(1993-11-01) Bill Hicks Rising

Bill Hicks Rising. On October 1st, the comedian Bill Hicks, after doing his twelfth gig on the David Letterman show, became the first comedy act to be censored

his real comic self in the banned Letterman performance

which he wrote out for me in a thirty-nine-page letter that also recounts his version of events. Hicks had to write out his set because the tape of it, which the Letterman people said they’d send three weeks ago, had not yet reached him.

The word in the Green Room was also good. A couple of hours later, Hicks was back in his hotel, wearing nothing but a towel, when the call came from Robert Morton, the executive producer of the Letterman show, telling him he’d been deep-sixed.

“Your audience! Your audience is comprised of people, right? Well, I understand people, being one myself. People are who I play to every night, Bob. We get along just fine

the decision was solely that of the producers of the program who decided to substitute his performance with that of another comedian

The farce came full circle in the week following the Letterman debacle. A friend called Hicks to tell him about a commercial she’d seen during the Letterman show—a pro-life commercial. “The networks are delivering an audience to the advertisers,” Hicks said later. “They showed their hand. They’ll continue to pretend they’re a hip talk show.

Goat Boy is Pan, or Hicks’ version of him—a randy goat “with a placid look in his eyes, completely at peace with nature”—through which he celebrates his own rampaging libido.

When I was about eleven, it dawned on me that I didn’t like where I was,” he said, speaking of the subdivision where he lived, which was called Nottingham Forest; of Stratford High School, which looked like a prison and where he was bored out of his skull for four years; and of his father, who was a midrange executive with General Motors. The Hicks family lived in “strict Southern Baptist ozone.”

“We were living the American dream. This was the best life had to offer. But there was no life, and no creativity. My dad, for instance, plays the piano. The same song for thirty years—I think it’s ‘Kitten on the Keys.’ I don’t play the piano, but all my friends are musicians. My dad goes, ‘Do they read music?’ I go, ‘No.’ ‘Well, how do they play it?’ I go to the piano and I write a song. What’s the difference? He can’t improvise. That, to me, is the suburbs. You get to a point, and that’s it—it’s over.”

As Hicks was about to go, he said, “We are facilitators of our creative evolution. We can ignite our brains with light.”