American: The Bill Hicks Story

Everyone comfy? Get comfy!

Get comfy! Cos the show's about to start!

This programme contains very strong language and adult humour.

Who do you ever pay to talk?

Maybe a preacher, maybe a lecturer, possibly a politician.

Even those, rarely.

Comedians are the only ones that you pay to hear them talk.

Talk to me, make me listen.

News is supposed to be objective. Isn't it supposed to be? THE news!

But every drug story is negative.

Well, hold it!

I've had some killer fucking times on drugs.

Let's hear the whole story.

What Bill said will never change,

because it is the basic truths, and they are never wrong.

Plenty of people say he is the best American comedian the country has ever produced

and he was only 32 when he died. His influence lives on.

Bill Hicks!

Get out. You're everything that America should be flushed down the toilet. You turd. Get out!

"Hey, buddy, we're Christians. We don't like what you said."

I said, "Then forgive me."

# The sergeant sent me and my men on a search

# He wanted us to go out and get the lay of the land

# We were to find any people who might be

# The enemies of man. #

Free yourself, folks. YOU'RE right. YOU'RE right.

Not those fuckers who want to tell you how to think. You're fucking right!

Sorry, wrong meeting. Again.

I keep getting my days mixed up.

From the moment I met Bill, throughout our life,

it was about laughs.

I think our parents were just happy being comfortable.

"Can we just be quiet? And can we just go to church

"and be distracted by our religion? It's orderly here."

Growing up in that environment, you start to get a little antsy,

because clearly there has to be something more.

Lyndon Johnson talked about the 'Great Society' back in the '60s

and I think he was keying into something and that was

that America's so wealthy and powerful that we have to do something responsible with it.

We're going to defeat poverty, we're going to do the Peace Corps,

we're going to make the world a better place. And then I think that Vietnam stalled that.

So the generation that Bill and I came out of was,

we were looking around going, "Well, there's got to be something else we can do with all this.

Bill was, uh... I don't know, I just...

He was interesting.

All of my children were special.

I had a girl. I had only a girl.

Then I had a boy. And then I had a baby.

There was definitely something there

that was different from Steve and Lynn growing up.

But Bill... You should have known him, is all I can say.

You know, they were so much older. Five and seven years' difference

is a lot of difference.

You couldn't do anything with him. He was too little at that point.

Bill was seven when we got to Houston.

Then we stayed there 12, 13 years.

Yeah.

He was just another kid playing sports, you know.

It wasn't evident yet where his life was going to go.

And, of course, by then he had met Dwight.

What I noticed about him is he was fast.

He had a real strong constitution.

He could do things better and longer than everyone else.

An unbelievable scrambler.

I was fast, but I wasn't a very good scrambler

but I watched him and just picked apart what he was doing,

then I was scrambling. All the way to the end zone, no-one would touch me.

After we'd played a few times, I just remember everyone leaving

and us being alone and me thinking to myself,

"I think this is going to be a friend of mine.

The first time I ever met his parents, Bill did not want to introduce me.

He just wanted me to go straight up the stairs.

When you'd go over there, he would look at me and just go,

"Look, don't talk to them. Just follow me upstairs." But of course,

an adult says, "Hello there! Who are you?"

You stop and you say, "I'm Dwight." Bill's like, "Come on!"

You're stuck on the landing with Bill at the top of the stairs and you're at the bottom.

And, "Well, just hold on. Where are you from?"

I go, "I live in Nottingham Forest." "What does your father do?"

"Works for Shell Oil." "Uh-huh." "Just leave him alone!"

Bill's screaming at you to come upstairs. "Come on!"

"Bill, would you just hold on? I like to know who your friends are.

"Aaagh! What does it matter? What does it matter?"

"Well, we're just curious. Is there a problem with being curious?"

When you reached his room, the door would be closed and locked and you were...safe.

I had told him that I wanted to be an actor and he goes,

"I'll show you these jokes that I wrote."

Because we were joking around so much,

he started saying we should be a comedy team.

It was completely alien to me. I had no idea what a comic really was.

He told me that he'd seen Woody Allen on Casino Royale.

This guy made his living being a comic, and it really fired him up,

the importance of stand-up, that society cherished its funny people.

And for Bill, he knew it.

He knew that he was going to be the comic that shook people up.

His mom figured out how to pick the lock.

The door would open and she'd be standing there with a butter knife.

"What are you doing?!" "I know you don't like me coming in,

"but I am leaving and you have not responded to me."

"Well, don't ever unlock my door again!"

I never met anyone who talked to his parents like that.

The Hicks family is a very smart, intellectual family

yet there was this suspension of reason on certain issues.

We were raised Southern Baptist and had to go to church

every single Sunday. It was just a strict household.

"You do this. You do that."

The one thing I wanted to get straight, often, over the years,

"Oh, the Hickses were raised fundamentalist Christian."

No, we were raised Southern Baptist and that's worse.

And he's right, really. That's just the way we lived then.

But hopefully what you're taught there teaches you the spiritual,

and I don't mean religion. I mean the basics of how to live a life.

So when I was 17, he was ten.

I was like, "Get me out of this house.

I want out." And off I went to college. I rebelled.

Steve, in his fashion, rebelled. And Bill rebelled too.

stand-up comedy was not on the map in the '70s

for kids to want to be.

But we were determined and so we started to do this very much

guerrilla theatre type of comedy amongst our friends.

This group of people's just standing around, and you appear,

and you do an outrageous sketch and then you disappear.

"What the hell was that?"

And, of course, once they got wind of it, they wouldn't let us alone.

"Are you going to do your thing? Do it!"

After school we would go over to his house

and we would plan them and write them and they were like gigs to us.

And it wasn't lost upon us, the fact that we already knew

what we wanted in life. This was what we were going to do.

You had to sacrifice your family, your relationship with girls, your popularity at school.

We were sacrificing everything for this.

And there was nowhere to do our craft. There was no open mics.

There was nothing in 1970s Houston, Texas.

As a backdrop to all this is how we met Kevin Booth.

Bill and I just thought that Kevin was hilarious, cos he was this technical genius

who could build things and blow things up.

I was known as the instigator and a facilitator.

You know, if you had an idea for something,

I would go out and figure out how to build it.

You know, the fact that he was able to get his parents' RV

and hook up a generator and then set up speakers

and play rock'n'roll to the Spartanaires

as they were practising their routines. That was classic Kevin.

Because of this ranch, I was able to get what's called a hardship driver's licence

when I was 14, without even, like, taking any lessons.

I just thought the two of them were hilarious.

It was like a new breed of person. They did all this weird stuff,

and I guess we just started talking about music all the time.

We wanted to be rock stars,

thinking like this was going to be our way to break out of suburbia.

Bill was like, "Let's go look at these guitars downtown."

I'd never driven downtown before. I was like, "I guess I'm game for this,

"if you guys are going to navigate the way."

He goes, "Did you see the paper today?

"A comedy workshop has opened up and they have open mic."

"Open mic stand-up?" "Yes." "Oh, my God. Finally."

So we drove to downtown. On our way back, we passed this place

called the Comedy Workshop in Montrose.

Bill and Dwight said, "That's the place we've been reading about." We couldn't believe it,

that something like this had happened in our own backyard.

