American: The Bill Hicks Story

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Everyone comfy?

Get comfy!

Get comfy!

Cos the show's about to start!

Who do you ever pay to talk?

Maybe a preacher.

Maybe a lecturer. Possibly a politician.

But even those rarely.

Comedians are the only ones

that you pay to hear 'em talk.

Talk to me, make me listen.

News is supposed to be objective.

Isn't it supposed to be?

The news!

But every drug story is negative.

Oh, well, hold it!

I've had some killer f***ing times on drugs.

Let's hear the whole story.

What Bill said will never change,

because it is the basic truths

and they are never wrong.

Plenty of people say

he is the best American comedian

the country has ever produced

and he was only 32 when he died.

- His influence lives on.

- Bill Hicks!

Get out. You're everything that America

should be flushed down the toilet.

You turd. Get out!

"Hey, buddy, we're

Christians. We don't like what you said."

I said, "Then forgive me."

# The sergeant sent me

and my men on a search

# He wanted us to go out

and get the lay of the land

# We were to find

# Any people who might be

# The enemies of man...

Free yourself, folks. You're right.

You're right. Not those f***ers

who want to tell you how to think.

You're f***ing right!

Sorry, wrong meeting. Again.

I keep getting my days mixed up.

From the moment I met Bill,

throughout our life, it was about laughs.

Cos I think our parents were just happy

being comfortable. "Can we just be quiet?

"And can we just go to church and be

distracted by our religion? It's orderly here. "

Growing up in that environment

you start to get a little antsy,

because clearly

there has to be something more.

Lyndon Johnson talked

about the great society back in the '60s

and I think he was keying into something

and that was

that America's so wealthy and powerful

that we have to do

something responsible with it.

We're gonna defeat poverty,

we're gonna do the Peace Corps

or we're gonna make the world a better place.

And then I think that Vietnam stalled that.

So the generation that Bill and I came out of

was, we were looking around going,

"Well, there's got to be something else

we can do with all this. "

Bill was, uh...

I don't know, I just... He was interesting.

All of my children were special.

I had a girl. I had only a girl.

Then I had a boy.

And then I had a baby.

There was definitely something there that was

different from Steve and Lynn growing up.

But Bill... You should have known him,

is all I can say.

They were so much older.

Five and seven years' difference

is a lot of difference.

You couldn't do anything with him.

He was too little at that point.

Bill was seven

when we got to Houston.

Then we stayed there 12, 13 years.

Yeah.

He was just another kid

playing sports, you know.

It wasn't evident yet

where his life was gonna go.

And, of course,

by then he had met Dwight.

What I noticed about him is

he was fast. He had a real strong constitution.

He could do things better and longer

than everyone else.

An unbelievable scrambler.

I was fast but I wasn't a very good scrambler

but I watched him and I just picked him apart

about what he was doing,

then I was scrambling all the way

to the end zone, no one would touch me.

After we'd played a few times,

I just remember everyone leaving

and us being alone

and me thinking to myself,

"I think this is gonna be a friend of mine."

The first time I ever met his parents,

Bill did not want to introduce me.

He just wanted me to go straight up the stairs.

He would look at me and just go, "Look,

don't talk to them. Just follow me upstairs. "

But of course, you know, an adult says,

"Hello therel Who are you?

You stop and you say, "I'm Dwight."

Bill's like, "Come onl"

You're stuck on the landing

between Bill at the top of the stairs

and you're at the bottom of the stairs.

And, "Well, just hold on. Where are you from?"

I go, "I live in Nottingham Forest too."

"What does your father do?"

"Works for Shell Oil." "Uh-huh?"

'Just leave him alonel" Bill's screaming at you

to come upstairs. "Come onl"

"Bill, would you just hold on?

I'd like to know who your friends are. "

"Aaahl What does it matter?

What does it matter?"

"Well, we're just curious.

Is there a problem we're being curious?"

When you reached his room, the door would

be closed and locked and you were safe.

I had told him that I wanted to be an actor

and he goes, "I'll show you

these jokes that I wrote. "

Because we were joking around so much, he

started saying we should be a comedy team.

It was completely alien to me.

I had no idea what a comic really was.

He told me that he'd seen Woody Allen

on Casino Royale.

This guy made his living being a comic,

and it really, really fired him up,

the importance of stand-up,

that society cherished its funny people.

And for Bill, he knew it. He knew that he was

gonna be the comic that shook people up.

His mom figured out how to pick the lock.

The door would open

and she'd be standing there with a butter knife.

"What are you doing?"

"I know you don't like me picking your lock

"but I am leaving

and you have not responded to me. "

"Well, don't ever unlock my door againl" Ppkkl

I'd never met anyone

who talked to his parents like that.

The Hicks family

is a very smart, intellectual family

yet there was this suspension of reason

when it came to certain issues.

We were raised Southern Baptist

and had to go to church every single Sunday.

It was just a strict household.

"You do this. You do that."

The one thing

I always wanted to get straight,

cos a lot of times it talks about, "The Hickses

were raised fundamentalist Christian.

"No, we were raised Southern Baptist

and that's much worse. "

And he's right, really.

That's just the way we lived then.

But hopefully what you're taught there

teaches you the spiritual,

and I don't mean religion.

I mean the basics of how to live a life.

So when I was 17, he was 10.

I was like, "Get me out of this house.

I want out. "

And off I went to college.

I rebelled. Steve, in his fashion, rebelled.

And Bill rebelled too.

Stand-up comedy was not on

the map in the '70s, for kids to want to be.

But we were very determined

and so we started to do

this very much guerilla-theatre type

of comedy amongst our friends.

This group of people's just standing around,

and you appear,

and you do an outrageous sketch

and then you disappear.

What the hell was that?

And, of course, once they got wind of it,

they wouldn't let us alone.

"Are you guys gonna do your thing?"

After school we would go over to his house

and we would plan them and write them

and they were like gigs to us.

And it wasn't lost upon us, the fact

that we already knew what we wanted in life.

This was what we were going to do.

You had to sacrifice your family,

your relationship with girls,

your popularity at school.

We were sacrificing everything for this.

And there was nowhere to do our craft.

There was no open mics.

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