Bill Hicks, the black-humored articulator of doubt

One of America's best and darkest comedians is eight years gone, but with a new biography and a new CD, his career shows no signs of stopping.

By Jack Boulware

Mar 13, 2002 | It's October 1991, inside the brass-and-ferns Punch Line comedy club in San Francisco. The sound system is blasting Stevie Ray Vaughan at top volume. I'm here because a friend has pestered me for weeks about a comedian named Bill Hicks, whom I've never heard of. He's performed in the city several previous nights, and I've finally made it down to see a show. I'm busy editing a satirical magazine called the Nose, and writing a similar column for SF Weekly. There's funny all around me. I have plenty of friends who are cartoonists, writers, comedians. And the country is already full to bursting with comedy clubs and lame comics. So who the hell is Hicks?

He walks onstage wearing all black, thanks the crowd, and says it's really great to be here, wherever he is. Pulling out a cigarette, he asks a guy in the front row how much he smokes. A pack and a half a day, the man answers. Hicks snorts. "You little puss -- I go through two lighters a day." He lights his cigarette, the flame adjusted to a ridiculous height, flaring like a blowtorch, and delivers a message for all the uptight, whining, prissy little nonsmokers: "Nonsmokers die ... every day." He pauses and exhales up to the ceiling. "Sleep tight."

Bill Hicks died of cancer in 1994. But here in 2002, his career is doing quite well. A greatest hits CD, "Philosophy." A brand-new Harper Collins biography, "American Scream." Bill Hicks tributes at comedy festivals in Aspen and Montreal, another tribute in London, Hollywood screenplays in the works, all of it eight years after his death. The timing is weird, but not surprising. The specter of Andy Kaufman waited 15 years for his film treatment, and 17 years for the biographies. America often overlooks its own best resources, especially in the marginalized subculture of stand-up comedy.

Back at that club in 1991, as I watched the show, I had no idea that my life was going to become intertwined with Bill Hicks, however briefly, until his death. I was preoccupied with listening to the guy, because he was astonishing -- polished, uncompromising comic sermons about hot-button subjects like Christians, JFK conspiracies, drugs, abortion. I'd never seen a comic so committed to communicating with an audience, and yet he could really care less if the crowd liked him. One bit about overpopulation ended with him squatting down to stare at the front row, and miming the act of a trailer-trash mother squeezing out unnecessary babies: "There's Trucker, Junior. There's your brother, Pizza Delivery Boy, Junior. There's your other brother, Will Work For Food, Junior," each birth punctuated with a loud "thunk." This was rude humor taken to a new level. The antithesis of TV-friendly material. No wonder I'd never heard of him.

He was an acquired taste, and the San Francisco audience got it immediately. The city has always been a town hip to comedy, from Tom Lehrer to Lenny Bruce and Robin Williams. When tourists did walk out, he'd wave goodbye and thank them for coming.

This wasn't standup comedy. It was something else: a tent revival meeting for a congregation of paranoid chain smokers? The word scalding came to mind. You felt it in your chest. I kept hearing an image, the sound of bacon frying, and thought, I need to know this guy. I introduced myself to him after the show, and he gave me his number.

I returned to the magazine offices and described to the staff what I'd seen. A black-humored, satanic Texan, holding forth on the world, articulating the doubts of every American who was paying attention. I'm pretty sure it was the first time any of us had heard Dick Clark referred to as "the anti-Christ." In some ways Hicks was expressing in a live context what we were attempting to do in the world of magazines. Except, of course, he was actually making money.

In that pre-Internet time, the Lollapalooza generation developed a perverse fascination with the dark side, from autopsy photos to vintage porn, medical oddities, tattoos, piercings and government conspiracies. America's pop culture was swirling with hellish apocalyptic information. Our magazine eagerly squeezed humor from this new shock chic. We didn't really pay attention to comedy. To us, the world was already funny and disturbing enough. But Hicks seemed to fit into this groove. We had to interview him.

I contacted his management, and starting reading his press kit: suburbs of Houston, doing comedy since age 14, part of the hard-partying Texas Outlaw comedy collective along with Sam Kinison and Ron Shock. He'd recently gotten sober, had headlined six shows at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal. He'd done Letterman, released a CD, "Dangerous," and was about to put out another. It seemed like he'd had at least two careers already, and he wasn't yet 30.

What impressed me most was that he was an autodidact redneck with a high school education, who turned around and used his background to his advantage. (In one of his bits a dimwitted waffle house waitress came up to his table, saw him reading a book, and asked, "What are you reading for?" Not "what are you reading?" as Hicks put it, but "what are you reading for?" His reply was brutally funny: "Well, I read for a lot of reasons, but one of them is so I don't end up a fucking waffle waitress.")

A few weeks later Hicks, who'd agreed to an interview, called my apartment from a hotel in Houston. As we talked about comedy and sacred cows, he tossed in things he'd read by Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut. I asked him if he ever saw himself on a network television show. He paused, and then brought up a quote from Paul Westerberg of the Replacements. The idea was essentially if you hate elevator music, by all means write elevator music.

"Like, go in there and change it," he said. "I thought that was very interesting. But I think there's so many people that hate elevator music, they're not all gonna be able to fit on the elevator. I don't know. It depends on the show. I'm totally confused about what I'm going to do with my life. That's why I'm going to an astrologer later today." He laughed.

When asked for a favorite review, he dug up a letter to a club owner from an irate woman who had attended a recent show, hoping to see some "real and refreshing humor," like Milton Berle or Sid Caesar. Instead, she listened to Hicks do bits about serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. He read the entire letter to me over the phone, shrieking with laughter at the woman's anger -- he had a great evil cackle -- and how she thought his act had no scruples or dignity. He loved such feedback; it didn't seem to bother him at all.

"You know, I don't think mass murder is funny at all," he said. "Probably the opposite. But I just have this weird theory. The best kind of comedy to me is when you make people laugh at things they've never laughed at, and also take a light into the darkened corners of people's minds, exposing them to the light. I thought the whole point of it was to make you feel un-alone. Many thoughts I do have are not my own thoughts. You know what I mean? They're not secret thoughts."

Next Page: "Silence of the Lambs" -- a comedy?

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