Do you have a secret language?
Do you use lines from comedy routines and movies as shorthand to communicate
with your friends? Did you even know about the ostrich that raised the tiger
cub?
An obvious example of what I
mean is saying, “Honestly, who throws a shoe?” from Austin Powers, The Spy Who
Shagged Me, to refer to someone doing something patently ridiculous. Or
retracting some opinion previously stated as absolute fact by saying. “Oh, then
maybe it’s not green.” a line from This is Spinal Tap.
To this day, whenever anyone I
know goes on holiday or goes anywhere exciting, I have to ask, “How was it
kitten, was it magic?” in reference to Spaced. My brother and me still
communicate, often exclusively, in lines from Wayne’s World. Everything from
expressing surprise at the length, height, or duration of something by going,
“That’s like way bigger than a normal car.” adapted to the particular
circumstances, to communicating the thought that we’re lost with, “I think we
took a wrong turn, ‘cause now we’re outside.”“What a shitty circus.” and “If it’s a severed head, I’m
going to be very upset.” also get quoted in the strangest of situations.
Not so long ago, I re-watched
Wayne’s World with a friend. The next day I was in the supermarket and found
myself accidentally wandering through the feminine hygiene aisle. The first
thought that popped into my head was, “That’s not Wayne’s basement.” giggling
to myself. I do this a lot these days.
I used to go out with one girl
who was always trying to pass off Simpsons quotes as her own. “Yeah but when I
do it it’s cute.” Or ask me if I wanted a drink using the exact same voice as
Janine in Ghostbusters: “Yew want some cawfee?” We even used a line from an
Eddie Izzard routine (“We were so bored.”) when
hitchhiking as a code word through Europe for if we got a bad feeling about someone giving us
a lift (we thankfully didn’t need it).
When I lived with another ex and
her kid, Scrubs was never off of the TV. Some families speak half English, half
Polish or Urdu. We spoke half in English, half in Scrubs quotes. “Help me to
help you, help me to help you, help me to help you, help me to help you.”
The one that I’ve used to myself
all the time in the last few years is, “There you go, there’s your pussy.”It’s a Bill Hicks quote, questioning why
British porn magazines had blue dots covering all the action, but turn on
Channel 4 late at night and the sex was unexpurgated: “It’s a foreign film,
it’s art all of a sudden. Put some subtitles in there. Here’s your pussy, here
you got it. Everyone happy? There you go, it’s art godammit.”
I use it when I’ve been trying
to do something for ages and finally manage it. What scares me is that I might
accidentally blurt it out in unfamiliar company, without context. To be honest,
one of my biggest fears is that I’ll develop dementia and start blurting out
all of the things in my head. You have no idea how much self-editing I have to
perform in an average conversation. My mind is always looking for the perfect
one liner, but most of the things that pop in there aren’t appropriate. There’s
only one or two people to whom I can say what I’m thinking, and only because
their mental Tourette’s is worse than mine.
So there you go, comedy and its
polylingual uses. Future generations will speak in nothing but old comedy. You
know what you want? You want the moon on a stick. You’re just angry at yourself
because you can’t play the guitar properly. I said ‘brick’. Not ‘penis’.
In deference to its subject matter, this started out as a nice little article about Monty Python's Life of Brian, but then it got silly and went off on a tangent.
Best Things Ever
#19 Monty Python’s Life of Brian
Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't NEED to follow ME, You don't NEED to follow
ANYBODY! You've got to think for your selves! You're ALL individuals!
Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!
Brian: You're all different!
Crowd: Yes, we ARE all different!
Man in crowd: I'm not...
I’ve said it before and I’ll say
it again, the true test of great comedy is in its repeat-ability. By that
measure, Monty Python’s Life of Brian is a strong candidate for greatest comedy
film of all time.