And we realised that now we had a real chance.

We could actually be comics.

Most entertainers have to deal with getting to LA or Hollywood,

taking acting lessons, getting head shots.

What's our problem? We can't go out on school nights.

I remember my father sitting me down and going,

"Look, you're not going down to a nightclub in Houston, Texas."

Oh, man...

We WERE strict. We wanted to know where they were.

We wanted to know when they were going to get home.

And if they didn't give us the answer we wanted,

we told them what we wanted.

Bill and I talked about it and he said, "We have to do it", and I was like, "Absolutely.

The question was, how to get down there on a school night?

When you're in Bill's bedroom looking out, if you hop that fence,

you're in the Catholic church's parking lot.

You could open the window, but there also was a storm window.

He became very efficient at getting that open and getting out the window.

You had to be quiet cos the roof was right above their kitchen.

The evil Catholic boy with his 14-year-old driver's licence

was sitting there in the Catholic getaway wagon

ready to take the Baptist boy down to the Comedy Store.

We'd never been in a nightclub, but when we walked in it was like,

"Whoa!" The whole thing is set up for comedy.

And there was chairs and they were all pointed at the stage.

This was what it was all about.

We did the first few jokes and it started working.

I think everybody was very receptive to them

because they were like these little kids trying to be a part of this adult world.

When Bill first started, you could see Woody Allen.

He had the Woody Allen mannerisms a bit. But that's not a bad thing.

If you keep doing it and you don't grow out of it, that's a bad thing.

When a comic first starts, you can tell his influences.

Bill and I got off stage and we were flying. We had done well.

It was beyond, you know, the exhilaration was just...

It was just, here we go, we're real comics.

And then the shit hit the fan. Mrs Hicks calls Scott's mom,

says, "Is Bill over there?" "No, they went down to the Comedy Workshop."

"Oh." So when Bill gets home, he gets nailed. Mrs Hicks calls my parents, and I get nailed.

It went from being thrilled with the fact that,

"Hey, we're doing this" to, "Now what do we do?

We're comics, we have to work on this career. We can do it."

And just as I thought that, my father came home and said,

"I've bought a business in Klamath Falls, Oregon. We're moving in July."

I was devastated, and I go, "I've got to tell you something.

"In July I'm going to be moving to Klamath Falls, Oregon."

There was just silence. Bill didn't exhibit any emotion about it.

It was just one more fucking thing we were going to have to deal with

and in typical fashion, we just began joking about it.

"When you get up to Calamity Falls..." "It's Klamath Falls."

"Whatever. You're going to meet a girlfriend, you're going to be happy."

"Yeah, but I'm missing my friend." "Oh, you'll make new friends."

So we joked about it, but there was this idea that it was all over.

What were we going to do? What could we possibly do?

He'd never focused on doing solo stand-up.

Our stuff was about characters, about creating worlds.

I think when I left, he just threw himself into music and the band.

I couldn't imagine Bill performing without Dwight or Dwight performing without Bill.

I thought the three of us would be doing music forever.

Dwight took off. And poof, he was gone.

And at the time, too, I had actually seen Dwight perform comedy

without Bill but I hadn't seen Bill perform comedy without Dwight.

And so I wasn't sure how it was going to go.

A big hand for the very funny Mr Bill Hicks.

APPLAUSE Yeah! Whoa!

Thank you. This is weird, I've got to see if this is universal or not.

-Remember this thing called flinching?

-Yeah.

You know what this is, you guys? Some guy would come up to you

and they'd go, "Hey." You'd go, "God! Watch out, man!"

And he'd go, "Ah, flinched! I owe you a poke."

The guy would go, "Oh, shit, I flinched. Here, poke me."

You remember that? First time it happened to me,

this guy comes up, "Hey, Hicks!" I went, "God! Get away from me."

And he goes, "Ah, flinched! I owe you a poke."

I said, "Get away from me, you jerk."

Principal's walking by. He goes, "What's going on here?"

That guy goes, "He flinched and won't let me poke him!"

I said, "He's trying to hit me." The principal went,

"DID you flinch, Bill?"

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

I remember Kevin telling me early on that he's going to be a comedian

and he writes comedy, and I thought that was really strange,

because we were only 16 years old or something

and finally I just said, "Kevin, I want to go over and meet this guy."

Bill and I had the same sense of humour from the very beginning

and we just got each other instantly.

It was, "Oh, really, you got a camera? Oh, these pictures are good."

"Well, yeah, you're my photographer. Come on, take some pictures of me. I need pictures for a newspaper."

Immediately, no question, I'm the photographer, he put complete faith in me.

I just saw it as that I found a kindred spirit.

He was the guy that was out in front, breaking barriers.

Cos it was a very adult world and he was like the high schooler

that was telling them what fools they were for drinking and smoking

and giving them this clear mirror.

You could tell they all really respected him.

The good sign for a comic is not just when audiences come in

and ask for you, it's when other comics stop what they're doing and come in the room and watch you.

There has never been anybody funnier at his age as a stand-up.

Maybe the only other guy that touched him was Buster Keaton.

The stuff about his family and his parents and growing up

was entertaining to anybody. Bill should have been famous right away.

Open house night, your parents go up, talk to your teachers,

find out you've been lying through your teeth. "His name is Bill?

LAUGHTER

"I thought it was Moltvic."

Come home the next night, my father's sitting there and he goes,

"Hold it, Moltvic."

LAUGHTER

"Went up to the school last night and I talked to your teachers.

"I talked to Miss Jones and she said you called her a frothing slut.

"What is that all about?"

"Well, Dad, she's a loser."

"Everyone's a loser, everyone's a jerk?

"Tell me, Mr Blister, who's the real loser?"

"Promise you won't get mad, Dad?"

Where it really hit me was one weekend,

I was home from college and he said, "Come down to this comedy club"

and here was Bill performing and the place was sold out,

and I remember going and telling all my friends, "Man, you got to come,

"this is unreal." And it hit me pretty powerfully, it really did.

What Bill's comedy was, was his view of our life.

He had been able to turn that into this thing that could entertain strangers.

"Oh, that's what you've been doing the last few years.

Both of my parents are college graduates.

My sister and I are graduates. Here came Bill and he said,

"I'm going to LA to be a comedian." What does that mean? We had no idea.

Bill basically said, "I'm moving to LA. I won't play music any more".

I was really taken aback, it was definitely depressing.

LA was something that had to be done. It was the next step. You had to go.

I cried, of course, and I said, "Bill...

"nobody will say a thing if you don't go.

And he said, "Mom, this is hard for me so I'm going,

"so please stop crying. If I don't make it, I'll come back.

"But I've got to try."

And that's how he lived the rest of his life.

I mean, he had girlfriends and relationships.

But certainly, life on the road as a comedian,

there's a lot of time by yourself.

I was working at the Comedy Store. Bill came up one afternoon.

Pale, bad haircut, had a suitcase with him.

He said, "I'm here to be a comic". I explained amateur night to him.

I got lucky, and was passed on my first audition. Bill did too.

The difficult part was stage time once you became a regular.

Bill was in a hurry too. He had an impatience about him.

