A Review by Gerry Donaghy

If you don't think the following jokes are funny, then nothing I tell you about Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines by the late comedian Bill Hicks will change your mind:

You ever notice how people who believe in Creationism look really unevolved? Eyes real close together, big furry hands and feet. "I believe that God made me in one day." Yeah, looks like he rushed it.

Speaking of Satan...I was watching Rush Limbaugh the other day. Doesn't Rush Limbaugh remind you of one of those gay guys who likes to lay in a tub while other men pee on him?

And, before anybody accuses me of having a bias, Hicks also had an axe to grind with Bill Clinton, but the material just isn't as snappy

The hysterically toxic venom that emanated from the microphone of Bill Hicks was the perfect antidote for the twilight of the Reagan-Bush years. I don't know what the opposite of zeitgeist is, but Hicks was definitely it. In a time when American comedy was defined by either the innocuously smug observations of Jerry Seinfeld at one end of the spectrum, and the infantile vulgarity of Andrew "Dice" Clay at the other, Hicks's trenchant and acerbic tirades were invectives against the hypocrisy he saw in the status quo. And if you look at current affairs (Bush waging war in Iraq, a small but vocal minority trying to inflame a full-on culture war, a press too afraid of its own shadow to ask the tough questions), Hicks was a comedian ahead of his time.

Indeed, if prophets are rarely heeded in their homeland, Bill Hicks is a shining example. He worked the American comedy circuit endlessly, and made frequent appearances on David Letterman's show. But Hicks had to go to England to be able to fill a room bigger than my cubicle. It was there that he recorded several of his albums and cable television specials. Just as his fame was picking up, he suffered what would be his final professional insult: his thirteenth visit to Letterman was deleted by the show's producers prior to broadcast in an effort to avoid any difficulties with the pro-life groups that Hicks ridiculed in his routine. Hicks only found this out by watching the program in his hotel room that evening. Hicks didn't live long enough to repair the rift in his friendship with Letterman; he died of cancer less than a year later.

Love All the People collects Hicks's stand up routines, as well as other writings. When reading these rants, the first thing that comes through is the anger; anger at what Hicks viewed as the willful ignorance of Americans. In one passage, he describes an encounter with a waffle house waitress:

I'm eating and I'm reading a book. Fine. Right. Waitress comes over to me (chewing), "What you reading for?" Now, I said, "Wow, I've never been asked that. Goddang it you stumped me. Not what am I reading, but what am I reading for? I guess I read for a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones....is so I don't end up being a fucking waffle waitress. That's pretty high on the list." Then, this trucker in the next booth gets up, stands over me and says, "Well, looks like we got ourselves a reader"....It's like I walked into a Klan rally dressed in a Boy George costume or something.

It's not that Hicks is being merely misanthropic -- in a succinct anecdote, he is able to summarize what he saw as the rise of American anti-intellectualism. Whether you agree with him or not, with a joke Hicks was able to express his views more clearly, and certainly more humorously, than any of the pundits working the television news programs today.

But Hicks isn't merely a malcontent kicking and screaming against things he doesn't like, he was a social critic of the highest order, one who used humor and outrage to illuminate what he saw as the social injustices in America. He wanted to show audiences how he felt this country spends more time and money arming the world than feeding it, how it prides itself on its ignorant self-righteousness, and how he questions a country that still insists on fighting a losing war against illegal drugs, without mentioning the damage caused by the legal (and taxable) ones. Sure, he spends a lot of time waxing poetic on his love of pornography and how much fun he used to have on drugs, but that is just the sugar to help the medicine of his message go down. What makes this even more amusing is that if you compare (for example) Hicks's solution for the aging and terminally ill (use them as stunt people in Hollywood), to anything that Ann Coulter writes, and you realize that Hicks is joking and Coulter is not, you begin to see how absurd most of what passes for political discourse in this country really is.

Sadly Love All the People does have a few drawbacks. The first being that, like most comedians, Hicks tended to recycle his material a bit, so the reader will keep coming across the same punchlines numerous times. The best bet is to not read this in one sitting. Also, part of the joy of comedy is timing, which you just can't get from merely reading these monologues if you've never seen him perform. But, given the paucity of material available on Hicks, these minor flaws are easy to overlook. And if this book spurs its readers to seek out videos and compact discs of Hicks performing live, then it's done its job.

Hicks's humor wasn't for everyone, and during his lifetime, few had a chance to hear it. Love All the People gives a talented and insightful performer a second lease on life. What is tragic about Hicks's belated renaissance is that it seems very little has changed in this country. But, as the sign at the entrance to Jonestown said (stealing a phrase from George Santayana) "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I truly believe that somewhere on the other side, Hicks is having the last laugh.