There is hardly a line in Life
of Brian that doesn’t bare repeating. While other films, This is Spinal Tap,
Withnail & I, Airplane etc., can
boast of dozens of one liners, most films don’t step beyond the boundaries of
the one liner. As a teenager, I was part of a clique that practically communicated
in comedy one liners from a dozen films and TV series. Yet the strength of
Monty Python was always in their finely crafted sketches and the Life of Brain
script represents the Pythons at the top of their game. Virtually every scene
is comedy gold and each of our clique had two or three sketches memorised that
we would real off for the amusement of each other, like singing karaoke or
bashing out the chords to our favourite songs on the guitar. My specialty was
always, ‘Crucifixion’s a Doddle’. That and, ‘I Want to Have Babies’.
Beyond its repeatability though,
Life of Brian is as good as it is because of its ability to interchange between
ribbing religion and side swipes at the mentality of certain sections of 1970s
Britain. One has only to think of Michael Palin chained to the wall in Pilate’s
prison, shouting ‘nail ‘em up I say’ in reference to crucifixion and see the
obvious parallels, even today, to the sections of the media that still want
hanging brought back in this country, not out of a sense of justice but because
of a thirst, a lust for blood. Or spot the same hypocrisies in the Daily Mail’s
recent headlines about unions campaigning for paedophiles in the 1970s, while at
the same time carrying countless pictures of underage girls in bikinis on their
website. The Daily Mail: For the Self-Hating Paedophile.
Yet Life of Brian as much
ridicules the left of the 20th century. I read somewhere recently that
when those on the left talk, they do so in a circle. The problem is that they
stand in the same direction when they start firing. The schism between the People’s
Front of Judea and the ‘fucking Judean People’s Front’, a hatred way and above
the hatred felt for the Romans, perfectly parodies this situation (cf. The
Spanish Civil War, where the fascists won because the leftist factions were too
busy fighting each other):
Brothers, brothers! We should be
struggling together!
We are! Oh!
We mustn't fight each other! Surely, we
should be united against the common enemy!
The Judean People's Front?!
No, no, the Romans!
Life of Brain found itself in a
lot of trouble for poking fun at religion and is still banned in a number of
countries. Yet if Monty Python makes religion look silly that’s because
religion kind of is silly. There is nothing in Life of Brain that shouldn’t be
obvious to most people, but offense is taken in reminding the faithful that
religion is silly, the elephant in the room to which most religious people don’t
want attention to be drawn. Likely, it has as much to do with the fact that the
one time we do see Jesus, at the beginning of the film, it’s during his Sermon
on the Mount speech, which is one of the many bits of the teachings of Christ that
you’re supposed to put as far from your mind as possible. If Christianity
actually paid attention to the vast majority of the things Christ is purported
to have said then Christianity as a for-profit organisation would be unable to
function. After all, Christianity is a church dedicated to a man who said don’t
go to church. Silly, see.
I’ve heard Anglican clergy that have
expressed a love for Monty Python, even for certain sections of Life of Brian,
but not for the end, because there’s nothing funny about crucifixion, especially
when Christ was crucified. But was he? After all, Acts of the Apostles states
that Christ was nailed to a tree and the Book of Galatians says he was hung and
then thrown into a tree. The image of Christ crucified is a fairly recent
innovation in the history of Christianity. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,
written in the fourteenth century, the pilgrims always refer to Christ as the
man who was nailed to a tree. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that Jesus was tied
to a stake and left in the desert to die (or was it yesterdie? – an old Goon
Show joke, aw thank yew).
In the original texts, the word
translated as crucifix could refer to a number of different punishments meted
out by the Romans. I have heard it said that no one was ever crucified using
the Latin cross, but rather the Tau or T-shaped cross. The Latin cross was
purely ceremonial but impractical compared to the simpler Tau cross, which
required less heavy timber. The Latin Cross was a pagan symbol and hanging a
cross around your neck is therefore no more appropriate than wearing a
pentangle.
There’s also something very
fishy about Christ’s crying out at the point of death. Aside from Matthew, Mark
and John all giving different versions of what Jesus actually shouted (My God,
My God, why hast though forsaken me; Father, I commend myself to your spirit;
and, It is done, respectively), the cause of death in crucifixion is by asphyxiation.
