No post body was provided.
The Goat Boy Rises (1993)
11–20 of 60 posts
Re: The Goat Boy Rises (1993)
#12No post body was provided.
Re: The Goat Boy Rises (1993)
#13Quoted post unavailable.
> congratulate themselves for being smarter than the rubes they're laughing at
Like you're doing now, I suppose. One hopes you find your perspective of today judged in 2050 with more charity than you bother showing here.
Re: The Goat Boy Rises (1993)
#14Quoted post unavailable.
When the hell did Bill Hicks ever tell anyone to vote for anyone? It's been a minute since I listened to his shows, granted, and it's not as if he's still around to care. But don't you think it would behoove you at least to make sure you know what you're talking about here?
Re: The Goat Boy Rises (1993)
#15Quoted post unavailable.
you know all comedy is kind of stupid, and if it is ever smart it's bad comedy. all comedy will also be stale some decades later.
Re: The Goat Boy Rises (1993)
#16Sometimes I find these kinds of link submissions pretty baffling. "Here's a nearly 30 year old article about a dead comedian!" Thanks, I guess. But also: why? Why this arbitrary New Yorker article, as opposed to any other article written in the last three decades?
Apparently a lot of people around here like Bill Hicks, and why not? He was a brilliant comedian, and maybe the most viciously accurate (and just vicious!) satirist there ever was of the grossly self-satisfied smugness that typified post-1989 American culture. He was easily worthy of being remembered alongside Carlin and Williams, and I think would've been had he not died of cancer just as his career was starting to really take off.
You can find a lot of his stuff, full shows as well as excerpts, on YouTube, and I'd recommend doing so. You'll find your question better answered there than here.
Re: The Goat Boy Rises (1993)
#17Quoted post unavailable.
That seems fairly reductive for such a wide breadth of work and influence, especially given the context that the US is and always has been essentially a two-party system. In such a system you’re either one, the other, or irrelevant.
Re: The Goat Boy Rises (1993)
#18Quoted post unavailable.
Chomsky calls out pretty much all past presidents (Dem or Rep) as war criminals.
Re: The Goat Boy Rises (1993)
#19Quoted post unavailable.
* In 2022 this kind vacuous, self-congratulatory pseudo-intellectualism typical to 90s stoner culture is just so stale and irrelevant*
I'd say 30 years later his material is a little more obvious but being 30 years ahead of the curve is a pretty nice compliment. In my State pot is now legal, some psychedelics are decriminalized (and small amounts of any illegal drug is no longer a felony), and my partner does intense therapy on MDMA (via legal trials). We may not be living with Bill Hicks presently, but we live more in Bill Hicks's hopeful future than ever before.
There are lots of 90's comics that are now pretty irrelevant, but Hicks ain't one of them. He wasn't trying to be universally loved, which may be what you're hitting against. He also wasn't positioning himself out as some super intellectual. He self-identified as being simply a, "dark poet". Being a comic was - and is, a pretty tough gig.
Re: The Goat Boy Rises (1993)
#20>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 at CBS’s Ed Sullivan Theatre, where Letterman is now in residence, and where Elvis Presley was famously censored in 1956. Presley was not allowed to be shown from the waist down. Hicks was not allowed to be shown at all. It’s not what’s in Hicks’ pants but what’s in his head that scared the CBS panjandrums.
Note what qualified as "censorship" to The New Yorker in the 90s.