Sometimes it seems as if there are no interesting stand-up comedians anymore and the form has regressed back to the days before Lenny Bruce when comedians told jokes about their mothers-in-law and the uncleanliness of Frenchmen. Since the 1980s, stand-up has become nothing more than a farm club for the future stars of crappy sitcoms, with fewer and fewer relevant performers every year.
The new collection of the works of the late Bill Hicks, “Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines,” brings this dire situation to light. With a long career in stand-up but a relatively short time spent in the national spotlight, Hicks appeared to most audiences fully formed. With his razor-sharp wit and clear view of reality, he created some of the most astute social commentary of the late 1980s and early ’90s. He died of cancer in February 1994, cutting short a career that seemed destined for great things.
“Love All the People” outlines Hicks’ philosophy and provides insight into his satirical world view.
A self-described “misanthropic humanist,” Hicks took aim at ignorance, blandness and hypocrisy wherever he saw it. The book is chock full of Hicks’ barbed insights as he discusses the war on drugs, television (“Lucifer’s dream box”), the Kennedy assassination and the first President Bush. (“People ask me where I stand politically. It’s not that I disagree with Bush’s economic policy or his foreign policy, but that I believe he is a child of Satan here to destroy the planet Earth. Yeah, I’m a little to the left on that one.”)
“Love” contains just about everything a die-hard Hicks fan would need of the man’s writing, but that is the problem. This is essentially a book for die-hards and even on that level it won’t fully satisfy. The transcripts are for acts that have been released on CD, meaning all of the performances contain material most fans are already familiar with. And since the performances only cover a period of a few years, material is often repeated. This means readers have to trudge through up to three or four variations on the same comedic riff. The transcripts also suffer from the simple fact that you are reading them rather than hearing them. Because Hicks’ delivery was just as important as the material itself, much of the humor fails to come through.
Looking through the material collected for the work, it also becomes apparent that the subtitle is misleading. The letters and lyrics make up only a few pages of the actual text. Of these, only a couple of the letters in which Hicks defends himself against Christians offended by his material are of any interest. And
because only Hicks’ responses are published, the arguments lack context.
A big chunk of the book is made up of magazine articles, some dating back to Hicks’ senior year of high school, when he was one of the youngest performers on the Texas stand-up scene. A few of these hold passing interest, but in general they provide little that is new and less that is worth republishing. An original script for Hicks’ planned-but-aborted BBC series is worth a look, but overall the book seems to lack relevant material with which its intended audience is not already familiar.
What the book does offer is a chance to view Hicks’ work as a whole. Through this, his views on life and existence are given a well rounded presentation. Though cynical and as bitter as three-day-old coffee, his outlook in the end is a hopeful one. One might even come out of it believing that it is possible for a stand-up comedian to be a relevant cultural figure with something important to say.

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