You suffocate to death due to the fact that all the weight of the body is
placed on the chest and lungs. So how could he cry out? Did he fake his death?
Did he not come to Earth as a mortal man and was just taking the piss? Or are
the gospels just fairy stories, expanded and refined over a century of
retelling through the oral tradition, like the tales of Odysseus and the other heroes
of Greek myth?
In one sense, Jesus is just
another Greek hero. The popular image of Jesus in western art bears no relation
to the historical man, if indeed he existed at all. The man we see is in
actuality Apollo, the Greek and Roman God of the Sun, reflected by the disc of
gold seen behind his head. The Greeks portrayed their gods as having long hair
in order to show them as wealthy, in opposition to the shaved heads worn by
slaves. Jesus would probably have worn prayer curls at the temples (as demanded
by Leviticus, something the Religious Right don’t seem as keen on enforcing as
bans on homosexuality). However, the rest of the hair on the head would have
been short or shaved.
The Jesus story, including his parents
fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod, is very much a retelling of the story of the
birth of Apollo and his sister, Artemis, whose mother, Leda, was raped by Zeus
and then had to flee the jealous rage of his sister-wife, Hera (as with much of
the Bible, the Jesus story is a Greek myth with all of the women excised). And even
the name Jesus is a Latinisation of a Greek name Iesous. But ‘Jesus’ was Jewish,
so his name would have been Joshua. Ergo, the Jesus so revered in western
tradition is really the pagan Sun God, Apollo.
James George Frazer in The
Golden Bough notes that in The Gospel According to Luke the soldiers who beat
Jesus and place the crown of thorns on his head are described as being Herod’s
men. They therefore would all have been Jewish, putting a whole new spin on
their mocking of Jesus as The King of the Jews. Frazer believed that rather
than being commensurate to the Jewish Passover, the crucifixion took place
during the Jewish festival of Haman, a Babylonian ritual or passion play brought
back from their time as slaves in Babylonia.
Frazer identified in the
crucifixion elements of a Mock King ritual, where one man would be sacrificed
to the corn gods, whilst another, the Barabbas (a ceremonial title), would be
set free to be executed the following year. Frazer thought that rather than Jesus
being special, the ritual was carried out every year during the festival of
Haman and Jesus, a troublesome Rabbi who wished to reform Judaism, was brought
up on trumped up charges and ritually executed. His theories have a certain
ring of truth about them, but who knows how close he came.
The irony here is that Frazer
also notes that the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis was never meant to be
taken as a literal event that actually happened, but rather an allegory designed
to stop child sacrifice amongst the Israelites, a practice which was common in
the Middle East and elsewhere at that time. If Frazer’s theories have any truth
to them, then it seems Judaism returned to this common practice later on.
(James Joyce puns on Frazer’s
Abraham/Isaac theory in the opening page of Finnegans Wake: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad
buttended a bland old isaac – in other words, before animal sacrifice had
replaced the bland/commonplace practice of kings sacrificing their own
children.)
All in all then, given the lack
of a clear method of execution mentioned in the Bible, the Latin cross not used
as a method of execution, the parallels to Greek mythology, the doubtfulness of
the descriptions found in the Gospels, as well as James George Frazer’s
speculations on the Gospel accounts, I think we’re on pretty safe ground to
sing, ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ from atop a couple of dozen
crucifixes. As with most cries of ‘blasphemy’, what those shouting really want
is for no one to think for themselves and have the bleeding obvious pointed out
to them. Without frequent recourse to the Church’s various inquisitions,
Chrstianity (as I prefer to call it) wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.
Life of Brian is also a meta
film, a film poking fun at other films about religion and the time of the
Romans. ‘I’m Brian and so’s my wife’ is a brilliant parody of ‘I’m Spartacus’. Or
the quintessentially British notion of a petty argument about noses going on in
the background of one of the most important events in religious scripture (The
Sermon on the Mount). If Tom Stoppard had written Life of Brian it would be considered
art rather than comedy. Indeed, there is more than a little of Becket and Brecht
in Life of Brian. Despite employing an alien space battle as a deus ex machina
at one point, which I’ve always suspected was shoehorned in to give Terry
Gilliam something to play with, Life of Brian is in many ways the Python’s most
serious film as well as their funniest.
