13 Friggin' Years

...since the death of Bill Hicks, the genius of comedy, the only one that mattered. He spent his last month on Earth saying almost nothing at all, such were the ravages to his body from cancer. But he said more in the first 33 years than anyone else could express in a lifetime. Hicks took a laser to all things phony and untrue and illogical and stupid, and sliced them to ribbons. His head might explode if he saw what we're facing in the current era.

Maybe my favorite bit:



I have some personal history with this next one. It's from The Funny Firm in Chicago, where my friend was then working as the house MC. I always remember him telling the story, but never saw it until today.



Hicks on The Dennis Miller Show, before Miller was stricken by the fear bug and did a stagedive into the arms of the welcoming neocons.



The "Let's Hunt And Kill Billy Ray Cyrus" bit from Hicks' last show, at Igby's in LA, November 1993.



Great that Marky Mark is given the full throttling in that one, and everybody's with him, and of course last night Marky Mark was sitting in the Kodak theater as an Oscar nominee. How times have changed.

And here's the last portion of the last set, ever.



Damn, he really was on a different plane, one that you could recognize, one that existed in our collective unconscious, but one that was so distant from our lives, with the billboard culture and mediocre media and 24-hour news you can't use. We immediately recognized these shards of truth and flocked to them like moths to a flame. It was Plato's Cave allegory played out in front of brick walls with a PZM microphone. It's almost painful to watch these and think that we've missed 13 years of insight.

(h/t Minkeyman)