I could mark out my comedy critic’s life in Bill Hicks anniversaries. When I first started writing about standup, Hicks was – well, not warm in his grave exactly, but not long gone either. His cult still throbbed with life and he was a personal favourite too. The idea of comedy as the new rock’n’roll might have crystallised around Newman and Baddiel at Wembley Arena, but Hicks was 90s comedy’s real rock star, and not by accident either. In the years after his death, you couldn’t move for articles by people like me, appraising the state of standup in the light of Hicks’ awesome example – a phenomenon Stewart Lee spoofed in his Observer column on the 20th anniversary of the Texan’s demise.
Then five years ago, I spoke about Hicks’ legacy with comics who weren’t born when he plied his trade – and was startled to discover in how low a regard they held his work. Of course, I knew some of his material was (to say the least) out of step with the times. But the extent to which his entire manner, the whole Bill Hicks way of being (as an outlaw comic, a teller of truth to power, a mansplainer) was now, for many, a thing hideous to behold. That caught me by surprise.