Life of Brain is a great film
and a great British film exactly because it is so iconoclastic. British comedy,
British life in general, has always been about poking fun at authority figures.
In the same way that Londoners stood on the banks of the Thames in 1834 to
watch and cheer as the Houses of Parliament burned down, so Monty Python gleefully
send up religion and politics and British life.
Left to the film industry, Life
of Brian would never have been made. It was considered too controversial.
Thankfully, George Harrison financed the film and gave birth to Handmade Films
in the process, which also came to make Withnail & I, one of the few films
that gets anywhere near Life of Brain in terms of quote-ability (I’ll come back
to Withnail & I in a later article). The Beatles were falling apart just as
the Pythons were coming together. It’s satisfying that it was a Beatle that
helped the Pythons stay together just a little longer (although they’d
essentially gone their separate ways by this point). The Pythons occupy the
same place in the annals of comedy that the Beatles occupy in music.
I rewatched Life of Brian before
writing this piece and despite knowing just about every word from start to
finish, I was still giggling to myself even as I repeated the lines like
repeating the catechism at church. A love of comedy is quite like a fervour for
religion. The only difference between religion and comedy is that comedy doesn’t
mind admitting that it’s silly.
Scene 18 Int. A stone corridor leading to an iron door.
Two henchmen stand before the door,
dressed all in black and armed with sten guns. Why?Boy comes around the corner
and stands before them.
Henchman1:
Don’t come any closer Why?Boy.
Why?Boy:
Why?
Henchman1:
‘Cause we got orders to keep you out.
Why?Boy:
Why?
Henchman1:
‘Cause our boss don’t want you in here.
Why?Boy:
Why?
Henchman1 (starting to sweat):
‘Cause you might stop him taking over
the world.
Why?Boy:
Why?
Henchman1:
Ah! I can’t takes much more.
Henchman2:
What you waiting for? Shoot him Reg.
Henchman1:
I can’t Larry. It’s his incessant
question what’s making me lose me mind.
Henchman2:
Stay back now ya hear Why?Boy? Stay
back or I’ll shoot.
Why?Boy:
Why?
Henchman2:
To stop you getting in here.
Why?Boy:
Why?
Henchman2:
‘Cause that’s what I’m paid to do.
Why?Boy:
Why?
Henchman1
See what I mean, Larry? It’s incessant.
Henchman2:
Now look, I was in jail see for
robbery. Henchman is the only job I could gets.
Why?Boy:
Why?
Henchman2 (eyes starting to bulge):
It’s the heartless system, see. An old
lag like me don’t stand a chance against the, the, the system.
Henchman2 screams and blow his brains
out. Henchman1 quickly follows. Why?Boy steps over the bodies and advances
through the door.
End Scene.
Scene 19 Int. Study beyond the iron door, wall to wall books and a desk
and an assortment of chemistry equipment in one corner. The rooms comes to a
point with two window either side.
Fools Top is making the final
adjustments to the rocket he will fire into the reservoir to pollute London’s
water supply. He doesn’t look up as Why?Boy approaches.
Fools Top:
Somehow I didn’t think it would take
you long to get past the guards Why?Boy. I suppose you think you going to stop
me.
Why?Boy:
Why?
Fools Top:
Why indeed.
Why?Boy:
Why?
Fools Top(looks up):
You’re not so tough, Why?Boy. The
rights answers to your questions are enough to render you powerless. (Why?Boy
makes to speak) Why?
Why?Boy:
Why?
Fools Top:
Why?
Why?Boy:
Why?
Fools Top:
Why?
Why?Boy:
Why?
Why?
Why?
Fools Top:
I think he’s caught in a loop.
Fools Top laughs manically as Why?Boy
sags and looks crestfallen. Fools Top reaches into a drawer in his desk and
takes out a Luger. He aims it at Why?Boy. He makes to pull the trigger, then
stops and circles the gun illustratively in the air as he speaks.
