America's Comedy Monsters Go Head-To-Head On CD
Yet both have a downside as well: both are porn fixated, both talk about the poverty of their sex lives and both tend to complain about it in public. Yet these are merely inroads to their original messages: Hicks talked about not getting laid because it allowed him to talk about wife-beaters whose wives keep going back to them. Leary blames bad sex on his small dick, attacking the macho baloney by using himself, or rather his stage persona, as an example.
Where Hicks and Leary really diverged was in their techniques and tools in attacking what they saw as the worst aspects of universal stupidity. Leary is the wise-ass at the end of the table, pricking the bubble of moron culture by coming on like John Wayne. He's a leather-wearing, drinking, smoking, one-of- the-guys kind of comedian, who points out by example what is worst around him. He's a satirist, savaging the macho working class culture that he grew up in so that it may change for the better.
Bill Hicks was never that subtle. Bill was at war. In some ways, it's easy to imagine that Bill just hated everyone and everything, handing down jokes like ancient lore. But that was all superficial and an idea that he himself discredited. He refers at one point to "the comedy of hate", but it was never hating people per se: it was hating what people stood for, like small-mindedness and selfishness, bigotry and violence. If he could have destroyed what he called the cracker mentality overnight with one small pill, then he would have quite happily been the philosophical equivalent of Jim Jones.
What Bill hated the most was himself, taking the worst of the world upon his own shoulders. There's an extraordinary degree of self-hatred that flows out of his material, an almost flagelistic side in which he relished talking about his own weaknesses: pornography, drugs and all his hobbies that would have drawn enough flack from liberals and right wingers alike. Yet the biggest failure for himself was his inability to change the world that he loved. Find any interview with any friend of Hicks and they'll all say the same thing: he was a visionary, deeply and desperately in love with everyone, convinced of the ability to redeem that is implicit in everyone. There's as much of the revivalist meeting about Hicks as there is comedy.
Yet both men use comedy as a tool, rather than an end in its own right. Leary makes his point through his stage persona, which is as much act as truth: a good gag is a joy to him, from which the point can be extracted. Hicks, however, almost regarded the joke as a barrier to his communication: if you're laughing, you may miss the message. Sometimes he even savaged his comedic successes, saying bitterly at one point "oh, good, the clown got the laugh".
Tragically, the most telling comment made by Dennis Leary doesn't make it on to the CD. Track down the video of No Cure For Cancer and you'll find him talking about the birth of his first child and how all he's trying to change the world to make it a better place. It's a brief moment, when the man behind the routine appears, and the mask comes up quickly, but it's still enough to show those that believe him to be just a right-wing whinger that he's just bothered about how things are.
What makes it on to No Cure For Cancer is his straight-on comedy. Leary's act is built around scorn, attacking the low-tide of American culture that came through in the 80s and 90s. With tracks entitled drugs, rehab, more drugs, smoke, meat and death, he comes up with the most incredible macho swagger. This is guy comedy, talking shit about beer, porno and who's dad could take who's dad. Fake intellectualism and snobbery are fair game as well, as the American psycho-therapy culture of apologists, takes a sever slapping. While still conventional in some ways, it's got more than enough vitriol to grease the wheels.
Bill Hicks had already turned out two albums by this point, Relentless and Dangerous. For those that get easily confused, the Relentless set is what turned up on video as Dangerous but that's a whole different story. Contentwise, it's Hicks at his most overtly funny, with his message as almost a sub-text. He's relishing the work and the audience, but it's the enthusiasm of youth, a youth that thinks it can avoid all the horrors of old age. Life may be crappy, but it can be made to improve.
Yet there was a point when Bill sounded happy and that's during the recording of Arizona Bay. His audience was big, international acclaim was imminent and people seemed to really be listening to him. Add on to this the fact that Bush had gone and it looked like people may be ready to actually here the message.
For the Hicks purist, there's only one album worth talking about: Rant In E-Minor. Released posthumously, compiled from a pair of his last ever performances, recorded six months before his appallingly premature death from pancreatic cancer in 1994. Bill made no attempt to play to the audience: this isn't a comedy routine, it's an explosion of vitriol. "Where's Bill going? He's going to comedy death!", throwing as more insult than comedy. It's the sound of a man that knows he's dieing and hasn't got it all done yet. There's so much to say and there's no time left. It's scarcely cogent, but as a full-on assault on everything that he had ever hated: stupidity, bigotry, intolerance, nationalism and the entire cracker culture he had always railed against. He was on a one-way path, and there was nothing left to do apart from rush head on into it. So what if they don't laugh? It's got to be heard.
Don't worry if this sounds like a joke-free manifesto. If Bill could have changed life without using jokes, he probably would have gone into politics: but comedy poured out of him. He seems to resent it, as if it gets in the way of what he needs to say, but he can't avoid being hilarious.
To be realistic, it took a further four years for Dennis Leary to even come close to what Bill managed, both in terms of darkness, originality and vibrancy. Although more commercially successful than Hicks, he had always been comedicly in his shadow (plus some would make comments on who did some of the Elvis material first, but that's a whole different question). Yet Lock'N'Load takes the whole comedy experience to a whole new level. Even at his best, Hicks' releases are just a recording of a live show: Lock'N'Load was conceived of as much more of an audio experience, like a Revolting Cocks album with more gags. All the old material about Catholics, the New York Irish and the destruction of simple pleasures like coffee and smoking in public places crop up, but presented in a radical new way. Now 40, Leary is faced with the fact that he's seen just about everything and still hasn't matured, so the mischievous Puck within is given full control. The end result is like a self-tuning radio, flicking from stand-up routines to hilarious Elvis pastiche, culminating in the full-on vitriolic roar of the title track, a semi-industrial anti-Papist rant, firmly accusing the Roman Catholic church of every vile crime of though and deed that it's got away with in this century. Christians need not apply.
There's only one down-side to all of this. Bill Hicks is dead. He had so much left to say and maybe more of it would have stuck in the minds of more people. Like Andy Kaufman and Lenny Bruce, or even John Belushi or Chris Farley, it seems that there was a trade-off: either you can be full-on or you can live longer. It seems Hicks new this and accepted the cost. This is all we've got. Leary, previously the lieutenant, is now the brevet general, handing out passion and warfare against the status quo while self-serving, middle-class, low-intellect fuck-weeds like Eddie Izzard. The term, I would suggest, is corporate whore and when we have a culture that has something going for it, I'll allow you to make jokes about how funny it is that we learn funny phrases in school. Listen to these guys and remember that there's still a war on: forget them, and you become a collaborator. End of lesson.
Four Bill Hicks CDs are available on Rykodosc - Dangerous, Relentless, Arizona Bay and Rant in E- Minor
Dennis Leary has released two albums on A&M - No Cure For Cancer and Lock'N'Load
RMW