But you went there to be on stage, to hone your performing abilities,

and, you know, to showcase for producers.

I remember we went out to visit him.

Being on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles at the world famous

Comedy Store where people like Robin Williams and Richard Pryor

and Billy Crystal also performed and then Bill Hicks.

That was the Mecca for comedy and Bill got his name up there.

OK, there's one for the books right there, you know.

He was where he wanted to be, and that was pretty clear.

You know, he would call me up in these fits of inspiration

and go, "You HAVE to get down here, we've GOT to do this script.

"It's our key out of this." I'd already decided that's what I was going to do,

so I left the University of Oregon and drove south to Los Angeles.

I remember knocking at the door and it was an intense moment.

I had the map out and I was going, "Donde esta Le Keystone?"

And, "Sir, you can't come in here."

"Where... donde esta Les Tropic de Olives?"

"Sir, you can't. Please."

And he goes, "Come on in", and of course it was just tiny,

and we would wind up living there for two years.

He goes "Do you want to go down to the Comedy Store?" I said, "Sure."

We got in his car, and drove down to Hollywood and I walk into the Comedy Store.

This is it, you know, the Ground Zero of stand up comedy.

He always went up really early in the show, like second or third.

He never swore. He was the clean-cut comic.

It was a nice way to restart a new chapter of our friendship.

I think we both knew we weren't going to be working together as stand-ups

cos he'd already gone on to be successful.

The whole focus of all this was leading to a script.

If we could sell a script, THAT'S when you get can excited.

We started to come up with an idea of,

how do we evolve these characters?

The father character and the mother character.

It would make a good movie.

We were writing constantly, pages and pages of scenes

and we knew these characters, the voices were in our head.

He flew back from LA to be the best man at my wedding.

He was always going to be my best man and we were going to be there

for each other whenever those times were.

But he had to perform that night, and so after the wedding

a bunch of people went down there "Yeah, let's go see him.

"What the hell! Let's go down there, you know?"

I didn't know I had a funny brother.

That was the first I was aware that that was

what he wanted to do as a serious profession.

He was hilarious.

The good news was the guy at William Morris said,

"I want to meet with you."

He was a big frickin' agent in Hollywood.

He looked at us and he goes, "You guys are 19?"

And we go, "Yeah." He goes, "How did you get in my office?"

So we kind of told him the story of being stand-ups

and that we're just out of high school and we're writing

a script about being from high school and that really intrigued him.

"I want you to rewrite it. It doesn't have much of an ending.

"I really want to see another script from you guys.

"After that, I want to talk about representing you.

"You guys are going to be good screenwriters."

And I was very excited too. This was my first break.

Bill was just disappointed because we'd put so much into that script, obviously,

and he would have liked to hear that it got bought.

And in the months that followed that,

he just lost interest in writing, and I could not fire him up about,

"We have a ton of ideas about scripts.

"Let's just write another one. Let's get him what he wants and see if we can do this."

He just wasn't into it. He didn't want to.

He was through being a screenwriter. He wanted to move on to being a comic.

Hello, this is Bill.

I just needed to talk with somebody and this tape recorder is all I've got right now.

I haven't been funny in a long time.

I haven't come up with new material in a long time,

and, I tell you what, there's nothing scarier,

especially for me out here, forsaking college and an easy life,

coming out here. What happens if I'm just not funny?

I have nothing. I am a bum.

I could be five years in the Store, no-one gives a shit there.

Fuck doing this stuff.

LA wanted six minutes of clean to do on the Tonight Show,

and that wasn't enough for Bill, Bill wasn't growing enough.

The only way you could grow was to get more stage time.

Bill, you know, was a veteran.

For Christ's sake, he was 21 years old in 1982.

And he had been a comic for seven years.

Coming to LA was such a romantic and meaningful and emotional experience

and then leaving like a thief in the night with every possession he has

streaming out of the back of his car,

Bill and his leather jacket and his guitar

and me going away with a knapsack to Oregon,

just glad to be the hell out of there.

And knowing that we both had all the tools

we needed for the rest of our lives.

For Bill, that period in Los Angeles was when he solidified

his identity as a stand-up comic. It taught him how to be on his own,

to take his comedy seriously, that this was what he was going to do

for the rest of his life. It strengthened him and wised him up.

But even when he went to LA the first time,

I don't think Bill had really found his voice.

You could be liked and doing well, but that day you find your voice,

the difference is night and day.

Bill called me and I thought he was still in LA.

He's like, "Guess what." I said, "What?" He goes, "I'm here."

I was like, "What?" and he goes, "I'm in Houston and guess what else?

"We're going to take psychedelic mushrooms tonight."

I was like, "Yeah, funny, Bill." He's like, "No, it's not what you think it is.

If there was one person that could talk me into doing it, it was Bill.

And we took some mushrooms in this vegetarian restaurant,

and just laughed our asses off.

Only Bill would try hallucinogenics before he tried alcohol.

He just had a whole new appetite, you know.

"I want to try everything."

When he came back to Texas realising that the difference

between where he was and, say, where Richard Pryor was,

was a way big thing, way bigger than he'd thought,

he knew that he was going to have to break moulds

and that it wasn't just enough that he was the baby-faced kid.

And I don't think he knew exactly where it was that he had to get to,

but he just knew that he wasn't there yet.

I think we left as kids and came back as real, seasoned comics.

Some sort of forces were moving people from Houston together.

There were so many kindred spirits and other comics

that made Houston different from other parts of the country.

-How many guys in here just broke up with my girlfriend?

-LAUGHTER

There were six of us at the time, and it was founded by Steve Epstein.

I was more of the court jester, in a sense, in that I was kind of goofy.

I-I say, Steve Epstein was driving a '78 Rabbit!

Oohorr!

He'd just flap around like an unattended fire hose, but he got everything going.

Andy Huggins, we met in LA.

I had a feeling Andy was more like a Houston comic than an LA comic.

And after Armageddon, there'll be a small reception at the Ramada Inn.

Jimmy talked me into coming back to Houston.

He said, "You want to do stand-up? We've more stage time for you."

That's all I needed to hear. John Farneti was a very successful lawyer,

-but just a terrific performer.

-I was born in Wyoming.

I lived there until I learned how to read a road map.

I'd wanted to do it since I was six years old

but there was nowhere on earth to do it.

And suddenly there's this place where you just walk in and people are lined up in the rain to get in.

And I wanted, like everybody, to hang around with Bill Hicks.

Everyone knew he was just head, shoulders,

waist, kneecaps and ankles above everybody else.

My problem with going to U of H, I went there in the summer session.

All I had in all my classes were jocks trying to make up credit.

You know that feeling? They weren't there to learn at all.

I remember the first day of my Eastern philosophy course.

The instructor walks out and goes, "God is consciousness.

"And we are all God trying to realise our full potential."

Wowwwwwwwww...

-This guy in the back row, "Yeah, we going to need to know that?

-LAUGHTER

"Is that going to be on the quiz?"

# Hey hey, hey hey, it's just a sunny day. #

From starting taking mushrooms and smoking cigarettes

to that night he first got drunk, it was a matter of months.

When the Comedy Annex started hopping for the first time, it was an exciting place to be,

and it was a place to go every night. There was drugs, alcohol and women.

