by Bill Hicks
On Monday Colleen and I flew to W. Palm Beach, Florida, where I was to perform a five-day run at the W. Palm Beach Comedy Corner. Colleen called the Letterman show and was again told getting a copy of my performance on Friday’s show would be no problem. Colleen then gave her address and Fed Ex number, and she was told the tape would arrive the following day.
Meanwhile, we had walked into Maelstrom. The phones were ringing off the hook, and for the next three days I was continuously busy. You see, over the course of my sixteen years performing comedy all over America, I had made many friends and fans in the media-print, radio, and television. All of them were notified by ‘my people’ of my Letterman appearance that Friday. When my appearance on the night they were watching never occured – ironically replaced by a canned comedy performance by Bill Sheft – they were curious as to what the story was. As I told them, I heard word processors clicking in the background. Apparently, many of my Media Friends, fans, and supporters are also Letterman fans. They felt this was a story that was Newsworthy and expressed to me their own sympathy and outrage over what had occurred. The ball was rolling without any help on my part. While it’s been tiring these last few days of continuous interviews, it’s really easy on my part, for all I have to do is tell the TRUTH . . . over and over and over again. At least it’s easy to remember.
Tuesday came and went without the arrival of the tape from the Letterman show. Throughout Monday and Tuesday, the interview requests kept pouring in. My managers Colleen McGarr and Duncan Strauss were pondering how to handle this situation. We all agreed that it wouldn’t be fair to voice our thoughts until we received the tape of the show and saw for ourselves the set, my performance, and the reaction of the audience. We also thought it only fair to tell the Letterman people about all the calls we were receiving, and find out what their response might be. Thinking the tape still might be on its way – even though it was now two days since they assured us they had overnighted it – Duncan Strauss called up Letterman’s producer Robert Morton, to tell him of all the articles and interviews that were pending.
Essentially, Robert Morton didn’t like the idea of any press about what happened. He took a particularly ‘dim view’ of the upcoming New Yorker profile, if it were to include any mention of this incident of me being censored. Mr Morton then reiterated how much they loved me at the show, and how well I’d done Friday. Duncan told him he looked forward to seeing the set on the tape and then they hung up. Now we all had heard 1st hand that a) The Letterman people loved my set. b) CBS Standards and Practices were responsible for the censoring. c) The tape was on its way. And d) They wanted to rebook me for another spot in the upcoming weeks.
When Thursday came and went and still no tape arrived, I took it upon myself to call Robert Morton personally. I asked him why the tape hadn’t arrived yet. He said, ‘Um . . . I don’t know if we’re legally allowed to send out a tape of an unaired segment of a show . . .’ Hmm . . . I thought that was pretty off the top of his head. I said, ‘Robert, I just want it for my archives, and my parents would love to see it.’ Morty said, ‘OK . . . I’ll try. I’ll see what I can do. I’ll get you the tape. Are we OK, Bill?’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I’m fine. I’m just looking forward to seeing my act.’ To which Morty replied, ‘I understand, I’ll get you the tape. And let’s work on another set for a few weeks from now.’ I said, ‘Great!’ And we hung up. To this day, no tape has ever arrived. What I’ve recounted here is the exact material I used, and the exact responses I received from the people responsible for producing the show, and the responses of the audience to the best of my memory. Since no tape of the set seems to be forthcoming, this puts me in the awkward position of having to recall these events and commit them to paper – basically to stand up for myself and tell the truth with all the possible information that’s at hand at this moment. Since there was so much interest from the media, and no support from the Letterman people, we decided to go ahead and do these interviews, telling the exact truth as we knew it to be with as much information that was at our disposal. Reporter after reporter followed radio talk show after radio talk show for five solid days. Almost to a man, each and every one were fans of mine and of Letterman’s show. And almost across the board the same outrage was expressed when I told them the material CBS Standard and Practices deemed ‘unsuitable’ for the viewing public. One such radio talk show – The Alex Bennet Show in San Francisco – had a live studio audience the morning I called in to be interviewed. The studio audience laughed at the Jokes as I told them, and applauded the points I made about television after hearing the Jokes. Someone who heard that broadcast took it upon himself to write a stinging letter to CBS, chastising