William Melvin Hicks better known as Bill Hicks (December 16, 1961 - February 26, 1994), was a controversial American stand-up comedian, satirist, and social critic.

Hicks is often compared to Lenny Bruce (although he frequently denied knowing much about Bruce's life or work) and Sam Kinison (a contemporary and friend). Comedian Richard Pryor figured largely as an inspiration and stand-up idol for Hicks, as did Woody Allen who also served strongly as a very early influence for a pre-teen Bill. Like Lenny Bruce, Hicks challenged formal and informal forces of censorship, and suggested a disconnect between the values and operations of modern life, particularly in the United States, a country toward which his humor frequently adopted a tone ranging from cynicism to scathing critique. Hicks characterized his own performances as "Chomsky with dick jokes".

Born in Valdosta, Georgia, Bill was the son of Jim and Mary (Reese) Hicks, and had two elder siblings, Steve and Lynn. The family lived in Florida, Alabama, and New Jersey before settling in Houston, Texas when Bill was seven. Hicks has two school-age stories on the Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1 album. He said he was raised in the Southern Baptist faith. He was drawn to comedy at an early age, emulating Woody Allen, and writing routines with his friend Dwight Slade. His parents took him to a psychoanalyst at age 17, worried about his behavior, but the psychoanalyst could find little wrong with him. The therapist apparently joked that Bill's parents would probably benefit more from a few sessions than Bill himself.

In 1978, the Comedy Workshop opened in Houston, and friends Hicks, Slade, and Kevin Booth started performing there. At first, Hicks was unable to drive and so young he needed a special work permit. He worked his way up to once every Tuesday night in the autumn of 1978, while still in high school. He was well received and started developing his improvisational skills, although his act at the time was limited. Steve Hicks, Kevin Booth, and Jay Leno reminisce about the Comedy Workshop years in the It's Just A Ride documentary.

1980s

In his senior year of high school, the Hicks family moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, but after his graduation, in the spring of 1980, Bill moved to Los Angeles, California, and started performing at the Comedy Store in Hollywood, where Andrew Dice Clay, Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, and Garry Shandling were also performing at the time. He briefly attended Los Angeles Community College, mentioning the unhappy experience on Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1. He appeared in a pilot for the sitcom, Bulba, before moving back to Houston in 1982. There, he formed the ACE Production Company (Absolute Creative Entertainment), which would later become Sacred Cow Productions, with Kevin Booth, and worked at local Houston comedy clubs like The Comedy Workshop (as did Brett Butler). At some point he attended the University of Houston briefly.

In 1983, Hicks started drinking heavily and using drugs, which may have influenced his increasingly disjointed and angry, at times even misanthropic, ranting style on stage. As had become his trademark, he continued attacking the American dream, hypocritical beliefs, and traditional attitudes. At one show, two Vietnam veterans took exception to his statements and sought him out after the show, breaking his leg and cracking one of his ribs.

Hicks' success steadily increased (along with his drug use), and in 1984 he got an appearance on the talkshow Late Night with David Letterman, which was engineered by his friend Jay Leno. He made an impression on David Letterman, and ended up doing eleven more broadcast show appearances, all hugely popular, despite being bowdlerized versions of his stage shows.

In 1986, Hicks found himself broke after spending all his money on various drugs, but his career got another upturn as he appeared on Rodney Dangerfield's Young Comedians Special in 1987. The same year, he moved to New York City, and for the next five years he did about 300 performances a year. His reputation suffered from his drug use, however, and in 1988, he quit drugs - including alcohol (Hicks recounts his quitting of alcohol in the One Night Stand special and on Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1.) He fell back to cigarette smoking as his only vice, a theme that would figure heavily in his performances from then on. (On the album Relentless, he jokes that he quit using psychedelics because "once you've been taken aboard a UFO, it's kind of hard to top that.")

An infamous gig in Chicago during 1989, later released as the bootleg I'm Sorry, Folks, resulted in Hicks screaming possibly his most infamous quote, "Hitler had the right idea, he was just an underachiever" to a heckler shouting "Free Bird" over and over. Hicks followed this remark by a misanthropic tirade calling for unbiased genocide against the whole of humanity, suggesting that it was not an anti-Semitic comment but rather an expression of his disgust with people in general. Hicks often veered between hope and love for the human race and utter hopelessness.

In 1989 he released his first video, Sane Man, to critical acclaim. The same performance was re-issued seventeen years later in 2006 and again received, generally, reviews of recommendation.

