All you need is love

Although the late, great, passionately anti-establishment US comic Bill Hicks deservedly earned a loyal cult following during his tragically brief 32 years, what Love All The People – a recently published collection of the Houston native’s correspondence, poetry and stand-up routines – conclusively proves is that the Czar of seditious humour was taken from us just as he was hitting his creative stride.

Hicks’ US media profile grew exponentially following his clash with the producers of CBS’ Tonight With David Letterman over a particularly contentious routine about the abortion debate. Hicks – ever the combative defender of liberal values – brilliantly upbraided the pompous self-righteousness of the ultra-conservative pro-life lobby, only to see his performance axed from the show, putatively on the grounds of its offensiveness to a large section of Letterman’s audience.
Although the programme’s producer, Robert Morton, tried to convince Hicks that his appearance had been dropped due to concerns from CBS’ office of standards and practices, closer analysis of the wider story suggested that Morton may have been more than a little insincere in his explanation. Although it was likely that the Letterman team would have earned a rebuke from the CBS authorities had they aired Hicks’ performance, the show’s producers were careful to remove the routine from the finished show before they’d even consulted network executives.
Additionally, a friend of Hicks pointed out that pro-life campaigners had shelled out considerable amounts of money to advertise during commercial breaks on Letterman’s show.
For Hicks himself, the entire affair was yet one more example of a monolithic institution surreptitiously dictating moral standards to the American public. In a letter to John Lahr (the London-based journalist whose New Yorker profile of Hicks around the time of the Letterman controversy was key in introducing the comedian to a wider audience, and who contributes a fine foreword to Love All The People), the comedian voices his concerns in characteristically eloquent and insightful fashion.
“I’ve finally been struck by the cold realisation that TV doesn’t want me, nor my kind,” he writes. “Just look at 90 per cent of television programming. Banal, puerile, trite scat. And this is what they want, for they hold the masses – the herd – in such contempt…
“The herd has been pacified by our charade of concern as we pose the most idiotic questions imaginable – ‘Is TV becoming too violent?’ and ‘Is TV becoming too promiscuous?’ The answer, my friends, is this – TV is too stupid. It treats us like morons. Case closed. Truly, the only stupid people I’ve ever met, the absolutely most clueless are the very people that produce television.”
As is often the case in these scenarios, the Letterman show’s censoring of Hicks served only to heighten interest in his work. Book, film and TV offers poured in. Sadly, however, it was also around this time that Hicks was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.
Of course, Hicks’ stand-up work was by no means exclusively concerned with broadcasting standards and pro-life campaigners. Reading over his old scripts and articles, it is truly remarkable to note how relevant much of his material still is to contemporary culture and society. Whether or not this is down to Hicks’ prescience or our own failures to learn from the mistakes of the past is open to debate, but the comedian’s penetrating observations continue to resonate with a rare degree of veracity.
One wishes, for instance, that Michael Martin would take five from promoting his own prime ministerial ambitions and consult Hicks’ views on the outrageous pomposity of careerist politicians: “I know that you non-smokers entertain some type of eternal life fantasy because you don’t smoke cigarettes. Well let me be the first to (makes exploding noise) pop that little fucking bubble and send you on the way with some little truth: you’re gonna die. OK. OK? Love ya! Shut the fuck up.
“And you know what doctors say: ‘Shit, if only you’d smoked. We’d have the technology to help ya.’ It’s you people dying from nothing that are screwed. I’ve got all sorts of gadgets waiting for me. Iron lung, oxygen tent, it’s like Christmas.”
Similarly, given that Mel Gibson’s production company is currently marketing nail-shaped pendants to promote The Passion Of The Christ, one could do worse than take on board Hicks’ legendarily jaundiced view of consumer culture: “Nothing is sacred to these fucks, man. I’m waiting to see: ‘It’s Jesus for Miller. I was crucified, dead for three days, resurrected, and waited 2000 years to return to earth. It’s Miller time.”
As mentioned previously, it is undeniable that Hicks was experiencing the most productive period of his career shortly before his untimely death. It is a particular shame that Counts Of The Netherworld never came to fruition, since the treatments reveal an extraordinarily imaginative project that would have given Hicks the perfect platform to articulate his views on love, religion, politics, media and much else besides.
Still, despite the cruelly unfulfilled promised of future projects, Love All The People – much like Hicks himself – has a defiantly upbeat tenor. He may have shuffled off this mortal coil at a ridiculously early juncture, but Bill Hicks nonetheless left behind one of the most bountiful bodies of work of any modern comedic artist.

Love All The People is published by Constable and is available in all good book stores priced E18.50