God Wept

In the Hicks documentary It's Just a Ride, Letterman aired his regrets about the treatment of the censored comic and said it was unfortunate that the comedian died before amends could be made. But in November 1993, fresh from being vindicated in a lengthy feature by John Lahr in The New Yorker, Hicks appeared on a Wayne's World-esque show on access TV in Austin and announced he was done with network TV because of the Letterman debacle. It seemed like a tough decision at the time, but what no one except his immediate family knew was that Bill Hicks was dying.

Activist Jerry Rubin once said that the most oppressed people are in the white middle-class, because they've got nothing to rise up and fight against. But Hicks, raised in the affluent Nottingham Forest subdivision of West Houston, had plenty to rebel against in a world he called "the third mall from the sun."

The cliche often used to describe the suburban family is that it contains 2.3 children -- and in the case of the Hicks family, Bill was the .3. The third and final child, Bill often took a book to the dinner table and read as he ate. When we was done, he'd go back up to his room and close the door.

On the outside, quite literally, everything looked pristine with the Hicks family. "They used to have a contest for Yard of the Month in our neighborhood," says brother Steve Hicks, shedding some light on a regular Hicks topic. "And after a while they just left the sign at our house year-round. My father's a master gardener, and our lawn was always perfect."

Besides his father's love of his lawn, another staple of Bill's early routines was the family car trips he hated. "We couldn't get along together in a five-bedroom house," Bill would say. "My dad's idea was to pack us all in a car and drive for hours through the desert during the hottest time of the year. Good call, Dad: Let's confront our tensions."

When Hicks complained of the heat, he said, his father would refuse to turn on the air conditioner because it ate up gas. "Take my college money, then, and turn on the a/c, buddy," Hicks would shoot back in his act. "I'm not going to end up a sunstroked Mongoloid just so you can save two fucking cents a mile." He also riffed on his mom's nonstop talking. "I've been listening to you for ten hours now, and I've got a serious question," Bill would say. "Do you know anyone who doesn't have a fucking tumor?!"

But, of course, that was only in his act. Off-stage, Hicks couldn't use any bad words, even those of the d and h variety, around the house. "Bill's parents were strict Southern Baptists, and he was real rebellious," says friend Dwight Slade, Hicks's first stand-up partner, who's now a comedian based in Portland, Oregon. "There were problems."

It was Woody Allen who first showed Hicks how to turn his despair into yucks. "In the eighth grade, Bill saw Woody Allen in Casino Royale and he liked how bizarre he looked," Slade recalls. "Then we ran across [Allen's] book Without Feathers, and that sealed it. We knew that we had to write jokes, to work on material.

"When we were about fifteen, everybody knew us as comedians. So some kids would come up and say, 'You gotta hear the new Richard Pryor album. He says fuck and calls himself a nigger.' And me and Bill were going, 'That's funny?' Then the movie Blazing Saddles came out, and everyone was raving about the farting-round-the-campfire scene, and we were like, 'That's so juvenile.' Even though we were in the tenth grade, we took comedy very seriously." By the next year, Hicks was heavily into a Pryor phase.

At sixteen, Hicks started playing the Comix Annex in Houston, where the top comedian was Sam Kinison. Dubbing Hicks "The Little Prince," Kinison took the teen under his ample wing. After Hicks graduated from high school his parents wanted him to go to college, but he wanted to move to L.A., where his comedy career could take off. Mary and Jim Hicks eventually relented, but only after Kinison came over for dinner and convinced them that Bill had a great future as a standup. "Okay," Bill's parents said. "We'll give you four years, just like if you were at college." So his parents paid his "tuition" to learn comedy.

"My dad always said that he hoped someone like Bob Hope would discover Bill and show him the ropes, but instead he had Sam Kinison," Steve Hicks says. "My parents just didn't understand this new shocking comedy. To them, comedy was Bob Hope."

One of Hicks's strengths from the beginning was in offering fresh takes on tired topics such as sex, drugs, and rock and roll. More a philosopher than a joke teller, Hicks was that rare comedian who'd lived in both L.A. and New York, yet didn't have in his repertoire a bit about how the two cities are different.