them for their cowardice for not airing my set. They quickly received a letter in reply which was then faxed to my office. Its contents were most interesting and added a humorous twist to this already black comedy that was unfolding. I have CBS reply before me, and I quote ‘. . . It is true that Bill Hicks was taped that evening and that his performance did not air, what is inaccurate is that the deletion of his routine was required by CBS (!) In fact, although a CBS Program Practices editor works on that show, the decision was solely that of the producers of the program with that of another comedian. Therefore, your criticism that CBS censored the program is totally without foundation. Creative Judgements must be made in the course of producing any program, and while we regret that you disagreed with this one, the producers felt it necessary and that is not a decision we would override. (!) (By the way, the underlining of pertinent sentences was done by me.) Whoa! Here was a unique twist. This response from CBS was at total variance with everything I’d been told repeatedly by Robert Morton, the producer of the Letterman show, and Mary Connelly, the segment producer of the show and my set in particular. This response doesn’t gibe at all with Morton’s claim that ‘Bill, the set was great! You killed! It’s CBS Standards and Practices who want this particular material edited . . . we fought tooth and nail to keep the set as is . . .’ etc., etc., etc. Then the darker implications of all this came into even clearer focus. I realized this is the only time weaselly capitalists ever pass the buck – when they’re held accountable for their actions. Next, the scoundrels will be wrapping themselves in the flag, and the farce will be complete – just another minor footnote in the history of the ongoing saga of Freedom of Expression in the Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave.
It’s been exactly one week now since this odd story began. And believe me, none of this was planned, expected, nor sought after. I did what I’ve always done – performed material in a comedic way which I thought was funny. The artist always plays to himself, and I believe the audience seeing that one person can be free to express his thoughts, however strange they may seem, inspires the audience to feel that perhaps they too can freely express their innermost thoughts with impunity, joy, and release, and perhaps discover our common bond – unique yet so similar – with each other. This philosophy may appear at first to some as selfish – ‘I play to me and do material that interests and cracks me up.’ But you see, I don’t feel I’m different than anyone else. The audience is me. I believe we all have the Voice of Reason inside us, and that voice is the same in everyone. And if I may open up even more, I believe that voice (you may call it conscience) is the voice of the Holy Spirit that God has instilled in us all to gently lead us out of our own self-created hells – those feelings and thoughts of hopelessness, fear, sin, and guilt which have never and could never exist in Reality, for what God did not create, does not exist. And I pose a question you can Meditate on and find a great deal of peace from: ‘What could oppose God’s will?’
This is what I think either CBS, or the producers of the Letterman show and Networks and governments fear the most – that one man free, expressing his own thoughts and point of view, might somehow inspire others to think for themselves and listen to that Voice of Reason inside them, and then perhaps one by one we will awaken from this dream of lies and illusions that the world, the Governmen
ts, and their propaganda arm – the mainstream media – feeds us continuously over fifty-two channels, twenty-four hours a day. What I realized was – they don’t want the people to be awake. The elite ruling class wants us asleep so we’ll remain a docile, apathetic herd of passive consumers, and non-participants in the true agendas of our governments, which is to keep us separate and present an image of a world filled with unresolvable problems that they, and only they, might one day, somewhere in the never-arriving future, may be able to solve. Just stay asleep America, keep watching TV, keep paying attention to the infinite witnesses of illusion we provide you over Lucifer’s Dream Box – television. I find it laughable and pathetic.
When I was a young boy, watching comics on television, I used to think, ‘Boy if they like this guy, they’re going to love me.’ And I began working quite young, writing, growing, maturing, always striving to top myself – to make people laugh hard at things they know and believe deep in their hearts to be true. It has been a long road, let me tell you; but after sixteen years of constant performing up until this little incident on October 1st, 1993, the cold realization finally struck me. A sobering answer to the wish of that young boy I once was back in Houston, Texas, all excited with the idea that ‘if they like these guys, then they’re going to love me.’ The realization was – they don’t want me, nor my kind.
