
Annons
Here’s Bill’s famous take on marketing and advertising. Now, I’m not an apologist for advertisers or marketeers. I realise that most of them are so used to talking shit that they no longer notice the taste of it on their tongues. I also realise that if they didn’t exist, no one would pay me to write (no big shame, I’m sure) and no one would really read the things I then wrote. The same goes for Bill’s comedy. But the main problem is that there’s no subtlety here; it’s just a mean-spirited sledgehammer. Telling people to kill themselves isn’t effective comedy. It’s not even effective anger. It’s just sloganeering. In the Bob Dylan song “My Back Pages”, Dylan sings about how he was “so much older then” but that he’s “younger than that now”. He was talking about his move from the simple, political chanting of his early days to the more nuanced approach he took once he’d moved away from Pete Seeger and the anti-electric folk police. That’s the problem with Bill, unlike his visionary heroes, Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, he couldn’t recognise a world that wasn’t entirely black and white.
Annons
This is the problem with Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais as well. It’s not difficult to pick on creationists, they’re obviously either just naturally incredibly stupid or the unfortunate victims of a moronic culture. Attacking them is like stealing a bone from a confused but truculent dog. I recognise that because I’m not American I don’t have to deal with creationists in the same way, but still, people have been attacking religion for thousands of years and they’ve thought of much better ways of doing it than simply stating the beliefs of the stupidest believers and then pulling a face. That shit may fly in Texas, when you’re an upcoming comic obsessed with your own religious background, but it shouldn’t fly here.
GOATBOY
This is essentially what Adam Sandler does. No-one thinks Adam Sandler is a visionary genius. They think he’s a grown man who wears a nappy.I don’t know, maybe the problem with him is that he could’ve been good or he could’ve been interesting.Which isn’t so badand it’s not like he was a corporate lackey or a racist or any of the other terrible things comics can be. He was just unbearably smug and that got in the way of anything interesting he had to say.Follow Oscar on Twitter: @oscarrickettnow