Fools Top:
I want you to know that I’m not an evil
man, Why?Boy. Usually I wouldn’t kill anyone so young as you, but you’ve
delayed my plans too many times and I can’t have you stopping me now. Not when
I am so close.
Why?Boy:
Why?
Fools Top:
Nice try Why?Boy. But allow me to
answer a question with a question: Why not?
Fools Top levels the gun at Why?Boy
just as two more children, a girl and a boy, enter through the door and stand
side by side with Why?Boy.
Fools Top:
What’s this? How Do Lad and Whatev's
Girl. But I saw you die.
How Do Lad (nods):
How Do Lad.
Whatev’s Girl(shrugs):
Whatev’s.
Fools Top staggers backwards at these
words, hands to his temples, gun still in his hand. The three caped crusaders
step forward as one.
How Do Lad (nods):
How Do Lad.
Why?Boy:
Why?
Whatev’s Girl(shrugs):
Whatev’s.
How Do Lad (nods):
How Do Lad.
Why?Boy:
Why?
Whatev’s Girl(shrugs):
Whatev’s.
How Do Lad (nods):
How Do Lad.
Why?Boy:
Why?
Whatev’s Girl(shrugs):
Whatev’s.
Fools Top:
Argh! No, stop you fools, stop.
How Do Lad (nods):
How Do Lad.
Why?Boy:
Why?
Whatev’s Girl(shrugs):
Whatev’s.
Fools Top staggers towards a window,
topples out and falls to his death.
How Do Lad (nods):
How Do Lad.
Why?Boy:
Why?
Whatev’s Girl(shrugs):
Whatev’s.
The three break into a musical routine
to the tune of Morecambe and Wise’s Boom, Oo, Yatta-ta-ta (Whatev’s, Why,
How-Do-Lad). Why Mother Why? (Cilla Black) released from the dungeon by
Whatev’s Girl and How Do Lad appears to sings the main tune.
Today we mark the 20th anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks. Best Things Ever #18
Bill Hicks: Rant in
E-Minor
“Bill Hicks,
blowtorch, excavator, truthsayer and brain specialist, like a reverend waving a
gun around. Pay attention to Rant in E Minor, it is a major work, as important
as Lenny Bruce's. He will correct your vision. His life was cut short by
cancer, though he did leave his tools here. Others will drive on the road he
built. Long may his records rant even though he can't.”
Tom Waits
Twenty years ago this month, the comedian Bill Hicks died of
pancreatic cancer at the tragically young age of 32. Three years later in 1997,
two posthumous album were released by Rykodisc: Arizona Bay and Rant in
E-Minor. In this article I am going to concentrate on Rant in E Minor, which I
consider to be both the greatest comedy album and the greatest spoken word
album of all time.
The material for Rant in E Minor was recorded at the Laff
Stop Comedy Club in Austin, Texas in March and October 1993 and at Coobs, San
Francisco in July of the same year. Unlike the albums Dangerous and Relentless
that were released during Bill’s lifetime, Rant in E Minor, as well as Arizona
Bay, presents the material in the form of chapter points rather than as a
traditional live comedy album. It’s more like a concept album, the live
material interspersed with musical interludes performed by Bill and his
producer and childhood friend, Kevin Booth.
I’ve always found the music on Arizona Bay to be somewhat
intrusive, though it’s still a good album (it’s a Bill Hicks album). With Rant
in E Minor though, the music is pitched perfectly and serves to divide the
seventy five minute album into a series of movements or acts.
The other thing to say about Rant in E Minor is that most of
the material included is unique to this one album. There have been a number of
subsequent albums released, as well as countless bootlegs of other Bill Hicks’s
gigs, which all have significant overlap between them. Yet aside from the
bootleg of his final gig at Igby’s, which does include some of the material
featured on Rant in E Minor, it’s a pretty unique set list. Even the Igby’s set
contains many well-worn routines that you won’t find on Rant in E Minor.
