American: The Bill Hicks Story

Everyone 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 fucking 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 fuckers who want to tell you how to think.

You're fucking 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.

Lindon 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 there! Who are you?

You stop and you say, "I'm Dwight." Bill's like, "Come on!"

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 alone!" Bill's screaming at you to come upstairs. "Come on!"

"Bill, would you just hold on? I'd like to know who your friends are."

"Aaah! 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 again!" Ppkk!

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. There was nothing in 1970s Houston, Texas.

As a backdrop to all this is how we met Kevin Booth.

Bill and I just thought that Kevin was hilarious,

just cos he was this technical genius who could build things and blow things up.

I was known as the instigator and a facilitator.

You know, if you had an idea for something, I would go out and figure out how to build it.

You know, the fact that he was able to get his parents' RV and hook up a generator

and then set up speakers and play rock'n'roll

to the Spartanaires as they were practising their routines.

Thatjust was like classic Kevin.

Because of this ranch,

I was able to get what's called a hardship driver's licence when I was 14

without even like taking any lessons.

I just thought the two of them were hilarious. It was like a new breed of person.

They did all this weird stuff,

and I guess we just started talking about music all the time.

We wanted to be rock stars,

thinking like this was gonna be our way to break out of suburbia.

Bill was like, "Let's go look at these guitars downtown."

I'd never driven downtown before,

I was like, "OK, I guess I'm game for this, if you guys are gonna navigate the way."

He goes, "Did you see the paper today?"

He goes, "A comedy workshop has opened up and they have open mic."

"open mic stand-up?" "Yes."

oh, my God. Finally.

So we drove to downtown.

On our way back we passed this place called the Comedy Workshop in Montrose.

Bill and Dwight were like, "That's that place we've been reading about."

We couldn't believe it,

that something like this had happened in our own backyard.

And we realised that now we had a real chance. We could actually be comics.

Most entertainers have to deal with the fact, "I've got to get to LA or Hollywood,

"I got to take acting lessons, I got to get head shots."

What's our problem? We can't go out on school nights.

I remember my father sitting me down

and going, "Look, you're not going down to a nightclub in Houston, Texas."

Man.

We were strict. We wanted to know where they were.

And we wanted to know when they were going to get home.

And if they didn't give us the answer we wanted, we told them what we wanted.

Bill and I talked about it and he said, "We have to do it",

and I was like, "Absolutely."

The question was, "How are you gonna get down there on a school night?"

When you're in Bill's bedroom looking out,

if you hop that fence, you are in the parking lot of the catholic church.

You could open the window, but there also was a storm window,

and he became just very efficient at getting that thing open and getting out that window.

You had to be quiet cos the roof was right above where their kitchen was.

The evil catholic boy with his 14-year-old driver's licence

was sitting there in the catholic getaway wagon

ready to take the Baptist boy down to the Comedy Store.

We'd never been in a nightclub,

but when we walked in it was like, "Whoa! The whole thing is set up for comedy."

And there was chairs and they were all pointed at the stage

and this was what it was all about.

We did the first fewjokes and it started working.

I think everybody was very receptive to it

because they were like these little kids trying to be a part of this adult world.

When Bill first started, you could see Woody Allen.

He actually had the Woody Allen mannerisms a bit. But that's not a bad thing.

If you keep doing it and you don't grow out of it, that's a bad thing,

but you can tell when a comic first starts who his influence may be.

Bill and I got off stage and we were flying. We had done well.

It was beyond... You know, the exhilaration was just...

It was just, here we go, we're real comics.

And then the shit hit the fan.

Cos Mrs Hicks calls Scott's mom, says, "Is Bill over there?"