Who is bill hicks

Hicks is also renowned for his critiques of consumerist culture as well as a conspiracy-driven worldview that often manifested itself in jokes about the assassination of John F. Hicks died in Little Rock on February 26, He was buried in the family plot in Leakesville, Mississippi. For additional information: Billhicks. Booth, Kevin, and Michael Bertin.

Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution. New York: Harper Collins, Boulware, Jack. Lahr, John. Honor or memorial gifts are an everlasting way to pay tribute to someone who has touched your life. When a tribute gift is given the honoree will receive a letter acknowledging your generosity and a bookplate will be placed in a book.

For more information, contact or calsfoundation cals. Read our Privacy Policy. The first time you log in to our catalog you will need to create an account.

Creating an account gives you access to all these features. Go Back. And move on. Repeated a quarter of a century on, the remark stands as a fine example of the contrarianism the southerner was known for, but it also takes on a fresh resonance.

Taking offence has become a global pastime in recent years. We hungrily take to Twitter every morning to see which public figure has said the wrong thing overnight, about race or sexuality, and drawn a storm of condemnation. Such is the appetite for this moral tar-and-feathering that users were recently forced to turn to an archive Playboy interview with John Wayne from , for sustenance on a rare quiet day for indignation.

The prevailing climate would have provided plenty of ripe material for the fearless provocateur, whose primary theme was the hypocrisy and mendacity of those in power.

His observations took American hucksterism to task in all seriousness. You are the ruiner of all things good. Kill yourself. The point of his pro-drugs routines — born from years of cheery experimentation with everything from LSD to magic mushrooms and Quaaludes — was not to shock us with the surprise of his advocacy but to challenge our blind acceptance of an illogical status quo.

The cult of Bill Hicks — which began to thrive among British students in particular following the comedian's barnstorming run at the Edinburgh Fringe in — has already faced one heavy backlash since his death.

The war on drugs. You know what I love? A generation later, advertising is the air we breathe, our selves are our product. The fall people are always women, gay people, Iraqis. His routines deliver devastating one-liners to members of the hospitality industry. The problem, says Oldham, is that Hicks is quick to criticise Americans, society, the government, but seldom himself. For all its blind spots, however, Hicks seems to me more self-conscious, and more concerned with social justice, than Oldham gives him credit for.

So have we lost faith in comedians as preachers, prophets or harbingers of The Truth? That used to be what many people looked for in comedy. Similarly, in the 80s and 90s, Hicks might have been the only dissident voice his audiences encountered. Night is not only a smart, year-old purveyor of social-commentary standup, he is also the son of comedian Kevin Day, who once performed with Hicks.