6. Bill Hicks in the UK
Although the Texas-bred Bill Hicks styled himself like a consummate vision of outlaw Americana—a chain-smoking, black-clad nexus of Lenny Bruce and Johnny Cash—he became the toast of Britain well before his home country caught on. By 1991, Hicks had already toured the U.S. club circuit for years, appeared on several TV specials, and released his first album, but he didn’t truly become the revered cult figure he is now until an appearance at Montreal’s Just For Laughs Festival made him a UK sensation. It certainly helped that Hicks “debuted” overseas having already honed his act, as did the fact that his specials, particularly the London-taped Revelations, aired repeatedly on British TV in their uncensored entirety, rather than in the bite-sized, sanitized form necessitated by U.S. talk shows. Hicks himself credited his UK popularity to the country’s eagerness to laugh at America, and cynically praised the UK’s more sophisticated sense of irony. Whatever the reason (and certainly it was a combination of all those factors), being bigger overseas allowed Hicks to think of himself as something of an expatriate, and you can’t get much more “outlaw” than that.
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