1990s

In 1990, he released his first album, Dangerous, did an HBO special, One Night Stand, and performed at Montreal's Just for Laughs festival. He was also part of a group of American stand-up comedians performing in London's West End in November. He was a huge hit in the UK and Ireland and continued touring there in 1991. That year, he also returned to the Just for Laughs festival and recorded his second album, Relentless.

Hicks made a brief detour into musical recording with the Marblehead Johnson album in 1992, the same year he met Colleen McGarr, who was to become his girlfriend and fiancee. In November of that year, he toured the UK. On that tour, he recorded the Revelations video for Channel 4 in England and the standup performance that would become Live at Oxford Playhouse and Salvation. He was voted "Hot Standup Comic" by Rolling Stone Magazine, and moved to Los Angeles again in early 1993.

The progressive metal band Tool invited Hicks to open a number of concerts for them on their 1992 Lollapalooza appearances, where Hicks once famously asked the audience to look for a contact lens he'd lost. Thousands of people complied. Tool singer Maynard James Keenan so enjoyed this joke that he repeated it on a number of occasions.

In April of 1993, while touring in Australia, he started complaining of pains in his side, and in the middle of June of that year, he learned he had pancreatic cancer. He started receiving weekly chemotherapy, while still touring and also recording his album, Arizona Bay, with Kevin Booth. He was also working with comedian Fallon Woodland on a pilot episode of a new sitcom, titled Counts of the Netherworld for Channel 4 at the time of his death. The budget and storyboard had been approved, and a pilot was filmed. The Counts of the Netherworld pilot was shown at the various Tenth Anniversary Tribute Night events around the world on February 26, 2004.

On October 1, 1993, he was to appear on the David Letterman show for the twelfth time, but his appearance was cancelled somewhat controversially. At the time, Hicks was doing a routine about pro-life organizations, where he encouraged them to "lock arms and block cemeteries" instead of medical clinics, but his routine was cut from the show. Both the show's producers and CBS denied responsibility for the cut, but the reason appeared obvious to many during the following week's Letterman show when a commercial for a pro-life organization was aired. For many fans, this reinforced one of Bill's recurring themes, that America was being sanitized and manipulated in the name of corporate sponsorship. Hicks himself felt betrayed, and hand-wrote a 32-page letter of complaint. Later, Letterman expressed regret at the way Hicks had been handled. Unfortunately Hicks was dead by that time, and never heard Letterman's sentiments.

One political event that became an object of interest and fodder for comedy was the storming of the Waco compound of the Branch Davidians under David Koresh. Hicks became convinced that the government initiated the destruction of the compound by setting it on fire (he pointed to footage of a tank allegedly shooting fire into the compound as evidence) and then covered-up its actions. He also expressed disappointment with the various overseas bombing campaigns ordered by President Clinton and the Warren Commission explanation of the Kennedy assassination.

He played the final show of his career at Caroline's in New York on January 6, 1994. Bill moved back to his parents' house in Little Rock shortly thereafter. He called his friends to say goodbye before he stopped speaking on February 14, and died at 11:20 p.m. on February 26 of pancreatic cancer. Bill was buried on the family plot in Leakesville, Mississippi.

The Arizona Bay album, as well as the album considered his best, Rant in E-Minor, were released posthumously in 1997 by his friend Kevin Booth.

2000s

In 2003 the British newspaper The Guardian ran a story on Hicks, reporting that "Indeed far from fading away, as most comics tend to do, he was "becoming a bigger star with each passing year."

Hicks's catalog of released materials continues to grow, as Sane Man was re-issued on DVD in 2006 and received many positive reviews.

Quotations

• "I was told when I grew up I could be anything I wanted: a fireman, a policeman, a doctor-even President, it seemed. And for the first time in the history of mankind, something new, called an astronaut. But like so many kids brought up on a steady diet of Westerns, I always wanted to be the avenging cowboy hero-that lone voice in the wilderness, fighting corruption and evil wherever I found it, and standing for freedom, truth and justice. And in my heart of hearts I still track the remnants of that dream wherever I go, in my endless ride into the setting sun." (Opening voice-over to Hicks's Revelations special from 1993, also quoted in the last issue of the extremely dark, supernatural and frequently violent/humorous comic book Preacher)

• "I hate patriotism...I can't stand it, man-makes me fuckin' sick. It's a round world last time I checked." (Rant in E-Minor)