Just look at ninety per cent of television programming. Banal, puerile, trite scat. And this is what they want, for they hold the masses – the herd – in such contempt. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been in a ‘creative’ meeting in Los Angeles, and after pitching an idea for a show heard the following statement: ‘That’s very Funny, but do you think it will play in the Mid-West?’ As though the Mid-West were this vast wasteland filled with bib-overall wearing bumpkins whose intellectual level and comprehension could only be satisfied with ‘American Gladiators’, or ‘Love Connection’, or ‘full house’, or . . . etc, etc, etc. The list fills the one inch TV guide each week – the Bible of the herd. Like a menu for bad drugs that deaden the mind and drive a wedge between our conscious and unconscious minds, and between ourselves and each other, and between us and them, and between us and the experience of Life itself. Well, I’ve got some surprising news for you – I’ve played the Mid-West – all over the Mid-West, in fact, and you know what I’ve found? The people there are quite intelligent, well read, thoughtful and reasonable folks, just like most people I meet every day, everywhere, all over the world. But no wonder there’s an evergrowing sense of disenfranchisement, apathy, and cynicism in our country. When we’re all tuned in to the real drug of this country – television – brought to us by an elite class of ‘unique’ and ‘special’ people who find the dirty herd beneath contempt, and only there really to buy the useless products created to fill the imaginary ‘wants’ television really hawks between hours of puerile programming. Every few years, they cart out the old argument regarding television’s role in our society. As usual, they pose to keep us divided and keep the problem unresolved, then it’s back to ‘business as usual’. The herd has been pacified by our charade of concern as we pose the two most idiotic questions imaginable – ‘Is TV becoming too violent?’ and ‘Is TV becoming too promiscuous?’ The answer, my friends, is this – TV is too stupid. It treats us like Morons. Case Closed. Truly, the only stupid people I’ve ever met, the most absolutely clueless are the very people that produce television. Unfortunately, self-awareness is not one of their long suits, regardless of how many hair weaves, breasts augmentations, Valiums, shrinks, or phony religions of the ‘inner child’ they’ve partaken of. Don’t you find it ironic at all, that television pushes beer (alcohol, the number two killer drug in the world) down our throats twenty-four hours a day, with beautiful half-naked women and the promise of ‘freedom and infinite sex appeal’, while also maintaining a division of their corporate empire called ‘Standards and Practices’? Exactly what Standards are you practising. I’ve even seen these commercials during ‘in depth’ reports on the war against drugs. At least drug dealers have enough shame to lurk on street corners and in alleyways, and not come over the tube into our homes with all the slick, glossy production values the beer hawkers muster as though they were offering manna from Heaven in a six pack.
But as I said before, their lack of self-awareness is only matched by their blatant hypocrisy. I remember one time I did the Letterman show, and the night before Robert Morton and I made the rounds of the comedy clubs in New York to hone the set. During the course of the night, Mr Morton had decided I should drop a few of the bits from my set because they weren’t ‘right for our audience’. The next morning I did a radio show, and the interviewer asked me if it was difficult to translate my club act to television. I responded by telling her of the previous night’s activities. That afternoon, when I showed up at the Letterman studio, Robert Morton ran up to me and said, ‘Hey Hicks, why were you dissing us on the air today?’ I asked what he meant. He said, ‘you were saying we edit your stuff for TV, we’ve never done that!’ Uh . . . Hmmm. How do you respond to the insane? I was speechless. Yes, lack of self-awareness and hypocrisy reign supreme in the world of television. Shoot, TV would still be hawking cigarettes if the government hadn’t stepped in. Why the government stepped in in the first place is anybody’s guess. Perhaps it’s because we’ve opened so many new overseas markets to push the number one killer drug73 in the world, that the future of tobacco products is still safe from encroachment. By the way, that’s another issue never raised by our OBJECTIVE News media – the fact that we are pushing the number one killer drug in the world to unsuspecting Third World Nations with the same glossy, enticing advertising that was used in the US in the fifties. We should all kick back, pop open a beer, and breath a sigh of relief that the few are still making a profit, while the many are tightening their belts in this ‘ever changing’ global economy – the New World Order. As Don Corleone said in The Godfather, ‘Follow the money’.
