Bill Hicks…

I’ve just finished reading a book entitled Love All The People… which was given to me by the Other Woman last year.

As I’m now cycling into work I am bereft of Tube time to read so I’m devouring less literature than usual, but I got round to reading this last week and I’m glad I did.

The book is a compendium of comedy routines, interviews, lyrics, articles and letters by Bill Hicks and it offers a fascinating and entertaining route into the world of one of the US’s most influential comedians.

Hicks had been a stand-up comedian since his early teens but in a very successful gigging career of 15 years he never got the big TV breaks in the US. This was essentially because American TV executives considered his material, which included routines on the hypocrisy of far-right Christian zealots, corrupt US politicians, the pro-life lobby and the evils of a corporate-led and consumer-driven society, too risky for Middle America.

But as Hicks pointed out when one of his guest spot routines was infamously pulled from the David Letterman Show for this very reason, he’d played shows in Middle and every other part of America for 15 years so he knew they understood jokes there too.

Hicks did, however, find instant fame and acceptance in the UK where he could deliver his material and his views uncut on TV – and unmeddled with by the raft of TV executives who caused him so much trouble on the Letterman show.

Sadly the show he was working on with Channel 4 never saw the light of day as Hicks died in February 1994 at the age of 32 from cancer – and, to paraphrase a famous Hicks joke, we have proof that injustice exists in the world when John Lennon, Martin Luther King and Bill Hicks are dead and Coldplay, George Bush and Ben Elton are still going strong.

Hicks may have been something of an outlaw comedian with a dark side in his time, but his book is a life-affirming, thought-provoking and entertaining read.