Another Dead Hero

“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

-Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight

For comedians in the 90’s, there were few individual comedy performances as wrapped in legend as Bill Hicks‘s October, 1993 spot on The Late Show With David Letterman that was cut from the show prior to air. For comics, if that individual decision to censor Hicks wasn’t the equivilent of Joseph and Mary being turned away at the inn, it was at least on par with spending a blind date with a porn star being told how her virginity was restored by Scientology.

Here’s the myth: Hicks, under a recent diagnosis of pancreatic cancer (Heretofore probably to be known as “The Swayze Scunge”) that he refused to disclose to anyone, did a seven-minute set on Letterman. He performed material that was somehow cutting-edge dark and yet simultaneously family-friendly, scathingly insightful yet accessible by cherubic toddlers, blisteringly devastating to the establishment yet embraceable by anyone with a rudimentary command of the English language. He commanded the audience, shaking the theater to the studs, ending with a standing ovation which included an elderly woman in a wheelchair who hadn’t stood in years and excluded a former politician who, after being confronted him with his own hypocrisy in comedy form, ground his molars to powder as his left eye slowly rolled back into his skull while simultaneously filling with blood.

Supposedly, immediately following Hicks’s performance, Letterman’s producer Bob Morton shook Bill’s hand and looked him in the eye, knowing that he would betray him. Later, Morton called Hicks and informed him that, not only would his performance not air, but that he would contacting the President of Show Business to make sure he never worked in any form of media again. Devastated, Hicks’s will to live spontaneously metamorphed into tumor cells, and he died soon after, having had not only his finest performance, but the finest performance since the invention of Marconi’s Wireless Radio, buried by a conspiracy of media conglomerates threatened and terrified by seven minutes of raw comedy truth.

That’s the myth. After about fifteen years, here’s the actual set:

Um… nice set? I mean… yeah, he stepped on his own words a couple of times… and his timing seemed a little off during the gay kiddie book bit… but hell, the crowd seemed to like it well enough, I guess… but as a “breakthrough set”? It’s not Kinison on the Dangerfield Young Comedians Special, you know what I mean? Frankly, after all this time it’s pretty Goddamned disappointing, like discovering Jesus’s tomb and finding a scroll entitled “The Back From The Dead Scam”.

I was disappointed to have Seven Minutes of Legend turn out to be nothing but a solid set by a competent and experienced comedian, because when I was a young comic, I idolized Bill Hicks. The first time I saw a tape of his Relentless comedy special it was a revelation in timing, mike work and delivery… which pretty much ruined me for a few years. Because if I’m honest, I was nothing but a Bill Hicks knockoff, to the point where the first time I got some press in one of the big Boston newspapers, I was referred to as a “Denis Leary disciple”… which, to those who know comedy, is roughly akin to being called a Jayson Blair worshiper. Let’s just say that if Bill Hicks had never taken a dump, Denis Leary would have died of a bowel prolapse in 1988.

And yet when I saw the article, what pissed me off was that they had equated me with Leary instead of Hicks… completely missing that I had just been called a third-rate knockoff in a major metropolitan newspaper. But what the fuck, I was twenty-six; at the time, I also thought that stand-up comedy was a vital form of underground performance art. It took another few years before I understood that Dean Johnson had (rightly) dissed me, and that stand-up was just an empty hole with no more of a future than, well, major metropolitan newspapers.

But as I got older, my act evolved into my own voice when I realized that the world doesn’t need another Bill Hicks; thanks to Leary, we already have two (POW!).

Let’s face reality: this set became legendary among comics because Hicks died. Period. Hicks himself became a legend not because he was a good comic (which he was), but because he was dead. Which meant that none of us would ever get the chance to work with him… but it also meant that we would never see him have an off night, or a bad set, or fill time with a street joke, or use a stock line to deal with a heckler, the way we mortal comics did. When all you have are records of a guy’s finest performances, it’s easy to idolize him. If you work with him and watch him drunkenly fart into the mike to recover a rough crowd? Not so much.

Hicks was good hero material because he was a decent martyr candidate (Leary was in an episode of The Simpsons this year, while Hicks’s biggest pop-culture splash was probably in an issue of Preacher, which was read by roughly 46,000 people worldwide) and because it’s hard to fuck up when you’re in a box.

Comics like to say that Hicks’s best material came when he knew he had a dying man’s license to say whatever he wanted, which is fine… but if he hadn’t died, who knows what he would have done? Hell, he died right as the 80’s comedy boom imploded, and five or seven years struggling to find a place to work makes people do crazy shit.  Hicks would’ve spent the last decade and a half pretending to like Dana at the Comedy Connection in Providence, RI twice a year, and trust me: that’s only one step up from having to plaster on a smile and ape that you love hanging out by the glory hole and that you’re not really only there because you’re desperate for the sticky five dollar bill that gets tossed over the stall wall.

Hicks always said that he would never sell out and leave the world of stand-up to do a sitcom or anything like that, and I believe that… kinda. Fifteen years is a long time to starve in defense of a principle, and besides: there’s the letter of the law, and then there’s the spirit of the law. It’s Friday morning on the East Coast right now, and the streets of Boston are filled with women in club clothes who started the weekend early, hailing cabs behind one red and inflamed eye, who have learned the difference between the letter and spirit of: “I won’t come in your mouth”.

Bill Hicks changed my life when I was in my twenties. He probably wouldn’t have if I’d been smart enough to realize that, with a working pancreas, he would probably be on Comedy Central right now… on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, bowing with one arm wrapped around Larry The Fucking Cable Guy.

[tags]Bill Hicks, stand-up comedy, David Letterman, Denis Leary, dark humor, satire[/tags]