This leads me, hopefully, to my summation on my own personal involvement with Letterman and CBS, and television’s involvement with society in general. Why was I censored from the Letterman show? Because some of my Jokes hit ‘Hot Points’ and were deemed unsuitable for the American viewing public. The fact of the matter is, this vast empire of network television called CBS are a bunch of shameless cowards who kowtow to very organized, although minority, special interest groups in America. They fear losing their corporate sponsorship, and that is the threat these special interest groups promise. What the networks don’t realize, due to their total lack of contact with anything resembling Reality, is that the majority of people in America are in general, thoughtful, reasonable people. But it is the minority of fundamentalist morons pushing their fear mongering agendas that get all the attention. The squeaky wheel gets the oil.
You see, Reasonable people don’t usually, write letters of complaint or praise to networks because a) Reasonable people have lives. b) Reasonable people know they’re just jokes. c) If the Reasonable people don’t find the jokes funny, they know it’s just TV. d) Reasonable people know if something’s on now which they don’t like, there may just as well be something they do like coming up soon. e) Reasonable people know they can turn the TV channel, and f) Reasonable people know they can just turn the TV off and go about their day.
It’s that insane minority the networks cower to, and play to in their imagined perception of the ‘Mid-West’, i.e. any state between Los Angeles and New York. That horribly unsophisticated herd that makes up the majority of Americans. Instead, one letter from some fundamentalist anything, written in crayon saying, ‘I saw a guy talk about Jesus on your show. I’m offended, signed X’, sends the network cowards scurrying to make amends and rid the show of the ‘unsuitable’ material. Well, I’ve got news for the Bureaucratic Capitalist Whore Cowards that run television. I’m offended too! I’m offended by the constant barrage of banal, trite, puerile scat you offer without any sense of shame or human dignity. And I’ve go
t something else to say to those people who say, ‘I’m offended’, like some five-year-old child throwing a tantrum. Ready? There are a lot of things in life that are offensive, life itself can be offensive, I myself have a large list of things that offend me . . . So what!? Grow the fuck up! We now live in the ‘Age of being offended.’ Get over it. Perhaps a little open-mindedness, tolerance, and acceptance may be the antidote to what ails you. Try it and see if your load isn’t lifted just a bit. See if your pinched face of fear doesn’t relax a tad. Why don’t you exercise a little of the faith you say you believe in so much, and trust in God and his infinite, unconditional love. Why don’t you fucking Christians start acting like Christians?
And now, the final irony. One of the ‘Hot Points’ that was brought up as being ‘unsuitable for our audience’ was my joke about pro-lifers. My brilliant friend Andy posited the theory that this was really what bothered and scared the network the most, seeing as how the ‘pro-life’ movement has become essentially a terrorist group acting with impunity and God on their side, in a country where the reasonable majority overwhelmingly supports freedom of choice regarding abortion. I felt there was something to this theory, but still I was suprised to be watching the Letterman show (I’m still a fan) the Monday night following my censored Friday night performance, and lo and behold, they cut to a . . . are you ready for this? . . . A pro-life commercial! This farce is now completed. ‘Follow the money’.
In summation, I’d like to point out that I am not some curmudgeon with a chip on his shoulder regarding television. There are several shows on TV I absolutely love and never miss. ‘Northern Exposure’, ‘The Simpsons’, ‘Seinfeld’, ‘The Larry Sanders Show’ I find absolutely brilliant, hilarious, and inspiring. It’s these exceptions to the rule that are truly entertaining, and treat the audience with love and respect as they deserve. And, I’d like to take my hat off to Roseanne Arnold for having balls the size of Montana, and overcoming much more serious odds than I’ve ever faced, to realize her artistic vision, keeping it pure, and silencing the white male elite ruling class by putting on, again, one of my favorite shows on television.