±«Óătv

is considered by many to be the greatest comedian of the last 30 years. He challenged the injustices of life head-on but his uncompromising approach met with conflict in America and he instead found fame on the international stage. Particularly in the UK, where 15 years after his death, his popularity continues to spread.

His fascinating life story is told in the award winning feature length documentary AMERICAN: The Bill Hicks Story, ±«Óătv Four, Saturday 27th August 10pm.

As an introduction, Brendon Burns, if.comedy Award Winner and Bill Hicks fan, reflects on the nature of Bill’s comedy...

Photo: Steve Ullathorne

Like a lot of comics, I wasted about 8 years of my career doing a bad impression of Bill, hero worshipped him to the point of it really sneaking too much into my work. I know some guys that have listened to his stuff so avidly that they went mad, literally went insane like he was their Helter Skelter, I've seen it happen.

His mike technique was awesome. I saw him in ‘93, and his pitching was just phenomenal, mesmerizing. He knew when to whisper, he knew when to yell, he knew when to hold the mike close to his mouth. I’m loath to use the term, but he was a real performance artist.

He was on the road 300 nights a year, and you can hear the changes and evolution in his sets, comparable to a performer like , who would sing a song that you know so well, and make it sound nothing like it.

The huge influence he has is also because he was such an emotive performer. When he’s speaking his mind so forcefully, you’re not always entirely sure about how you feel on the subject, until you talk about it at length afterwards. That’s when the writing process has become very organic - he could’ve argued either side of any coin and made it sound just as impassioned.

I think he was at his ballsiest in his youth – when he was doing that kind of (religious, provocative) material in the deep South. As he got older, he came to the UK, found an audience, and then obviously found it a lot more gratifying.

He had a magical gift for language – that’s where British audiences are head and shoulders above the rest, in their love and appreciation of the kind of comedic puzzles in the punchlines that Bill excelled at.

He left open-ended punchlines – my favourite jokes of his are the ones that would just hang in the air, where the audience has to consider who the butt of the joke is, and as it hangs in the air they realise that butt of the joke was actually their dilemma, and the laugh comes when they realize “Oh – he’s ****ing with us.”

His is a really good example – you find you have to explain that joke to a lot of people but that cheapens it. He could have taken the coward’s way out and explained what he meant, but he didn’t, he let it remain ambiguous and left the joke in its purest form.

When you do that, you risk losing some people along the way (that’s not my quote, that’s ’s) and in the club scene, people can find that too much like hard work, but at arts centres and theatres across the UK, people flocked to hear him.

I would have liked to have seen Bill survive. Look at – that’s a complete career, his final special was on Death, and his acceptance of that. I think with Bill, there would have been a lot of incongruities in his work in later life that would have pissed off a lot of these people that adhere to his ideas in an almost fundamentalist fashion. Everything Bill did was preaching against fundamentalist thought and I’m pretty sure that he would’ve found that so funny. It’s a shame we didn’t get to see that.

The direction Bill was going in was clearly spirituality – which is basically a period in every comics life – “What the **** am I doing this for? I should be saying something meaningful and changing the world”.

I think that’s the big overarching theme, that his comedy always aimed high, and that’s something that I took from him, that you must always do something that you’re afraid of doing, if you feel stupid broaching something, learn more so you can talk about it.

Any performer, an artist of any kind that is trying to find themselves onstage, that’s always intriguing to people, because none of us really know who the **** we are.

I think that’s why people are so drawn to his comedy, because it's based on audience response; it's one of the art forms where the judgments of success or failure are so in the moment. When you’re putting it out there on the line every night, that group audience realisation can be a real communal moment of understanding between people.

Because he aimed high, because of his passion, his brilliance with language, he was searching for a brand new way of saying something that has a comic viewpoint, and if you spend your entire career trying to find it, and with such a definitive voice, that stuff never dates.

Brendon Burns will be recording a DVD of his show on 12th November at in November.

AMERICAN: The Bill Hicks Story is on ±«Óătv Four, Sat 27th August, 10pm and is followed at 11.40pm by a screening of Revelations Live at the Dominion, Bill’s biggest and final UK show.

You can find out more about the making of the film at