We were there every night.

Pineapple and Huggins were hysterical drunks,

so I think he was ready to learn from us in other ways, I guess.

I remember he came up to David Johndrow and I, and he was like,

"I want to try a drink. What's a drink people drink?"

I said, "You want to try drinking for the first time, order a margarita."

He went up to the bar and ordered seven margaritas. And he downed them

and went up on stage.

He never drunk before, and the bitterness came out

for the first time, it just came pouring out.

He was literally crawling around the stage

with a full house of 200 people watching him.

But he was still funny. People were still laughing, the whole time.

The drinking was a way that he was able to have this breakthrough

of really going out on the edge

and not being concerned with people's reaction.

Then all of a sudden he could really be bold

and really say what he wanted and not be concerned.

-HECKLER: How's your girlfriend?

-Oh, my girlfriend! Thanks, pal(!)

Throw salt on the fucking wound! Thanks a lot!

Why don't you just come up here and throw salt on it, huh?

Here, here's my heart. Throw salt.

Come on. Dig it in. Yeah, my girlfriend left me.

Five years. I loved her more than anything in the fucking world

and she just split on me. Remember your first love? Didn't that hurt?

Isn't it hard to get over? But I think it helped my career

when she left me, cos I'm a driven man now.

I'm driven by a fantasy that one day, this girl who I loved

more than anyone in the world and I gave my heart to, and she spat upon it and spun out the door,

one day this girl'll be living in a trailer park in Oklahoma,

swampy trailer ground and clouds of Aids mosquitoes

swarming around her, blocking out the light from the sun.

She has like nine naked little kids with rickets.

They got burrs in their hair and jam on their face

and rats laying babies in their ears at night.

LAUGHTER

And they bring home dead animals from beside the road to eat.

And she lives with this ex-welder who doesn't have a job.

He's got fur all over his back. He's fat, like 600lbs,

and he makes love to her with a broom handle at night.

LAUGHTER

And one night he's going to be romancing her with that stick

and his heart is going to explode

and she's trapped under 600lbs of flaccid, sweaty,

fish belly cellulite that's moving like the tides of the ocean

and blood and phlegm and bile pours out of his mouth and nose

into her face, into her face, and just before she drowns in that vomit

she turns to the TV and I'm going to be on it. Hahaha.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

Once Bill decided that he would just be in his home base

and he would just do his own comedy the way he wanted

and that the world would come to him, well, it did.

He was just too good not for fame to find him,

no matter how many corners it had to go around.

Jay Leno showed up at the Annex and they adored Jay Leno at the time,

cos he was THE professional stand-up comic,

You know, he was just the best.

Jay did help. Jay liked Bill's act.

He gave Bill advice. He made a few phone calls.

When Leno said this guy is good,

I would imagine Letterman knew totally he was.

Hello. Good evening. Good evening.

My name is Bill Hicks. Thank you.

Full name is William Melvin Hicks. Thanks, Dad.

It's a name with certain connotations, huh?

"Hi, my name is Melvin Hicks. This is my wife and my sister."

"OK, Melvin..."

All right.

He called us every time he was going to be on

and I used to always tell him, "Billy, it's just not you,"

but, you know, that first time, the impact and nirvana

of being on national TV, I mean, we felt that too, watching him,

-and I was like, "No, it was great."

-Christmas rolled around, my friends got go-karts.

I'm 12 years old, I got a college dictionary.

Mom goes, "Bill, it's the thought that counts!"

Oh, Mom, but what were you thinking? Seriously.

Laughter is big business in Houston.

Now you've been on television, it's like a stamp of approval.

So if you were on the David Letterman Show, it was like, yeah.

He did not want Jim and me to see him.

I guess he thought we wouldn't understand.

But we did sneak into that one in Austin.

Steve thought we were in shock when we saw Bill perform.

-I know you were in shock when you saw Bill.

-Uh-uh.

Cos he did not know they were in the audience so it was the entire show.

I was not shocked. I was in awe, to tell you the truth.

-I could not believe...

-Oh, how the years have changed your memory!

I couldn't believe that he was up there and he had such poise.

I think Bill was the one in shock. But all he said was,

"Well, that's what I do." And I said, "Well, that was very good."

And then the odd thing about it is he didn't really temper

his material for them. Not like I would have.

And I think they kind of treated it like, "Well, that's his world.

"We don't understand it, but that's what he does."

He was open for anything, really.

Yeah, I have had a good job. I've had a good job.

I'm not complaining about every fucking job I've had.

I used to work at a lady's shoe store. I liked that. I got to see this all day long.

It was great. Women came in, they'd wear dresses to try on the shoes.

I'm the guy that helped them on with the shoes.

I don't know if you ladies do that on purpose, but keep it up.

They're sitting there, going, "Ahh...

"How does it look?" Oh, gwaaaaa...

"It looks great. Yeah, it's you. It's definitely you."

"Mmmm...it's kind of tight."

Oh, man...

"I can stretch it out for you."

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

So after I got fired from that job...

No-one said it'd be pretty!

Bill was always an all-or-nothing guy.

There was no halfway for Bill.

And wanting to experiment with mushrooms was to him

a way of trying to, like, further his evolution as a person.

Just hearing about something was not good enough.

Bill always wanted revelation to be first-hand.

Our family got this ranch, and it ended up being a place

where we could come and get away from everybody.

Our friends said, "You're just trying to get fucked up."

Bill would just say, "No, we really are trying to get somewhere else with this."

So we would go out and fast a little bit and prepare

and then have this experience and see what happened.

Well, some really amazing things happened.

The world is one magical motherfucker.

If you take a certain amount of mushrooms, you're in a magical world.

A lot of people have this thought when they take these,

"Does anybody know about this?" Because it's like a secret.

It's like this fundamental thing about the human brain,

but no-one knows about it and no-one talks about it.

There was one time in particular, the harmonic convergence.

It was basically this time when all the planets were to align

in some alignment that only happens once every 10,000 years.

I remember walking down this tunnel of light and feeling like we were walking into a spaceship.

Bill was just asking, "Who are you and why are you here?"

and basically being told that the boundaries of space and time

are all in our minds and that we all are one, and everything is one.

We all are one, everything is one.

ECHOING: We all are one, everything is one.

I remember Bill just looking at me, like, "Oh, my God.

"Can you believe that just happened?"

At first I was like, "That was just something I thought of",

and then Bill explained everything that I had just seen

and then the day went even further than that,

where it was like tapping into all these other minds,

like thousands of them all at once. And I'm really sceptical.

I was ready to say, "OK, we're on drugs.

But something about what happened on this day was different. It was significant and very tangible.

ECHOING: We all are one, everything is one.

You know, this was accepted by human beings that you take substances

to change your consciousness, from the beginning of human history.

After that day, I think he really was like 100% sure

that something did exist on the other side

and it helped him go out there and become a lot more fearless,

and part of his art was being able to broadcast

cutting edge ideas to the public.

We came here for the truth, right?

That's all I want out of life, is the truth. Is that too much to ask for?

You ever see a positive story about drugs on the news?

Ever? Me either.

Isn't that weird? The news is supposed to be objective.

