Happy Birthday Bill Hicks!

Today my friend Bill Hicks would have turned 50. I only got to know him slightly, but he was a great influence on my comedy, and now years later my life. Hicks was a marvel to watch. Years ahead of his time, he walked into danger with every set and his audiences were treated to a true revolutionary. Let the other comedians stick to stale routines about celebrities and airplane food – Hicks would light out for the unchartered territories and let his audience find him by following the trail he blazed.

I miss Bill Hicks just about every day. But this isn’t going to be a maudlin oh woe is me kind of blog – Hicks would have grabbed me by the metaphorical lapels, blown smoke in my face and tell me to stop being such a whiny little bitch.

Stand up is not an easy way to make a living. A lot of crappy hack comics do manage to make a living by trotting out well-worn premises, but the real comedians who push the envelope and become social commentators are rare. That was Hicks, a rare individual who would make you laugh your ass off and then make you look at the world a little differently.

When Hicks came along and allowed me to orbit his world briefly, I was one of those “other” comics, basically a hack doing anything for a laugh. I was desperate for the laughs. Please love me audience while you nurse a beer through an entire evening of weak open mic comics. I did have the rare ability to get the audience to like me, and so was able to get away with weaker material.

I was afraid to take chances because if the six or seven people in the audience didn’t like me, I might not get hired to open for somebody you never heard of six months from now. I craved that validation. Among my contemporaries I was the first out of the shoot – I started getting steady work and that extra income went a long way to supplement my fairly meager salary. Two growing kids like to eat and they grew through clothes at an alarming rate. My day job barely covered the essentials, so if I could pick up some extra cash by entertaining drunks, well, that meant we could afford groceries AND electricity.

For some reason, Hicks saw something in me that I didn’t even see in myself. We talked one night at the Richmond Comedy Club that was upstairs over an Italian restaurant. It was a quiet night with only a couple of regulars scattered at three or four tables. Hicks sat at the bar talking to the manager of the club who had been a friend of his for years. On the way from somewhere to somewhere else he stopped off for a short time and was crashing on her couch.

After my set he waved me over and stubbed out his cigarette. Mostly we just chatted a little bit about the road (I was getting ready to do my first out of town trip) and he invited me to take him out to lunch while he was in town.

I wish I had recorded our conversations. Much of what he talked about centered around being funny, but being original. He talked about getting in touch with those dark corners in your mind, that those dark corners were far more interesting than the lighted uncluttered space that is most people’s lives. Today, when I teach either writing or stand-up, that is one of the rules I put out early, and those students who follow that advice accelerate their material considerably.

It wasn’t too much longer that Hicks was gone. Shortly after that he was diagnosed with the cancer that would eventually take his life.

So, just for today, to celebrate Bill’s 50th birthday, be fearless. Be daring. Be original. Find those dark corners and bring them out for everybody to see. You just might find that the things we consider evil within us are the things that make us human and connect us. Casteneda said that we are all made up of light, and that light connects us to the others in our life.

Of course Casteneda did do an enormous amount of peyote….

But we are all connected somehow, and as long as those things stay in the darkness, their hold on us grows. Break free and bring ‘em out.

They just might be funny.

Happy Birthday Brother Bill. Thanks for the years and the gift of laughter. You might have laughed at this, but I hope God holds you in the palm of His hand until we meet again and share a few laughs.