Rant in E Minor is Bill Hicks at his bravest, his angriest,
his most free and his most engaging. The material from the later recordings at
the Laff Stop was recorded when he knew he was ill and any pretence that Bill
was holding back at all is gone. To hear him screaming at his audience, “You
fucking morons, you fucking morons.” is cathartic. As Hicks himself says:
“That’s what this is all about, man. It’s supposed to be a
fucking catharsis, man, you know. It’s supposed to be a release from the
fucking daily grind.”
In that catharsis, Hicks takes aim at the anti-abortion
lobby, Christianity, Billy Ray Cyrus, the perpetrators of the raid on the Waco
complex, including Bill Clinton and Janet Reno, homophobia in the military,
women who defend abusive partners and Rush Limbaugh. One of the reasons that
the comedy of Bill Hicks stands the test the time is both because of the
universality of it content matter, but also, depressingly, because of how
little seems to have changed and how much has come full circle in twenty years.
If Bill was alive today, instead of riffing about hosting a TV show called,
‘Let’s Hunt and Kill Bill Ray Cyrus’ it would be have to be called, ‘Let’s Hunt
and Kill Miley Cyrus (with special guest, Robin Thicke)’. Rush Limbaugh is
still allowed a platform from which to spout his moronic opinions. The show
Cops has been replaced by a thousand and one equally fascistic “reality TV”
programs and rather than senselessly slaughtering women and children in Waco,
Texas, it is instead in Pakistan and the Yemen that women and children are
gunned down with drones by executioners who never leave the comfort of their
armchair in some military base in the desert wilds of the United States, or
have the decency to look their victims once in the eye.
I think Bill Hicks would be appalled at the level to which
soldiers have been elevated to the level of heroes, protectors of freedom, even
as they are used as instruments of brute terror and blunt force to destroy
freedom in favour of corporate profit. He was never one to shy away from
criticism of the military, questioning why a suicide bomber was a coward but
firing Cruise missiles from a ship hundreds of miles away in the Gulf was a heroic
act. In dealing with the issue of gay people serving in the armed forces, Hicks
says:
“Anyone dumb enough to want to be in the military should be
allowed in... I don’t care how many sit ups you can do, put on a helmet, go
wait in that fox-hole, we’ll tell you when we need you to kill somebody.”
Now, I’m sure that Bill didn’t really mean a lot of the
things he said but, like Jonathan Swift, used extreme views to present certain
arguments as reducio ad absurdium, as
well as a way to get laughs. My parents met in the Royal Navy and I exist
because of the armed forces, so I tend to give serving personal the benefit of
the doubt that they are merely following orders and they simply trust that
those orders are given in good faith. Yet I don’t think there is anything particularly
heroic about following orders, especially when the Nuremberg Trials established
that “I was only following orders” is not a valid defence (although Nuremberg
also established the invasion of another sovereign state to be the supreme international crime under
law, but that doesn’t seem to stop us).
For all the supposed threat from Al Qaida in the last decade
or so, the simple fact of the matter is that the most successful terrorist
organisation in the last hundred years is the CIA. More coups against
democratic regimes and more loss of innocent life than Al Qaida could ever even
dream of taking. They kill thousands, we kill hundreds of thousands in
retaliation. In America the repeated mantra is, “Support the troops, they
protect your freedom. “ If you need protecting, you are not free. And all that
all this killing really achieves is to intensify the level of retaliation that
will be visited upon your children after the empire falls. You would think that
the richest country in the world would have at least grasped the basic fact that
all debts get called in eventually. That’s karma, man. It’s also the Second Law
of Thermodynamics.
Bill’s routine on gays in the military manages to correct
one of the niggles I have with his early routines, especially on Dangerous and
Sane Man, where his material is somewhat homophobic (although he did out George
Michael several years before George’s own actions did it for him). Again, this
could simply be a matter of taking things to extremes for deliberate comic
effect. I like when graphic images of gay sex are used as a weapon against
homophobes and other fatheads, so Hicks’s observation that Rush Limbaugh
reminds him of “one of those gay guys who likes to lay in a tub while other men
pee on him.” is especially brilliant. Although it gets too graphic for me when
he comes to the part about Barbara Bush unrolling her flaccid labia, then shitting in
Limbaugh’s mouth. Then I have to skip forward.
