Bill Hicks: do the legendary comic's jokes still stand up?

In 1993, when Bill Hicks recorded Arizona Bay, he was at the peak of his powers. He had taken the UK by storm, performing two sell-out nationwide tours the previous year alone. He had experienced the dubious honour of being censored by CBS for a routine on the David Letterman show, only to subsequently rework that routine into a hit HBO special. He was the subject of a lengthy profile in the New Yorker which cast him as a unique voice in America, an outlaw in the culture. Within six months he’d be dead, at the age of 32.

The pancreatic cancer that took Hicks’s life had already been diagnosed before he finished Arizona Bay, an hour-long album that was originally released posthumously in 1997 and gets an expanded rerelease on Friday. In the valedictory statement he released shortly before his death, Hicks writes of how the diagnosis seemed “one of life’s weirdest and worst jokes imaginable”. He continued: “I’d been making such progress recently in my attitude, my career and realising my dreams that it just stood me on my head for a while. Why me!?”

For those of us who were fans of Hicks during his lifetime, his death was as definitive as that of John Lennon or Kurt Cobain. In one of those memories whose value lies in reminding you how much of an idiot you are, I passed up the chance to see Hicks on his Relentless tour in ’92. To make it worse, I did so because I’d just paid to see Dennis Leary perform his No Cure For Cancer show, a routine that is widely held to be a straight rip of Hicks’s material. No problem, I reasoned, he’d be back again soon enough. He wasn’t, and what was left were the cassettes of Hicks’s shows, recorded off late-night TV, committed to memory and, on occasion, adopted as maxims for living.

One such appears on track 22 of Arizona Bay.

Oh by the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising, kill yourself.

[laughter]

No joke there, I’m just planting the seed, see if it grows, who knows … But seriously, kill yourself. [beat] Now …

[more laughter]

No seriously, there’s no rationalisation for what you do, you’re Satan’s little helpers, kill yourself. OK, now back to the show.

[more laughter]

Anyway. Seriously …

[more laughter]

Anyway. You know what bugs me about doing stuff like that, is that I know every marketing person here is going: ‘Yep, Bill is trying to get that anti-marketing dollar, that’s a huge market.’ [Comes close to mic] Not everything is a fucking market. Stop putting a dollar sign on every fucking thing in the world! [away from mic] ‘Ooh, the righteous indignation dollar, huge market. Very smart of Bill.’

It goes on, getting by turns both more incensed and more ridiculous. It’s perhaps the most renowned bit of Hicks’s material (though there are certainly others). It also shows off why he was a master comedian, how the upwards of 200 shows he played a year from the age of 17 had afforded him technical control of his craft.

You can’t hear the intonation from the transcript (the diffident way in which he delivers the first, killer line), but you can see the pauses, the way he allows people to roll the idea around their heads at the same time as they’re laughing (quite probably in shock). The way he pulls the joke back, as if to carry on (“Now …”), but then rolls back in and delivers the punch again.

By the third time he’s extemporising, jazzing it up, something common to this show and increasingly where Hicks was heading with his performance. Finally, after expertly milking four bouts of laughter from one line, he delivers the actual joke: that marketeers can find an opportunity for making money in anything.

It’s not easy to get a sense of how important a comic Hicks remains in 2015. He’s got good Google juice, with over 22m pages indexed under his name. But by contrast, another funny Bill, Bill Murray, has 176m. Hicks was always an alternative concern in the US. But the late-night environment that found his material too hot for TV even then is now dominated by song-and-dance men.

Meanwhile, in the UK, beyond the greying figures of Paul Merton and Ian Hislop, there’s a strong case to be made that the nation’s most prominent satirical comic is Russell Howard (catch his Good News at 10pm on Thursdays on BBC2).

A lot of the material on Arizona Bay shows its age too. Hicks’s fascination with the Kennedy assassination may have resonated in 1993, but it’s confined to the past now. You can hear the awkwardness in the room when Hicks talks about his porn habit (“Video games and porno films, I wish they could combine the two, I’d have a high score on Clam Lappers by now”), but in 2015 the thing that shocks the most is that he had to go to something called a “video store” to get it. And as for all the stuff about smoking … the identification people then felt with Hicks’s defiantly self-destructive behaviour (he’d quit by this point, to the disappointment of at least one audience member who cries “nooo” at the revelation) is nowadays a love that dare not speak its name.

To suggest that Hicks is out of sync with the modern age, however, is not the same thing as saying he’s irrelevant. First off, it’s impossible to listen to Hicks’s act – especially the sexual stuff – without hearing the performance echoed, and quite frankly diluted, in the standup of Louis CK. Furthermore, do those masterful pauses and restatements, the sudden switches of tone, the imagined interlocutions – do they not form the structure of the one American comic who has consistently spoken truth to power these past 15 years, Jon Stewart? Hicks’s influence may not be obvious, but it’s there.

And while the culture has moved on, it doesn’t mean that Hicks’s way of thinking is no longer useful. Listen to a man deliver a routine on the LA riots that both denounces the police as racists, but also encourages (white) truck drivers to run over (black) rioters and it still carries a charge in 2015, but it comes from a very different place. In ’92 the risk came from calling out the police, in 2015 it’s from saying something that’s not PC. It’s possible now to cast Hicks as a man of white privilege, calling out whatever took his fancy. But it’s equally possible to listen to Hicks and feel that someone moral but unconstrained is exactly what we need right now. And a bit of righteous indignation wouldn’t go amiss neither.

Hicks told the New Yorker: “The best thing I do is make connections. I connect everything.” I miss that. I also miss a guy who talks about hifalutin ideas in low-slung language. Someone who talks dirty to make a point about universal love. Perhaps most revolutionary, I miss someone who – in an age where consumerism is perhaps our defining ideology – rejects putting a dollar sign on every fucking thing.