Patton Oswalt on Bill Hicks

On the anniversary of Bill Hicks' death, Patton Oswalt published the introduction he wrote to a new edition of Hicks' biography that never saw print.

Which is what makes Bill Hicks’ achievement all the more miraculous, when you put his comedy into the context of the time he did it. Lenny Bruce had to punch through an icy wall of Eisenhower-era repression. But Bill Hicks had to make his voice heard through the amorphous, ever-shifting fog of Reagan-era comfort and complacency. Comedy club audiences in the 80’s actually thought they were being revolutionary and dangerous, listening to a sport-coated, sleeves-rolled-up comedian railing against the absurdities of airplane food, the plot holes on Gilligan’s Island and the differences between cats and dogs. Like Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout, laying down world-saving truths in the pages of disposable stroke magazines, Bill Hicks was trying to light the way into the 21st century – on the stained-carpet stages of strip mall chuckle huts, usually following a juggler.

I wrote about Hicks and lot more in this rambling piece (that I consider a sea change in what I am trying to accomplish here). I said,

Hicks talking about inbred Southerners in a black duster was just a flip of your standard Eighties comic in shirtsleeves and a square-bottomed tie talking about the fags. Even the stereotypical comic might end his set with a bit of maudlin talk, maybe about the unhappiness in the world and his chance to brighten everyone’s day, just as Hicks would pepper his act with syncretic references to a cosmic consciousness.

Oswalt says that audiences in the 80s thought they were seeing something "revolutionary and dangerous" but I think he's being blinded by stand-up comedy's own bullshit.

For one, did 80s audiences go out looking for something revolutionary and dangerous? Not in comedy clubs. Comedy clubs are the last vestige of the old dinner-and-a-show supper clubs--they were a mainstream pursuit.

For another, Oswalt doesn't remember that the 80s was the last era in which America had a mass audience. The urge to find something alternative, revolutionary, counter-cultural was a tiny part of the landscape. It wasn't until the 90s that the attitude of disdaining the mainstream landed in the mainstream. The comic with his sport coat's sleeves rolled up was taking on the image of what the mass audience thought was cool and was trying to entertain and win over that mass audience with twists on experiences everyone shared.

Hicks' innovation was in polarizing the audience, on the premise that it was better to have half the audience adore you rather than have the whole audience think you're just okay. What he did was turn to the progressives in the audience and said, "Aren't those non-progressives stupid?" One half of the room said, "Hell, yes!" while the other half said, "We paid money for this?"

The result is that the stand up world is still divided between traditional comics and the descendants of the alt-comedy scene. The latter, especially Oswalt, are dominant in the media but it appears that the mainstream comics make the most money. Stand-ups are not entirely polarized within the industry and usually have respect for whoever has built an audience but you can draw a line between those you might imagine guesting in an Adam Sandler movie and those that might show up on Adult Swim. The division was already on its way--Hicks was just the loudest, angriest and came first.