Same LSD story every time. We've all heard it.

Young man takes acid, thinks he can fly, jumps out of a building.

What a tragedy.

What a dick, really, when you think about it.

If he thought he could fly,

why didn't he take off from the ground and check it out, first?

Why give acid a bad name cos you're a moron, you know?

LAUGHTER

I'd like to see a positive LSD story. Would that be newsworthy, just once?

"Today a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy

"condensed to a slower vibration, that we are all one consciousness

"going through itself, subjectively, there's no such thing as death,

"life is only a dream, and you're the imagination of yourselves.

"Here's Tom with the weather!"

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

Wow.

During this time, all the drinking and drugging too, some of the club owners

were concerned about how erratic the shows would be.

Alcohol with Bill was definitely like throwing gasoline onto a fire.

You know, it was kind of a tightrope,

cos you never knew what was going to happen, and usually,

if there was a lot of drinks being pounded down, it was going to go bad.

I mean he was always like an angry kid, but when he drank the alcohol,

he was letting everybody have it.

And so we were like, "Ooh, this is a new kind of comedy".

# Shout! #

Bill was what we used to call a shortball. He got drunk real quick.

What happened?

The main thing that I remember was him getting on stage

and people in the audience sending him up drinks.

Fuck it, I'll drink red wine if no-one's going to offer me anything real. Fuck you!

And people said I couldn't improvise!

He could drink a lot because he had all the adrenaline of the show

and he said, "I'm a bull, I can't be brought down.

Conflict..

Sorry - y'all lost.

Coke dealers would be giving Bill free coke.

Can I get a shot of Jack up here?

"How much can we get Bill to take on stage?

"Let's all watch."

It was just like a red flag for club owners.

He was like suddenly not on Letterman any more.

He started losing bookings.

Be careful going home tonight, cos I'm driving right along with you, fuckers.

I got there in the middle of the set and nobody was laughing, really.

He was laying down on his back screaming into the microphone.

-It was awful.

-It was terrible. It wasn't a show any more.

It was a drunk on stage, is what it was.

I'd taken a friend from work. "You're going to love him. He's my brother! He's hilarious!"

To have a room clear, I felt bad for him.

He called me the next day and said, "Well, they fired me too.

"Seems to be the thing. Everybody fires me." Like, yeah, it wasn't funny!

Bill didn't bring these problems into the family.

Just the fact that now he drank and now he smoked, well,

so did I, so how big of a deal was that?

I don't know what I would have said, had I said anything.

Maybe I should have, but I didn't.

But I knew there was something in there during that time.

You can see it in his eyes.

That was after he got in that fight and he broke his leg

and he was performing and leaning on crutches.

I'd like this man to leave the room,

if I could have that, please. Thank you very much, sir.

Why don't you applaud the fact that you're a mobile biped right in front of me?

Why don't you do a fucking cartwheel into your stall, sir?

Thank you, I'd like to do my impression of Ironside now.

Next week we have Helen Keller...

No. I'm delirious. I'm delirious.

It's the heroin.

Seriously.

Aaah!

Good evening. Don't worry, there is no pain.

I just didn't want to spill my beer.

There are priorities, even in the world of pain.

I wish that we had been more worried about him, maybe.

But there was kind of a code that we had, Kevin and Bill and I,

which was, "You're going to do what you're going to do

"and I'm there for ya, but I'm not going to stop ya".

But it was kind of cool, because it was like we had faith in each other.

We tended to trust that he knew what he was doing.

I got beat up by a guy in a kilt. Are you happy? You wanna see blood?

It suffered, yeah.

There were club owners that were willing to forgive and forget,

cos he was that good, and there were other club owners that...

you know, it wasn't worth it. It wasn't worth it.

When I saw him at my wedding, he was clearly enmeshed in substance abuse.

You know, and he'd obviously been up all night and he looked beaten.

My wife-to-be, and she'd never met Bill,

she didn't know anything about him, thought he was wild - funny -

but wild, could not be contained.

There were half a dozen of us that were in bad shape that way,

and we were drinking suicidally basically, that's where it was headed.

We were sitting up, me and Bill, and he just started crying,

and he broke down and he said, "Man, I've got a problem.

"My life is out of control".

My big answer was, "Well, just stop, then, Bill. Stop doing that.

And he straightened back up real quick

but it was the one thing I always felt I let Bill down about.

And it was just from ignorance.

I didn't know how to handle it, didn't know what to do.

And when a Bill Hicks show became more about,

"How drunk can we get Bill?" instead of, "Let's see how far

"Bill can take us with his ideas", that's when the party was over.

You know, realising, "What the fuck am I doing?

"These people are not my friends, you know?

These people are trying to kill me. Led him down the path of knowing,

"If I don't make a drastic change, I'm going to die."

That was a moment of clarity for Bill.

That could've been the wake-up call. I guess he just woke up.

He realised what he was working for and this was in the way of it.

Bill quit drinking in February of '88, I quit in April,

and we started going to meetings together in downtown Houston.

Being the stupid alcoholic I am, I'm going "Good, good for him,

"he should go in there", not thinking about what a fuckup I was.

"You need to get sober and get clean. Good job."

Bill knew there was no way he was going to be able to sustain

any kind of sobriety surrounded by all these Houston comics.

He told me, as a matter of fact, you have to get rid of the people,

that you can't be around the same environment and expect to survive.

Bill realised that he had to jump ship and as crazy as it sounds,

moving to a big city, by yourself, is the way to get sober, and, um...

Bill just disappeared to New York.

When you're dealing with drugs and alcohol, willpower,

it's the opposite, it's when you admit that you don't have, you're powerless.

I don't think there was ever a question

that he was not going to continue even though the struggles must have been mighty.

He was tapped on the shoulder and this was what he was going to do

and it doesn't mean it's going to be handed to you

and I'm sure that it had to have been unbelievably challenging.

He told me that it was six months before he could start being funny again.

That's when he went from being just an above-average comedian

to being something spectacular.

Let me hear you say, "yeah!"

ALL: Yeah!

-Sing it! Yeah!

-ALL: Yeah!

-Well, all right.

-ALL: All right.

That's it, end of your part. Thank you.

Hope you don't mind if I smoke. I know it's getting harder and harder to find a place to smoke these days.

I feel like I'm in high school with the bathroom window cracked again.

I don't do drugs.

I don't think they tell us the truth about drugs, though.

They tell you marijuana smoking makes you unmotivated.

That's bullshit.

When I was high,

I could do everything I normally could do just as well.

I just realised it wasn't worth the fucking effort, man, that was it.

Why get out of bed? Shit,

I'm just going to get stuck in traffic and go to a job I hate.

Fuck it. Stay in bed and watch cartoons.

By the time he came back in late '88 for a show,

he almost didn't talk to me or Jimmy, who was with him on the bill that night.

He was staying away from, "You guys drink, you get loaded. I can't be near that",

which we didn't understand or appreciate.

Here he is, Bill Hicks!

Cut!

How about a hand for Jimmy "The Odious" Pineapple, and John...

..John "His Whimsical Shadow" Farneti.

APPLAUSE

Give them some love, God DING it, give them some love.

Can I get a coke, por favor? Is that part of my star treatment?

