Bill Hicks's Birthday Party
For complicated reasons, we weren't able to get word out about this (my fault, not the staff...) so I figured I should blog it... (We publish the Essential Bill Hicks)
This Friday, we are excited to present the BILL HICKS BIRTHDAY PARTY at the Bowery Poetry Club, a tribute to the iconoclastic comedian the late Richard Pryor once called “an inspired and inspiring truth teller, dangerous and brave and scary, all at once.”
Featuring Rick Shapiro and a screening of the new Bill Hicks DVD!
Friday, December 16 at 8:00pm
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery (@ Bleecker)
Manhattan
$10
ABOUT BILL HICKS:
In 1993, not long after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, controversial comedian Bill Hicks found his final, scathing appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman abruptly excised at network demand. Months later, at age 33, he was dead.
Hicks could have been on all the chat shows. He could have had his own show on prime time. He could have got rich and fat and frightened. But Hicks didn't go the easy way (give or take the occasional dick joke). He turned down every offer Satan made him. Instead he figured out his best shot at truth and then he said it. He attacked the lies that justified and prettified the carnage of the First Gulf War. He attacked the easy surrender of art to commerce, the demeaning cynicism of the marketing culture and the preposterous power of the mainstream media to confuse and corrupt. In an admiring profile by the New Yorker critic John Lahr — reissued in Lahr’s collection of essays, Light Fantastic, and reproduced in Love All The People — Hicks describes the comic’s vocation as being “the antithesis of the mob mentality.”
“He was a genius. He was one of the five best comics I've ever seen in my life.”—Dennis Miller
“An inspired and inspring truth teller, dangerous and brave and scary, all at once.”—Richard Pryor
“Bill Hicks—blowtorch, excavator, truth-sayer, and brain specialist, like a reverend waving a gun around. He will correct your vision. Others will drive on the road he built”— Tom Waits
“Savage, brilliant, funny, tremendously intelligent.”—John Cleese
“Bill was right up there with Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor. He was easily the best comic of my generation.”—Brett Butler
“He was hilarious, brilliant, brave, and right about everything” — Henry Rollins
“That this house notes with sadness the 10th anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks, on February 26th 1994, at the age of 33; recalls his assertion that his words would be a bullet in the heart of consumerism, capitalism and the American Dream; and mourns the passing of one of the few people who may be mentioned as being worthy of inclusion with Lenny Bruce in any list of unflinching and painfully honest political philosophers.”—Stephen Pound MP; Parliamentary House of Commons
We hope to see you there!