His routines deliver devastating one-liners to members of the hospitality industry.” Take the famous “What are you reading for?” routine, in which Hicks recalls being asked this question by a waffle waitress, who becomes the butt of the joke. The fall people are always women, gay people, Iraqis. For a supposed critical voice, who doesn’t follow all the other sheep, how on Earth did he not realise he was recycling a violent patriarchal trope which has been the bedrock of an oppressive system for thousands of years?”
Then there’s his repeated references to rape as a moral punishment. When he wants to disparage Rick Astley, it’s about having no dick as opposed to Jimi Hendrix’s big dick. “In his ‘Goat Boy’ character,” says Oldham, “he revels in these paedophilic sketches.
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Not so Oldham, who sees Hicks as unpleasant, hypocritical – and not as radical as he’s cracked up to be.Īgain, it’s the toxic masculinity that’s off-putting. Anachronisms apart, Petts and Bob both admire Hicks’s comedy, considering him, in Bob’s words, “a nice dude”. Rob Oldham’s debut show Worm’s Lament was well received at the Edinburgh fringe last year. That’s not just Petts’ and Bob’s take: some straight white guys think the same.
‘He kicks down an awful lot’ … Rob Oldham. To Petts, who is the co-founder of queer comedy collective The Lol Word, Hicks is “like mansplaining from start to finish. Today – in an era much more alert to privilege, gender and cultural politics – it’s not such a good look, especially after Louis CK’s behaviour. “These days,” says Petts, “if an angry white guy stands in front of an audience spouting his opinions like they’re 100% fact, people will be quite alarmed.” In the 90s, that was standup’s most romanticised mode. Says Bob: “No matter how much you say, ‘All right, let’s time travel and put myself in the headspace of a fan’, there’s still some stuff that’s like, ‘Oh, OK, this is so not 2019!’” Plenty of his material is sexually explicit, and some is sexually violent, like the revenge fantasy (trigger warning) about an ex-girlfriend now married to a 600lb welder who “makes love to her with a broom handle at night” before drowning her in his vomit. Bob seems to be understating things when she says: “Selling out has evolved in meaning.”īill Hicks on the ‘miracle’ of childbirth – exclusive video Guardianīob’s biggest beef with Hicks, though, is that “he gets a bit misogynist”. It’s harder – for comedians and everyone else – to imagine how life could ever be otherwise. A generation later, advertising is the air we breathe, our selves are our product. It’s the things that got Hicks wound up: advertising, marketing, capitalism, and how they captured and sullied all things good. It’s not just the rock’n’roll stylings that seem quaint. And rock’n’roll.’ It felt very reminiscent of the era.” “He’s like, ‘Who smokes? All right! Now I’m talkin’ ’bout drugs. She’d never watched his work before I contacted her for this article, and found doing so a hoot. Kemah Bob, a compatriot of Hicks, runs the Femmes of Colour (FOC It Up) Comedy Club in London. And it turns out the answer is: not so much. “But these days,” says the standup Chloe Petts, “if someone came on stage with that energy, you’d think, ‘Oh my God, you’re an arsehole!’ Don’t you think?” I’m talking to Petts on the 25th anniversary of Hicks’s death, curious to know what a generation of comics – all born after he died – make of his work. ‘It felt very reminiscent of the era’ … Kemah Bob.
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