“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:
Back in the old days, The American Jerk was nothing but a bunch of plain old HTML files. Which was simple in it’s own way, but every update required going into an HTML editor to create the new pages, rebuild the old pages to add new links and maintain the taxonomy, and re-uploading the entire increasingly complex and snarled mess of files up to the server via old-school FTP. To coin a filthy metaphor (old days or no, why change now?), updating it was a lot like trying to bone Andi McDowell in Groundhog Day: every time I had the urge for a new piece it felt like I had to meet, court and lie to her all over again before she’d give up the goods.
