Lifestyle
Mr. Malcontent
The funniest Texan working the comedy circuit today is also the angriest. That may be why he’s so successful.
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Hicks knew a setup when he heard one. “Well, then,” he replied, “you must have the comprehension of a second-grader.”
Following his graduation in 1980, Hicks and three other Houston comedians—including the late Sam Kinison—moved to Los Angeles, hoping to find work at the burgeoning Comedy Store nightclub. They did, but Hicks grew bored with the scene, the city, and the very act of telling jokes for a living. He enrolled at Los Angeles Community College and on his first day got his nose broken in karate class. Taking that as a sign, Hicks returned to Texas and signed on at the University of Houston.
“It was the Great Postponement,” Hicks admits of his stint at the university. “I figured that if I hung in there for four years, something would strike me. I started off taking public speaking and philosophy. I thought it would be good to start off my college career with a couple of A’s. The public speaking guy tried to turn me into a Rotary Club speaker, with all the right gesticulations. I did my speech—muttered and paced and smoked and yelled at someone. And the philosophy professor wanted us to prove David Hume’s there-is-no-God thesis right at a time when I’d just taken mushrooms for the first time. He turned purple every time I raised my hand. I failed both classes.”
Sulking, Hicks returned to the Comedy Workshop, where he knew he could get free drinks. It was 1982, and for reasons Hicks now insists have something to do with Reagan’s presidency, the American comedy scene was exploding. The nightclub’s booking agent urged Hicks to rejoin the circuit. “It literally went like this: ‘Bill, we have a gig for you in Victoria, Texas. Oh, and while you’re there, a club just opened in El Paso.’ It happened in every state.”
Hicks and his menacing stage act became much in demand. In 1983, at 21, he opened for a hot New York comic named Jay Leno in an Austin nightclub. “What’re you doin’ down here?” Leno demanded after seeing Hicks’s performance. “Why aren’t you on TV?” A few months later, Leno arranged to get Hicks on David Letterman’s show. Subsequently, Hicks appeared several times, on the third visit incorporating an attack on the Reverend Jerry Falwell that greatly displeased Letterman’s producers. Hicks was not invited to hurry back. His defiance only fueled his renegade image—a reputation that included an overt fondness for alcohol and drugs.
“Rock and roll would not exist without drugs,” he delighted in pointing out in his shows, adding, “The Beatles were so high they even let Ringo sing a couple.” But drugs, especially alcohol, were slowly getting the best of Hicks, who would later tell crowds, “I was a weekend drinker—started on Saturday, ended on Friday.” His routines became more meandering, his words less comprehensible. By the mid-eighties, Hicks began to see in the faces of the audience the sentiments of his former principal: “You’re pathetic.” This time around he began to believe it.
One night was particularly grim. Hicks spent the entire evening on a binge, then had to do a radio show at seven the next morning. “I was up all night with the most satanic thoughts,” he said, “thinking, ‘I have chosen evil.’ Somehow I did the radio show—and was really funny. But my heart was pounding and I thought I was gonna die. I went back to the hotel. And this guy I was working with who used to have a problem also, he was up whistling and looking peaceful. I said, ‘Man, you going to one of those AA meetings today?’ He said, ‘I’ve been waiting three years to hear you ask that. There’s a meeting in fifteen minutes. Let’s go.’”
Going straight was not easy for Hicks, who had come to think of the whiskey shots as stage props. He wondered if he would be funny without drugs. “But I also realized,” he says, “that I wouldn’t be funny if I was dead.” That Hicks’s shows are now more sharply focused is a matter of personal pride for him. Yet Bill Hicks does not sell his sobriety either as a story or as a stage sermonette—beyond telling his audiences, “I admit I’ve had bad experiences with drugs; I mean, look at this haircut.” He continues to insist that hallucinogens changed his life for the better, maintaining, with deadly seriousness, that he was taken aboard an alien spacecraft during a mushroom trip. He says that Debbie Gibson and Hammer are proof of what a lack of drugs does to rock and roll and that “marijuana should not only be made legal, it should be made mandatory.” If anything, his own misadventures have strengthened his convictions. “People from AA come up and say, ‘Bill, I loved the show.’ If reformed addicts aren’t offended, why should anyone else be?” he asks.
In 1988 Hicks moved to New York, in large part to redeem himself with Letterman’s people. He quickly did, and in January of this year, he again packed his bags and returned to Los Angeles. There he hopes to increase his exposure. He also wouldn’t mind if he happened to gain the favor of the Tonight show, soon to be hosted by his old friend Jay Leno, and those elusive Hollywood producers. Until then, he remains one of the few comics in America popular enough to pick and choose where he performs.
Which is not to say that Bill Hicks has it easy. Unmarried and forever on the road, he’s living a life that’s hellish—lonely, anyway. But as with everything he has survived, Hicks has managed to turn bad karma into good material. “All this traveling, all this moving from town to town, living out of a suitcase,” he murmurs to his audience, affecting a pout. “You know, it’s a hard life for anyone to comprehend. It’s really going to take one very special woman …” The crowd ponders this with him. Then the silence is broken by Hicks’s cackle. “Or a lot of average women,” he says.
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