I’ve described Rant in E Minor as my favourite spoken word
album, as well as my favourite comedy album, because as funny as Rant in E Minor
is, it also represents Bill Hicks at his most philosophical. The power of
comedy is in its repeatability and yet with Rant in E Minor there are so many
lines that are as much like stanzas from Dylan’s It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only
Bleeding) as anything else and worth listening to whenever you are feeling down
or need a call to action. As well as his comments on catharsis, one further example
will suffice here:
“The argument doesn’t work with me Flapjack. Go back to your
fucking crackerjack lifestyle and I’ll meet you at the evolution bell curve.
I’ll be sitting there awhile, it’s kind of a tortoise and the hare story.”
Many comedians and sitcoms can make me laugh till I cry,
even after I know every word, but there is only Rant in E Minor that can make
me actually cry. To hear Bill talk about thinking about taking his own life,
but not having the balls to do it, and to realise that in that instant he is
facing up to his mortality and the fact that he is going to die is heart breaking
to hear. He’d struggled to build an audience in his home country, but was a
star across the Atlantic. He was about to have his own TV show for real in
Britain and died right on the cusp of major success. On that day, the world
lost a true comedy genius.
In many ways, Bill Hick was a visionary and a man ahead of
his time. Some of his material, like his alter-ego, Pan the Randy Goat-Boy, was
considered extreme at the time. His honest discussions of his use of
pornography were not applauded by all and yet to listen to many comedians these
days, his comedy seems somewhat mild by comparison. The ubiquity of the
internet, it seems, has made us more voyeuristic and more cruel.
If you read Agent of Evolution, the Bill Hicks biography
consisting of interviews with the people who knew him, you see that there were
elements of his life about which he didn’t talk openly (like visiting brothels
and experimenting with just about every drug yet invented, not just the
fashionable ones). He could go too far sometimes, but there was also as much
that he held back. Compare that with, say, the average Doug Stanhope routine,
where very little is censored or held back. I love Doug Stanhope, by the way.
There has been a lot written about Hicks in the media in
this twentieth anniversary week, especially by other comedians. He has been
lauded as a fine comedian, but some question his elevation to the level of
Messiah. I don’t think Hicks was the Messiah, but I do think that some art and
artists transcend the medium in which they exist. Was Shakespeare just another
playwright? Is the Mona Lisa just another portrait? When Billie Holiday sang
Strange Fruit to hushed audiences, was that just another artist singing another
jazz standard?
There’s nothing wrong with being a comedian, making people
laugh is a fine way to make a living, but it doesn’t mean that some comedians
can’t transcend comedy. Bill Hicks wasn’t/isn’t the Messiah but with the
greatest respect to many other comedians that I listen to and love, neither was
Bill Hicks just another comedian. He was somewhere halfway between comedian and
Messiah and his genius in no way devalues the comedy of others, only drags it
up by its bootstraps. If you want to realise the potential of stand-up comedy,
listen to Rant in E Minor.
It’s hard to say what Bill Hicks would be doing if he were
alive today, 52 and grumpier than ever, but I like to imagine him having his
own weekly podcast. Anyone who listens to Greg Proops’s podcast, The Smartest
Man in the World, can get a sense of what that might have sounded like. Proops
has his own style, his own rhythms and way of doing things, but he also
channels the spirit of Bill Hicks, frequently citing Hicks as the bravest
comedian he ever saw. The Smartest Man in the World is one of the highlights of
my week and I can highly recommend it.
It’s useless to dwell on what might have been, only what is.
Bill Hicks died too young, but his comedy lives on through his recorded
material. Rant in E Minor is his crowning achievement and remains a call to
action against hopelessness. If he could be this funny and thought provoking as
he was dying, imagine what we can achieve even as we live.
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