I started out in this club ten years ago.

Pretty bold of me to admit that!

I want you to know I started out when I was 15 years old.

It's weird doing comedy when you're 15 and going up in front of strangers.

I don't know these people. It's scary, you know?

You don't know if you're funny. You don't know, you know, what you're doing.

All the other comics were helpful. If I had a bad show, they'd buy me a drink or something.

"If I had a good show, we'd celebrate and get a drink. Pretty soon, I was getting better.

People I didn't even know would buy me a drink after the show.

Women would come up to me, you know, buy me drinks...

offer me coke and I started doing coke and drinking every night

and women I don't even know getting me coke and booze and...

Phew.

I just want to tell you what my life's been like for ten years.

How's y'alls jobs?

I said, "Bill, gosh, you're not doing your mom any more.

"That's so funny.

He goes, "Yes, but I've done that. "Yeah, but it's funny.

I was still in the thing where, "This is what it's all about".

But he was in this thing, "I have other things I want to say.

John Kennedy is murdered. Martin Luther King is murdered. Jesus Christ is murdered.

Reagan - shot, wounded, cancer eight times.

That fucker still walks, doesn't he?

Rrrrrr!

When Bill first came back and announced to me that

he really was sober several months later,

I didn't really believe him at first, and I watched him do a set at the Laff Stop

and all of a sudden it was like, oh, my God. Bill was back.

The Fundamentalists, they try to get creationism taught in schools as a science.

What exactly would that be?

"Welcome to Creationist Science, on the sixth day, God created the world.

"On the seventh day he rested, and...

"Well, shit, class dismissed, you got it!"

It was like he had re-hatched out of a cocoon or something.

He had the same stamina that he had as the young boy

that could run the 2.20s on the track team, and smoke everybody.

You know, and I said, "Now is the time we have to make a video recording of a feature-length set",

and that's when we did Sane Man.

I remember coming in to do the show that day and I was just

so scared that he was going to break his sobriety before he went on stage.

And Jimmy Pineapple, who opened the show, had also gone sober.

Backstage, Jimmy said, "Screw it, I'm going to down some whiskeys before I go on stage.

I hadn't been sober that long. I go, I could try it again later.

But for this show, these audiences,

working with Bill, I wanted to knock it out of the ball park

and I wasn't going to fuck around with the jitters about being sober.

I know some of you people are looking up here and saying, "Hey, man, this guy is IT.

LAUGHTER

Well, you're right.

I am it. I've always been it.

Even when I was a kid, I was it.

When we played tag...

LAUGHTER

..some kid would hit me and say, "Hey, you're it!",

and I'd say, "You're goddamn right, buddy".

Here I am really praying that Bill's not going to do the same thing

and I went back into Bill's green room

and Bill was still just drinking water and pacing around and smoking.

We were already making films for Access Television

and I was backstage and Kevin had said,

"Wait till you see his new stuff".

This was like the sober Bill,

and I guess he'd been on the road working new material.

How about a nice round of applause for Mr Bill Hicks?

APPLAUSE

Yeah, it's good to be here.

I haven't been here in two years.

Thanks.

That warmth I've missed in Austin.

"So? We been here.

"Not our fault you got to travel around, shit.

"We supposed to follow you around? You supposed to be back here.

"What are you doing? Where are you?"

Where have I been? I've been on my flying saucer tour.

Which means like flying saucers, I too have been appearing

in small southern towns in front of a handful of hillbillies lately.

No-one doubts MY existence.

I've noticed a certain anti-intellectualism going around this country, man.

I was in Nashville, Tennessee, last week,

and after the show I went to a Waffle House.

I'm sitting there and I'm eating and I'm reading a book.

I don't know anybody. I'm alone. I'm eating and I'm reading a book.

And this waitress comes over to me - "Chkchkchk!

"What you reading for?"

Wow, I've never been asked that.

Not what am I READING, but what am I reading FOR?

Well, God damn it, you stumped me.

I guess I read for a lot of reasons but the main one is

so I don't end up being a fucking waffle waitress.

Am I stepping out of some intellectual closet here?

I read. There, I said it.

I feel better.

Suddenly he's just commanding the audience.

There's no breaks.

It's just perfectly choreographed.

I don't do drugs.

I want to thank management for offering. But I said no.

When I say no, it means...

how much and can I get some more?

No. It means... seriously, it means no...

is the bar open?

OK, no, it means...

Let's see how I...

No, I used to do drugs. I had no luck with drugs, man.

Got pulled over tripping once.

Whoo! There's a dream come true.

I'll match that to any drunk story you got.

Pulled over tripping. Jesus!

The cop was tapping on THIS window. We're staring at him in this mirror over here.

LAUGHTER

How tall are you?

Whoohooh!

Shit.

Ambush.

Big one and a little one.

Twins.

Oh, shit.

Be cool.

But I think he'd had to work to get to that point.

He had to go through some dark shows and break some furniture,

but after going through that I think he knew where his limits were and...

how much the audience could take and how far he could push 'em.

Our emotions are running wild and our mind has stopped, man.

The flag-burning thing.

Oh, God, did that bring up some fucking retarded emotions!

The flag! The flag! They said we could burn the flag!

They didn't say that, they said, "If a guy burns a flag,

"he perhaps doesn't need to go to jail for a fuckin' year."

Pretty harsh on their part, isn't it?

People are going, "Hey, buddy, let me tell you something.

"My daddy died for that flag.

"Really?

"I bought mine.

"You know they sell them at Kmart and shit? Three bucks.

"He died in the Korean War for that flag.

"What a coincidence! Mine was made in Korea.

He didn't die for a fucking flag.

It's a piece of cloth. He died for what the flag represents, which is...

the freedom... to burn the fucking flag!

And as my friend Jimmy Pineapple would say, "Case. Fucking. Closed."

We filmed two sets that night.

His parents were there for the first set.

And now that he'd gone sober, I think they were just more proud

of him and I don't think Bill was really censoring himself that much. It'd kind of gone beyond that.

Bill's demeanour was different.

His eyes were brighter.

My thought was, "Thank goodness that that's behind us.

I never said anything like that to Bill.

I just accepted him like he was.

-Watch this, Uncle Bill!

-Wow.

We did have this place south of Austin called Wimberley,

and when he'd come to Austin, Bill went down there with us.

You know, I think that he just really got into the rhythm of this place,

which was a total getaway.

The cracker man.

All right!

It's a duck frenzy.

BOY SQUEALS

Coming from the hecticness of what he did, what all of us did,

that was a great little place to spend a week,

before he went back out and hit it again.

I really don't think the full Bill kicked in until he went sober.

I really don't.

I think a lot of people were still coming to see the shock jock comedian,

and now Bill was slipping in some loftier ideas to leave people with.

You know, just because this is a comedy club,

doesn't mean that we can't do something more with this.

My clothes have got to be clean on time.

-We're going to have to get on the beer...

-Well, that's right!

When I saw him in Chicago in 1989,

we hadn't seen each other for three years.

His life was completely on track and he was beaming about it.

It's been a very exciting week for me because I'm working with Dwight, who...

He and I started off doing comedy together,

we were 13 years old in Houston, Texas.