• "A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. Do you think when Jesus comes back, he's really going to want to see a fucking cross? Ow! Maybe that's why he hasn't shown up yet...it's like going up to Jackie Onassis wearing a sniper rifle pendant... Just thinking of John, Jackie. We love him. Trying to keep that memory alive, baby. [mimes shooting a rifle] I did that routine in Fyffe, Alabama, and after the show these three rednecks came up to me. 'Hey, buddy! C'mere! Hey Mr. Comedian! C'mere! Hey buddy, we're Christians and we don't like what you said!' I said 'Well, then forgive me.' Later, as I was hanging from the tree..." (Relentless video)

• "The world is like a ride at an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly coloured and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question: Is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, 'Hey - don't worry, don't be afraid ever, because this is just a ride ...' And we ... kill those people. Ha ha, 'Shut him up. We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real.' It's just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn't matter, because - it's just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead, spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace. Thank you very much, you've been great." [several gunshots ring out, Bill mimes being hit and falls to floor, motionless.] (Onstage closing comments of Hicks's Revelations special from 1993)

Legacy

Bill Hicks has had a far-reaching influence. Tom Waits, the prolific American singer-songwriter, composer and actor, said of Hicks and his work:

Bill Hicks-blowtorch, excavator, truthsayer and brain specialist, like a reverend waving a gun around. Pay attention to 'Rant in E Minor,' it is a major work, as important as Lenny Bruce's. He will correct your vision. His life was cut short by cancer, though he did leave his tools here. Others will drive on the road he built. Long may his records rant even though he can't.

In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, fellow comedians and comedy insiders voted Hicks amongst the top 20 "Greatest Comedy Acts Ever" at number thirteen. Likewise, in "Comedy Central Presents: 100 Greatest Stand-Ups of All Time" (2004), Hicks was ranked at number nineteen. Devotees of Hicks have incorporated his words, image and attitude into their own creations. Thanks to the technologies which enable audio sampling, fragments of Bill Hicks rants, diatribes, social criticisms and philosophies have found their way into many musical works. His influence on Tool is well documented, and the British band Radiohead's seminal 1995 album The Bends was dedicated to his memory (and to "Indigo").

In 1998, on the week of the fourth anniversary of his death, FOX aired The Simpsons episode "The Last Temptation of Krust" with Krusty performing an uncredited homage to him with two Hicks evangelists, Janeane Garofalo and Jay Leno. The movie Human Traffic referred to him as the "late, great Bill Hicks," and showed that the main character, Jip, liked to watch a bit of Hicks' stand-up before going out for a night to "remind me not to take life too seriously". Hicks even appears in the comic book Preacher, in which he is an important influence on the protagonist, Rev. Jesse Custer. His opening voice-over to the 1991 Revelations live show is also quoted in Preacher's last issue.

On 25 February 2004, British MP Stephen Pound tabled an early day motion titled "Anniversary of the Death of Bill Hicks" (EDM 678 of the 2003-04 session), the text of which was as follows:

That this House notes with sadness the 10th anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks, on 26th February 1994, at the age of 33; recalls his assertion that his words would be a bullet in the heart of consumerism, capitalism and the American Dream; and mourns the passing of one of the few people who may be mentioned as being worth of inclusion with Lenny Bruce in any list of unflinching and painfully honest political philosophers.

Audio

• Dangerous (1990)
• Relentless (album) (1992)
• Arizona Bay (1997)
• Rant in E-Minor (1997)
• Philosophy: The Best of Bill Hicks (2001)
• Love, Laughter and Truth (2002)
• Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1 (2002)
• Live at Oxford Playhouse, or Shock and Awe (2003)
• Salvation : Oxford November 11, 1992 (2005)

Video

• Sane Man (VHS, 1989 / DVD, 2005) - (Sample clips viewable here at Sacred Cow Productions.)
• One Night Stand (VHS, 1991 / DVD, 2002)
• Ninja Bachelor Party (VHS, 1991)
• Relentless (VHS, 1992 / DVD, 2006)
• Revelations (1993)
• Totally Bill Hicks (VHS, 1994 / DVD, 2002)
• Comprises the documentary It's Just A Ride and a live performance, Revelations
• Bill Hicks Live: Satirist, Social Critic, Stand Up Comedian (DVD, 2004)
• Comprises One Night Stand, Relentless, It's Just A Ride and Revelations