This comedy routine contains language and sexually explicit material. It’s extremely NSFW. Seriously.
Comedian Bill Hicks died over two decades ago (or at least that’s what the sheeple want you to believe), and while his posthumous catalog has been lovingly curated by his parents and longtime collaborator Kevin Booth, it’s also been fairly stagnant, with the last release in 2005. That’s to be expected for the catalog of someone whose last performance was more than twenty years ago—but it’s also about to change, as comedy distributor Comedy Dynamics, in partnership with Hicks’ estate, releases Bill Hicks: The Complete Collection Friday.
That collection features twelve CDs, six DVDs, and a photo book, and though some of that material includes previously released material, the real jewel of the set is the whopping ten hours of unreleased footage culled from Hicks’ personal recordings from countless nights on the road.
Below, you can take an exclusive look at one of those recordings, as a laid-back Hicks goes deep on some extremely NSFW material at Colorado Springs’ Loonees Comedy Corner in 1990. (Really, we can’t stress enough the extent to which the bit is not for the sensitive-eared.) Hicks never shied from dirty material—one of his better known routines involved fielding complaints from his parents about how better-known comedians don’t need to swear in their act, to which he would reply, “Bob Hope doesn’t play the sh*tholes that I play, all right?” before describing the sort of material that Hope would be doing if he had to take the stage at a venue like, well, Loonees.
The exclusive clip below from Comedy Dynamics’ Bill Hicks’ box set definitely gives an accurate sample of the free-associating, foul-mouthed material he dished out. It’s dirty, funny, weird, and—most importantly—a new look at an important, wildly influential comedian whose material had been considered pretty fully excavated. We’d give anything to know what Bill Hicks would make of these times we’ve found ourselves in now, but since that’s impossible (unless, of course…), we’ll take this never-before-released look at the man as a young performer wooing a difficult room. But just don’t watch it at work, and not with children in the room.
