Full Circle

“Go back to bed, America, your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed America, your government is in control. Here, here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up, go back to bed America, here is American Gladiators, here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on the living in the land of freedom. Here you go America - you are free to do what well tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!”

-Bill Hicks, 1991

American Gladiators: A Breakout Hit?

Is “American Gladiators” the unexpected hit of the 2007-08 television season?

It’s far too early to say anything definitive, but Sunday’s two-hour premiere of the NBC reality competition “delivered the highest ratings among adults 18 to 49 of any new show this season on any network,” Benjamin Toff noted earlier this week.

The program drew an average of 12 million viewers on Sunday, gaining viewers during each half hour, and another 11 million when a second episode was shown in what will become its normal time slot on Monday night. This week a repeat will be shown on Sunday at 10 p.m., in a time slot originally filled by the Golden Globes.

Ah, progress.

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)