimate the intelligence of his audience, never toning down his material when he was on stage, no matter where he performed. However, he did sometimes overestimate his audience's tolerance, and when they heckled or walked out, he placed the blame squarely on them. It wasn't his fault if they didn't understand satire, he was only joking after all. His comedy was intensely black at times, which may be why he became a star in England, always appreciative of irony and sarcasm, while never managing to match that success in his own country. Like one of his heroes, Jimi Hendrix, Hicks had to go to the UK to become famous, and there, they lapped up the comedy that Americans weren't quite ready for.

No subject was too dark for Hicks, who thought of comedy as the one thing capable of illuminating that darkness. "To me, real humor is very serious," he told Set magazine in 1991. "Mark Twain's humor in Huckleberry Finn is funny, but it’s about very serious things. It’s a deeper, richer laugh for me." Hicks could be quite intense on stage, screaming at his audience, engulfing the microphone and making ear-piercing sound effects. His rants often reached a fever pitch where Hicks would be leaning forward toward his audience and screaming into the microphone. "I want my rock stars dead!" he would yell. "I want them to fucking play with one hand and put a gun in their other fucking hand and go 'I hope you enjoy the show!' Pow! Play from your fucking heart!" As the audience sat stunned, he would stop for a moment, surveying the damage. Hicks believed that you could never go too far with an audience as long as you had one line that could soften the blow. After several minutes of screaming at the audience he would turn and finish the joke with one of his favorites, "I am also available for children's parties."

Television presented a problem for the wild, untamable comedy of Bill Hicks, which may be one reason why he never saw massive popularity in the United States. He appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman twelve times during his life, and it was always a huge frustration for the comic, whose material had to be watered down to something appropriate for American television. His last scheduled appearance made national news and prompted a profile by John Lahr in The New Yorker when his entire set got axed for being "unsuitable" after having been approved twice before by producers. The event infuriated Hicks and sparked a huge debate over censorship on television. It would have been his last appearance on the show, and unfortunately Letterman would never be able to make it up to him.  Hicks would be dead just a few months later.

Unbeknownst to most people at the time, including some of his closest friends, Hicks had been diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer at the age of just 31. He would die less than a year later, the voice of truth silenced long before his time. Before his death he grew amazingly prolific, gathering material for a new album, working on a new TV series for England's Channel Four, and completing a movie script. He moved back into his parents’ house before he died, returned to his Baptist roots, and, after calling several friends to say goodbye, declared that he was finished talking. He had said everything he had to say, told all the truths he had to tell. His final message was one of hope and optimism. "I left in love, in laughter, and in truth," he wrote, "and wherever truth, love and laughter abide, I am there in spirit."

As MSNBC opinion-head Keith Olberman put it shortly after Hicks' death, "with his clarity of vision and gift of words, if Bill Hicks had had any more time he might have started a revolution.”  Eleven years after his death, Hicks' words are just as relevant, and almost more important, than ever. With social and political events now repeating those of the early 1990s, his jokes about government and war are eerily prescient and remarkably fitting. But Hicks, once nearly alone in his dissidence in a country afraid and unwilling to speak out against the Gulf War, would probably be proud of the amount of dissent Americans have waged against the current war, and might think that maybe his work as a comic revolutionary had not all been in vain.

In the end, Hicks believed in something more powerful than what we think of as "reality," something bigger than any of us. He believed that love and compassion were more powerful than hate or fear, and that no matter how bad things became, it was never too late to change the world, because it's all a choice, and ultimately, it's all just a ride. "The world is like a ride in an amusement park," he said. "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 colored 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."

1. Boulware, Jack.  “Bill Hicks: High Plains Jester.” The Nose, Issue 11, 1992.

2. Lahr, John.  “The Goat Boy Rises.”  The New Yorker, November 1, 1993.

For more information on Bill Hicks check out his official website at http://www.billhicks.com.

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