American: The Bill Hicks Story

In an age of anodyne comedy in which smug, arrogant put-downs, anecdotal, whimsical banter and crass moronic observation are the bread and butter of stand-up comedy, Bill Hicks is desperately missed. American: The Bill Hicks Story charts the story of the comic from his early beginnings of sneaking out of his family’s home at the age of 13 to do stand up to his later raging and perfectly formed monologues on, in his own words, ‘everything your parents hate, everything the church preaches against, everything the government fears’.

The film is structured around the memories of Hicks’ family and friends coupled with animation and archive footage to piece together a coherent narrative of Bill Hicks’ rise to cult status as a no-nonsense comic voice and social critic raging against the machine. There’s ample archive footage throughout American: The Bill Hicks Story that bears witness to Hicks’ intense stand-up performances. His anger, disgust, and apathy is plain to see in the footage used from his stand up and is always coupled with a deadly delivery that, at times, is like a bullet into the brain.

He raged at a US political system that constantly exhibited ‘a totalitarian government’s ability to, you know, manage information’. His paralleling of the US’s imperialist tactics with Jack Palance’s psychopathic gunslinger in Shane is a sublime exercise in potent comic delivery.

He spits venom at ‘Satan’s little helpers’ who work in advertising or marketing berating them and imploring them to ‘Kill yourself. Seriously. It’s the only way to save your soul, kill yourself. Rid the world of your evil machinations.’

His routines were fuelled by his anger at mediocrity and banality within the media and popular culture, referring to them as oppressive tools of the ruling class, in place to ‘keep people stupid and apathetic’. His ‘I want my rock stars dead’ routine is a chilling slice of dark humour.

Behind this anger you detect a great sadness and heartfelt disappointment at the world around him. He saw lies being peddled by hypocrites everywhere around him. Hicks’ message was, at its simplest, a plea for authenticity.

Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas, the filmmakers behind this documentary, are certainly not afraid to wear their admiration for Hicks on their sleeves and you won’t find any challenging voices here – some critics have accused Hicks of being misogynistic, harbouring a deep resentment towards those people not as educated or informed as he was, and ranting to the detriment of humour. All the voices heard throughout the film belong to Hicks’ family and close friends and all serve the filmmakers’ objective of the canonisation of his cult.

Despite this, American: The Bill Hicks Story is a valuable document of an important voice in comedy as well as beyond it. For people familiar with his work, the documentary works as an intimate testament to his career. For people not so familiar, the documentary provides an absorbing insight into his vision and ample reason to go out and seek his work, such as Bill Hicks Live DVD, which contains 3 of his finest live performances. Hicks died of pancreatic cancer in 1994 at the age of 32. It’s a shame we’ll never see what direction his career would have taken. One thing’s for sure, the targets he levelled his acerbic vitriol at are as ubiquitous as ever and you feel for sure that he never would have run out of material.

Best to end with Hicks himself, who once imagined a news broadcast that, instead of scaremongering, featured a positive drug-related story for a change: ‘Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death; life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves… Here’s Tom with the weather!’

(American: The Bill Hicks Story is released 14th May, 2010)

Film Ireland