Big in Japan...

Bill was recently featured in this article from avclub.com about American cultural entities that found greater popularity overseas...

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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Bill Hicks Skull

Check out this interesting piece of Bill Hicks art by David Hollier. Available to buy for $85 -

Source

Disinfo's Bill Hicks Editorial Was Recently Reposted

Posted by Wes Moore on July 13, 2012

[disinfo ed.'s note: this original essay was first published by disinformation on February 20, 2002. Some links may have expired.]

“Thank you. How you doing folks? Me too. You gotta bear with me, I’m very tired, very tired of traveling, and very tired of doing comedy, and very tired of staring out at your vacant faces looking back at me, wanting me to fill your empty lives with humor you couldn’t possibly think of yourselves. Good evening.”

Bill Hicks: the Nietzsche of comedy, the most legitimate social critic of the 1990s: a renegade messiah who tried to make people laugh, but usually ended up pissing them off, or drawing blank stares.

Born in 1961, Hicks died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 32, just as his career was peaking. He left in his wake a legacy of biting criticisms against American society: no inadequacy or hypocrisy was immune to his scathing satires, but don’t take my word for it. For Christ sakes, if anyone demands our undivided attention, it’s Bill Hicks . . .

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The 7 Best Comedian Heckler Smackdowns—From Bill Hicks to Joe Rogan

Bill Hicks Flips and Drops the C-bomb

Watch Now

If you had your choice of comedians to heckle, Bill Hicks—a legendary comic known for his intense and enraged monologues on the hypocrisy of society—would be the very last man you’d want to incense. Apparently, the lady in the front row of this show didn’t get that memo, and boy does she soon regret it. In what can only be described as an outburst and diatribe of epic proportions, Hicks blasts this woman with every verbal insult known to mankind. And, along the way—in between physically flailing around the stage like a demonic pastor—the audible hiss of this poor woman’s deflated soul causes Bill to take a small reprieve after the oral assault: “I dug a real hole on this one, didn’t I?”

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Bill Hicks deserves a monument in Houston, DAMMIT

From Free Press Houston
Submitted by Editor on June 3, 2012 – 4:32 pm

The folks who organize FPSF are a sordid and disparate group of people who come from every different age and background. ( It may be a fact that we collectively have more felony convictions than college degrees.) But there is one commonality between all of us: We are all admirers of late great Houston comic-philosopher legend Bill Hicks. Hicks is one of the world’s most influential comics and the closest thing to a philosopher to ever come out of Houston. While in high school at Stratford, Hicks would sneak out at night to perform at downtown Houston comedy clubs. Yet despite being world renowned, there does not stand a single monument to this native son. We want David Addicks to build a statue of Bill Hicks and erect it AT ELEANOR TINSLEY PARK park as a tribute to the man who taught us to laugh at the absurd, question the dominant paradigm, and stick it to the man with a smile while chuckling. Help us spread the word about this. Donate to the cause.Tell your city council member that you support a Bill Hicks statue at Eleanor Tinsley Park. We will soon release donation and cost information on this project. STAY TUNED.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Letters of Note: Bill Hicks on Freedom of Speech

In May of 1993, deeply offended by its "blasphemous" content, a priest wrote to Channel 4 and complained about the recent screening of "Revelations," a recording of Bill Hicks's live show at London's Dominion Theatre some months before (a show which, incidentally, can be seen in its entirety here).

Upon receiving said complaint, Channel 4 passed it on to Hicks himself. Hicks then responded to the priest directly with the following letter. It doesn't disappoint.

(Source: Love All the People; Image: Bill Hicks, via The Quiet Front.)


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Soup Having Sex With Soup

Article taken from TruthDig.com

Posted on Jun 9, 2012

Mr. Fish

By Mr. Fish

“I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.”

–Andy Warhol

Bill Hicks, arguably the most existentially articulate comic id of the late 20th century, had a bit in his act where he talked about the bias that the news media had against illegal drugs; illegal drugs, of course, being a metaphor for anything that existed outside the miasma of mainstream influence and wasn’t directly controlled by elite institutions of corporate and state power. Pretending to be a television news anchor reporting on hallucinogens without prevarication, Hicks said, “Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration—that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we’re the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.”

What I appreciate about that quote is how it forces a person to consider the context wherein a concept of truth is typically placed for public consumption. Like all good satire, it illustrates just how insular and self-serving every hard-boiled notion of reality can become once it’s dropped into the confused bowl of electrified noodles that is the human brain, an organ famous the world over for its uncanny ability to acquiesce to whatever real or imagined authority it perceives to be blowing through the room at any given moment. How many of us, for example, have walked through the reptile house at the zoo and stopped to press our face against the glass of a terrarium and looked at the lizard lying as still as a root cresting the ground in the corner and thought that the cheesy landscape painted on the rear wall of the tank, along with the Sherwin-Williams sky and the Exo Terra Repti-Glo 10.0 Compact Fluorescent Desert Lamp pretending to be the sun, was enough to convince the captive animal that it was at home in the vast grasslands of Southern Australia? All of us have, of course, and not because we are too stupid to see through bullshit but rather because we like to think that the world is being managed by other people who know more than we do about all the complicated and boring crap that we don’t want to waste our time thinking about. When we imagine that there are other people in the world burdened with the responsibility of not letting bullshit run amok, we succumb to the illusion that we are being protected and shepherded along by a wisdom that isn’t really there. 

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