Big news: Bar-rock singer and fake-Irish accent peddler Russell Crowe is to direct a film about the comedian Bill Hicks, hero to first year sociology students the world over. It’s a perfect match. A boring man who takes himself incredibly seriously interpreting the life of another boring man who took himself incredibly seriously.
I’m sure it’s gonna be a shitstorm. It’s bad news for all of us, because it means we have to listen to idiots droning on about how iconoclastic and awesome Hicks was. That claim may not have been totally ridiculous in the 90s but it is now. I’ll admit that there have been worse comedians–Gina Yashere, Lee Nelson, all the racist ones—but the smug reverence in which Hicks is held somehow makes him worse than them all. (Except the racist ones, except the racist ones!)
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My main gripe with him as a comic is that, while it’s very easy to agree with the general premise of most of what he says, it’s a whole lot easier to find the way he says it and what he says about it really fucking irritating. Or perhaps, like Jeff Buckley or Nick Drake, the problem is his overzealous and hopelessly earnest fans? Here’s a pissy list of other whiney complaints I have with the revered speaker of grand truths and ecstatic acid-fused Atlantis-to-wherever revelations:
BILL HICKS IS AN ENTRY-LEVEL COMIC FOR ASPIRING LEFT-WINGERS
Listening to Bill Hicks is like listening to a guy who’s just found out about Noam Chomsky. It’s the feeling of being trapped in a student house somewhere with a guy who has less of a tolerance to cocaine than you and is intent on telling you he’s read (half of) Manufacturing Consent along with some comment pieces on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Hey, did you know there’s injustice in the world? Did you know corporations are, like, bad? No, I didn’t. I’ve literally never heard this information before. Stop. Blowing. My. Mind. Now pass me the bong and the Michael Moore boxset and let’s get cracking. Have I told you about this thing called prejudice?
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