It's good to be in Chicago. What a great town, man!

Went to Lincoln Park Zoo. How many people have been there?

APPLAUSE A couple? Yeah?

Well, if you haven't been there, I'll save you a little time.

I'll do a quick visual impression for you guys.

First time ever seen. This is every animal in Lincoln Park zoo.

Here we go. Save you some time. Ladies and gentlemen, every animal in the Lincoln Park Zoo.

HE SNORES

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

What a fucking rip-off.

We had this unique relationship that...

I brought out things in him that normally would not be brought out, and he did the same thing.

What do you feel? What's inside you?

What makes you tick? What fires you up?

What pisses you off?

It's nice to have someone in your life that's like that. He brought that out of you.

He expected it out of you.

This is called logic. It won't hurt you, it'll set you free. But we'll get to that later.

I think a lot of comics have confused being a great comic

with being like Bill Hicks.

Well, no. Being a great comic has to do with your inner voice matching your outer voice.

That's what Bill did.

His personality on stage was just an animated extension of who he was.

Hey, get this, man.

I was in Las Vegas, right?

I'm going to get an elevator at the hotel and I'm smoking.

There's a lady next to me, coughing.

"Hehhem! Hehhehhehhem!" (Shut up...)

I look out the window of the hotel and I see the sunset,

and it's green and purple,

and it's 3pm,

and then a mushroom cloud forms in the desert,

and the hotel starts shaking and every elevator stops working.

I was a little bit curious.

So I turn to this lady who lived in Las Vegas and I say, "What was that?"

And she goes, "Oh! That's the army.

"We don't know what they're doing out there. Hahaha!"

And you're worried about my cigarette smoke?

I would get a fucking priority list happening.

And then I talked to people who lived in Vegas and they go,

"Well, they're 100 miles away."

Yeah, well, my little deodorant aerosol can

is 50 miles from the ozone, so shut the fuck up.

I'll use Cheez Whiz, aerosol, anything I want.

Shut up.

Quit setting off nuclear bombs, OK, it being our planet and all,

don't you think?

What gives them the right to set off bombs?

Haha! I love y'all.

He knew that he was just formulated to be a comic who was supposed to shake things up.

It's all about money, not freedom, y'all, OK?

Haha.

Nothing to do with fucking freedom.

You think you're free?

Try going somewhere without any fucking money, OK?

When you laugh at him,

it makes you think about things you hadn't thought about before.

It's about fucking money, not about freedom.

Don't ever think that it is. Thank you. Sorry.

I am a child of God sent here to bring salvation to the earth,

and you're welcome.

When people walked out of his shows, they may not have admitted it,

but they just were changed a little bit.

He knew that he'd have problems

because he would be going to places that his fan base,

his audience, may not follow him.

As Bill evolved as a comedian,

the comedy clubs were probably de-evolving.

Please quit yelling, man.

It's not funny, it's stupid, it's repetitive -

why the fuck would you continue to yell that?

I'm serious.

Kevin Matthews - OK, what does that mean now?

Now what does it mean? I understand where it comes from.

So do you. Now what does it all mean?

What is the culmination of yelling that?

Jimmy Shorts. He's not here. He's not going to be here.

Now what? Now where are we?

We're here at you interrupting me again, you fucking idiot.

Yes, we're here at the same point again where you,

the fucking peon masses, can once again ruin anyone

who tries to do anything because you don't know how to do it on your own!

That's where we're fucking at once again, the useless waste

of fucking flesh that has ruined everything good

in this goddamn world!

People started to notice Bill at this point.

You know, a lot of the places I travelled to

to be able to experience that with him.

We were brothers, we were pretty close,

and that's what we did, going to Las Vegas for the first time

and being there on opening night by request by Rodney Dangerfield.

It was cool being backstage at the filming of an HBO One Night Stand special.

From the Vic Theatre in Chicago...

please welcome Bill Hicks!

WILD APPLAUSE

Good evening, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbours,

vibrations in the mind of the one true God whose name is love.

How many smokers do we have here tonight? Smokers?

CHEERING

That's a lot of energy for you fuckers. That's good.

Usually you get...

HE COUGHS

Thank you, guys, thank you.

Next time I need you, just hawk up a chunk of lung for me, all right?

Rear back, launch a phlegm gem towards the stage.

Cuh!

BUT listen to this.

How many...

NON-smokers do we have here tonight?

WILD CHEERING AND WHOOPS

Bunch of whining little maggots.

LAUGHTER

You obnoxious,

self-righteous...

slugs.

Don't take that wrong.

I'd quit smoking if I didn't think I'd become one of you.

LAUGHTER

But you got to understand something. I don't do anything else.

I don't drink.

Now, a lot of you non-smokers are drinking, OK?

I'm a non-drinker and I smoke. Now, to me, we're trading off vices.

That seems fair to me.

Yeah. Like fuck. "No, it's not. No, it's not.

"Why should our lives be threatened by your nasty habit?

"Nyehnyehnyehnyehnyeh!"

Yeah, but you know what?

I can't kill anyone in a car cos I'm smoking a fucking cigarette,

all right?

RALLYING CRIES

And I've tried.

LAUGHTER

Turn off all the lights and rush 'em, they always see the glow.

HOWLS OF LAUGHTER

"Man, there's a big firefly heading this way.

"Shit! It's knocking over shrubs!"

It's really weird, he could do an HBO special one night at a big arena,

and then to go back on the road and do crappy clubs.

'American Airlines flight 577.'

I think to him that was part of the journey,

getting his vision out to more people,

that was what he needed to do.

I'm really tired. I apologise upfront. I'm really tired of...

uh, travelling, and tired of doing comedy,

and tired of staring out at your blank faces looking back at me,

wanting me to fill your empty lives with humour

you couldn't possibly think of yourselves.

Good evening.

American audiences, people are too quick to take offence over here.

He just couldn't get any momentum going.

So I guess there was a frustration level of...

you grow past where you're working

and Bill was moving faster than the audiences at times.

What is pornography, man? No-one knows.

The Supreme Court says pornography is any act that has no artistic merit and causes sexual thoughts.

That's their definition, essentially.

No artistic merit. Causes sexual thoughts.

Hm.

That sounds like every commercial on television, doesn't it?

You know, when I see those two twins on that Double Mint commercial,

I'm not thinking of gum.

I am thinking of chewing.

Maybe that's the connection they're trying to make there in a roundabout way.

You've all seen that Busch Beer commercial.

The girl in the short hot pants opens the beer bottle on her belt buckle, leaves it between her legs,

it foams over the bottle and over her hand, and the voiceover goes, "Get yourself a Busch".

Hmmmmm.

You know, correct me if I'm wrong, that looks just... No. No.

The fine liquor company wouldn't try and plant that idea in my head, would they?

Not the fine upstanding liquor company!

Let me tell you what commercial they'd like to do if they could,

and I guaran-fucking-tee if they could, they'd do this.

Here's the woman's face. Beautiful. Camera pulls back.

Naked breasts.

Camera pulls back.

She's totally naked.

Legs apart.

Two fingers right here.

And it just says, "Drink Coke".

LAUGHTER

Now, I don't know the connection here...

