Bill Hicks's Principles of Comedy
giantrobotlasers.com
giantrobotlasers.com
# 1 - "If you can be yourself on stage nobody else can be you and you have the law of supply and demand covered." makes a heck of a mantra for life. If you try to be somebody else, at best you'll only ever come second.
People warned me this would happen if I kept blogging about my business, and it turns out they were right. I think I have two dopplegangers now. Turns out that if you're concentrating on beating your own previous best performance beating the performance of knockoffs of your own previous best performance isn't all that hard.
This is true for everything. I am constantly amazed at how many of my peers bitch about their customers and users while never doing anything to help them aspire to be what they can be.
Great interview for those who haven't seen it.
Yes!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PdKpR9qNtg
The guy was a pure, pure, foul and vile juveline. "Fuck" "turd" "cunt" "toilet". That's his humor.
Bill Hicks has been quoted by more than one famous comedian as an example and inspiration. Among his repertoire was toilet humour, yes, but he also was a razor-sharp critic of society, beliefs, values. He wasn't just a comedian, he also tried to make people think.
Grab a piece of paper. Draw four large squares on it in such a way that they form a bigger square.
Write "Clean" and "Dirty" alongside the squares on one axis and "Funny" and "Not funny" alongside the squares on the other axis.
Now, fill in the squares with the names of comedians who meet the criteria: clean and funny, clean and not funny, dirty and funny, dirty and not funny. I'm sure you can think of more than one for each square.
After this exercise is completed, consider that comedians make their money -- and like to be judged as comedians -- based on only one of these axes. I leave it as an exercise for the reader which axis.
Hicks performed for over 10 years - and covered a lot of ground during that time. If you see his performances as juvenile or foul, you've missed a lot of the brilliance, and humour that I have found in him.
For those curious about him though, here's a lazy link to youtube: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=videos&search...
"By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself".
Okay, that's a non-joke that you'd expect from a 13 year old. But he's setting the context, and maybe the best foot was not forward, so let's keep listening...
Okay, he keeps at that theme for awhile, repeating himself, and then uses the phrase "Satan's little helper" which I'm pretty sure he got off the simpsons, which he presumably was familiar with.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22satan%27s+little+helper%22...
(I could be wrong, as the vid isn't dated.) He then repeats himself a few more times and then says, "There's no joke coming" which I suspect is true. He then repeats himself a few more times adding the word "fuck" which is a word that stopped being daring on the stage right around Tennessee Williams' mid-career.
He then reiterates the past theme, as well as correctly stating again that there is no joke involved.
But then he gets to the first joke, about how the marketing people in the audience are probably interpreting his anti-marketing bit as in fact being pro-marketing. Okay, not funny, but at least it's a joke. He then performs several variations on that theme. End of bit.
.......
It doesn't do much good to critique comedy, but the point is: He's repetitive, he has an anti-establishment shtick that I find trite and unconvincing, his jokes are punctuated with gratutious vulgarities which are as informationally valuable as "hmm", "uh", "umm", "whu?", etc., and I sit there watching...and not laughing...ever. Which is the final test. It is possible to do blue comedy right, you know.
If you're immersed in a world of pro-establishment suckers, then his comedy provides some validation and relief. I remember what it's like to be a young kid and feel like my life is controlled by idiots, but I no longer feel that way. If you've been hanging around with worldly people who have read a little bit of history, or a little bit of anything really, then this kind of comedy just misses. I still know there are a lot of idiots in the world, but I no longer feel oppressed by them, so Bill Hicks seems beside the point.
Some of this reminds me of watching a George Carlin HBO special near the end of his life. There was one point where it seemed he was just ranting, just livid. He wasn't trying to be funny; it was like he just slipped out of the comedian role and into some raging maniac role. I have to figure that's just how he worked. It was personal, and deeply heart-felt, and sometimes that gets wild.
I'm sympathetic to your point of view though. When I first heard some of his routine I thought "This isn't funny at all, he's just shouting about stuff he dislikes". His style does grow on you. Also it's hard to get an impression of a comedian like Hicks through youtube videos. His comedy doesn't lend itself to one-liners and the top videos tend to be lowest common denominator stuff of what one-liners he did do.