He was the Kurt Cobain of comedy, railing against advertising, politicians, the war on drugs, even waffle waitresses. What do the new generation make of the chain-smoking motormouth?
Comedy Central, Channel 4, Rolling Stone: whenever there’s a poll of the greatest comedians of all time, you’ll find Bill Hicks haunting the top 10. The stature of the Texan, who died of pancreatic cancer in 1994, has grown and grown, with each posthumous DVD release or docu-hagiography stoking the legend of the fearless prophet-comic bellowing truth to power. This, we were told, was standup as it should be: revolutionary in intent, rock’n’roll in spirit – and not for the faint-hearted.
It helped with the too-hot-to-handle mythology that Hicks was a prophet without honour in the US, where audiences stayed away and his final guest-slot on Late Night with David Letterman was cut. And it helped – morbidly enough – that he died at just 32. All those routines deploring sell-outs and squalid compromises retained their power because this Kurt Cobain of standup never had the chance to betray his lofty principles in middle age.
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