The greatest comedians, the ones who turned stand-up into a true art form, have shared a characteristic that might be called an extreme allergy to falsehood. Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor — no matter what, they told the truth and then paid the price of having to make it funny somehow.

In order to do that, one has to first recognize and acknowledge the truth, and this is quite a trick if you also happen to be an addict. If there is any area in which an addict can claim expertise, it is hiding the truth of the condition — not only from others, but first, from himself or herself. The average hooked-on-something person expends more energy on self-deception than a dozen people unaffected by substance abuse. So this all adds up to an enormous paradox, which will be explored further on.

Bill Hicks started stand-up comedy very young, and according to a biography at Grunge.com, his parents discouraged the practice of that art form to the extreme extent of not allowing him to do it for the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Association charity telethon.

His career mainly happened in the Eighties, and in 1994, he died at the shockingly young age of 33, from a form of cancer that has rarely been cured. But let’s zero in on 1987, when he moved to New York City to begin a five-year run of doing stand-up in clubs, virtually every single night of those years. (In 1988, he quit drinking, and the remaining few years got really interesting. We will return to explore the reasons behind that after filling in the backstory.)

In 1990, the first Bill Hicks album, Dangerous, was recorded. Over the next couple of years, he spent quite a lot of time on the stages of clubs in Britain and Ireland, much appreciated by fans who are in many ways more sophisticated, and who did not object to how Hicks vilified American politicians.

Before discussing his remarkable series of visits during those years to Late Night With David Letterman, let’s take a look at how that might easily have not occurred at all. Much later (in 2002), journalist Ian Watson recounted the story of something that had happened back in 1984, when the Letterman show first took an interest in Bill Hicks. At a certain time on a certain day, our hero was supposed to call the people in charge to talk about when and how it would all happen.

But this was in the comic’s heavy drinking and heavy whatever-other-substance-anyone- happened-to-hand-him, days. Watson wrote,

Hicks and fellow comic John Farneti were due to take some magic mushrooms and go on an “urban hike”. A former devotee of transcendental meditation who’d found psychedelics through his interest in spirituality, Hicks would later claim to have boarded an alien craft while on mushrooms. But this was a rather more earthbound experience. The pair wandered around Houston struggling with the mechanics of making a pay phone call for hours and when they finally got through, the booking agent had left for the weekend.

Still, as time went on, it all worked out, and when on this side of the Atlantic, Hicks appeared on Late Night With David Letterman nearly a dozen times, which is a pretty respectable run. But it might not have happened at all.

And eventually, it stopped happening. An irreconcilable difference of opinion occurred, and Hicks was banned from the prominent variety show. But this failed to discourage him, especially since getting the Letterman boot brought to his career “more attention than my other eleven appearances on Letterman, times one hundred.”

His work was, in fact, so widely acclaimed that a few other well-known stand-ups were emboldened to start cribbing his material, a perennial hazard in the business. If the comic whose work is plagiarized complains, it makes him look like a sorehead who has to whine about a little borrowing, because he can’t think up any more new ideas, and won’t be able to get along without the stuff that was stolen. This is an area where it counts to be a really unique voice, making it that much harder for anyone to get larcenous notions.

(To be continued…)

Written by Pat Hartman. First published June 4, 2026.

Sources:

“The Untold Truth of Bill Hicks,” Grunge.com, March 9, 2023.

“Bill Hicks,” Sunday Herald, December 2002.

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