..but God damn if Coke isn't on my shopping list this week!

After doing these big, long shows, which always wore him out,

being on the road, it was good to be back in Austin

and to be playing music with his friends.

The start of the Marblehead Johnson thing was the three of us playing

the night of the first Gulf War breaking out,

and Bill had these new songs that he had written.

My band Year Zero broke up and we were looking for something to do

and Bill came to town one day and sat in with us, and it totally gelled.

We were watching the live feed of the war and the classic... shells going over downtown Baghdad.

It was weird watching that kick off live, and that's the surreal thing about American wars now,

is that they're televised with some sort of ratings blood lust.

# Just one thing I know for sure Chicks dig jerks, yeah... #

Bill then got the HBO special and gained greater and wider notoriety.

Still there wasn't that explosion.

Why didn't the country like Bill as much as we do?

He went to the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal.

Just For Laughs is like the Cannes Film Festival for comedy.

They come from all over the world and it's a big deal.

He realised for the first time in Canada

that there was a new boundary and far more thirst for his perspective

about what was going on with the American dream.

First of all, this needs to be said.

There never was a war.

How can you say that, Bill?

Well, a war is when two armies are fighting.

So you see right there, I think.

We can all agree. Yeah.

Those guys were in hog heaven out there. You understand, man?

They had a big weapons catalogue opened up.

"What's G12 do, Tommy?"

"Well, it says here it destroys everything

"but the fillings in their teeth.

"Helps us pay for the war effort.

"Well, shit, pull that one up.

"Pull up G12, please."

Shhwwshh!

Kkkcckkk!

"Cool. What's G13 do?"

LAUGHTER

Everyone got excited about the technology, and I guess it was

pretty incredible watching a missile fly down an air vent.

Pretty unbelievable.

But couldn't we feasibly use that same technology to shoot

food at hungry people? You know what I mean?

Flying over Ethiopia. There's a guy that needs a banana!

Shhkkkrrrkkk!

Shhwwshh!

APPLAUSE

Here he was not only just playing in the arena of international comedy,

he was excelling in that arena.

Cos I live in the States, a very puritanical place,

full of superstition,

and ancient, ancient religions that no longer serve their function on this planet,

because they're based on fear instead of love.

But, uh...

they say rock'n'roll is the devil's music.

Well, let's say that it is. I got news for you.

Let's say that rock'n'roll IS the devil's music

and we know it for a fact to be absolutely, unequivocally true.

Boy, at least he fucking jams.

OK, did you hear that correctly?

If it's a choice between eternal hell

and good tunes or eternal heaven and New Kids On The fucking Block...

I'm going to be surfing on the lake of fire, rockin' out.

"Oh, come on, Bill, they're the New Kids.

"Don't pick on them. They're so good, they're so clean-cut

"and they're such a good image for the children."

Fuck that. When did mediocrity and banality become a good image for your children?

I want my children to listen to people who fucking rocked!

I don't care if they died in puddles of their own vomit!

I want someone who plays from his fucking heart!

I want 'em to fucking play with one hand

and put a gun in their other fucking hand! "I hope you enjoy the show!" Bkkk!

YES! YES!

Play from your fucking heart!

LAUGHTER

I am available for children's parties, by the way.

I don't think Bill knew that this video

they made there was going to suddenly be broadcast on British TV,

and then that would be the beginning of the next step.

From the United States, please raise the roof for Bill Hicks. Yeah!

I love being a comedian.

It's the greatest job in the world for one simple reason - I don't have a boss.

Definite plus in a lifestyle, man. Every job I've had with a boss, always harassed.

"Hicks, how come you're not working?"

"There's nothing to do.

"Well, you pretend like you're working.

"Well, why don't YOU pretend I'm working?

"You get paid more than me. You fantasise".

In Edinburgh, he won the Judges' Award.

He realised, "Man, OK, there is an audience for what I do.

Here's an American ridiculing America.

He had been so good at making fun of his parents, especially his father.

Now he was terrific at making fun of his fatherland.

The American dream was supposed to be us running from the Brits,

and now Americans are having to tell the Brits

what's become of the American dream.

They did get it. They got it. They could handle it.

How that manifested itself was his confidence went through the roof,

and he definitely attributed that to being in the UK.

This is amazing. Last show I did... You're not going to believe this, but its true.

Belfast, Ireland, last week.

Never been to Belfast, Ireland.

Played to 900 screaming and adoring fans

in a turn-of-the-century theatre

that Oscar Wilde performed on...

only to come back to America, the country I have toured ceaselessly for 15 years

to play Adolf's Comedy Bunker in Idaho,

in front of 25 apathetic people,

strangers one and all,

who stared at me like a dog that had just been shown a card trick.

LAUGHTER

One of life's little ironies.

When Bill talked to me about breaking out in England

and making it there, I thought, "Oh, shit, you know?

You're going to be over in England? But it was pretty much for him a fait accompli.

"This is the place that gets me, I'm filling theatres, not comedy clubs, and partial comedy clubs.

It wasn't really until I saw the Revelations special

that we were all like, "Oh, my God, you know.

"Bill's like a rock star over there, that's amazing. You know, finally."

FANS SCREAM, ROCK MUSIC PLAYS

You're in the right place.

It's Bill!

I'm so sick of arming the world and then sending troops over

to destroy the fucking arms, you know what I mean?

We keep arming these little countries

then we go and blow the shit out of them.

We're like the bullies of the world.

We're like Jack Palance in the movie Shane,

throwing the pistol at the sheep herder's feet.

"Pick it up."

LAUGHTER

"I don't want to pick it up, mister. You'll shoot me."

"Pick up the gun."

"Mister, I don't want no trouble, huh?

"I just came downtown here to get some hardrock candy for my kids,

"some gingham for my wife.

"I don't even know what gingham is, but she goes...

"she goes through about ten rolls a week of that stuff.

"I ain't looking for no trouble, mister."

"Pick up the gun."

LAUGHTER

Pkk! Pkk! Pkk!

"You all saw him.

"He had a gun."

LAUGHTER

Bill was a true patriot, and that is like a true American

and a true patriot does question the Government and that's what

being a patriot means, is that you question the powers.

I mean, I think he was still always proud to be an American,

but he was embarrassed about the things that his government was becoming.

By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing,

kill yourself.

-LAUGHTER

-Thank you, thank you.

Thanks.

Just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds.

Maybe...maybe one day they'll take root, I don't know.

You try. You do what you can.

(Kill yourselves.)

Seriously, though, if you are, do.

Uh...

no, really. There's no rationalisation for what you do

and you are Satan's little helpers. OK? Kill yourself, seriously.

You're the ruiner of all things good. Seriously. This is not a joke.

"There's going to be a joke coming." There's no fucking joke coming.

You are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage.

You are fucked and you are fucking us.

Kill yourself. It's the only way to save your fucking soul.

Kill yourself.

CHEERING AND WHISTLING

(Thanks, thanks.)

Planting seeds..

I know all the marketing people are going, "He's doing a joke.

There is no joke here. Suck a tailpipe,

fucking hang yourself.

Borrow a gun from a Yank friend. I don't care how you do it.

Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations.

Machi... Whatever. You know what I mean.