Bill Hicks was one of the greatest comedians who ever lived, but he was a lot more than that. Hicks was a writer, musician, philosopher, and an all-knowing soothsayer whose work on and off the stage remains even more relevant now than it did when he died from pancreatic cancer at the young age of 32 in February 1994. Hicks was fearless in his approach to finding humor in the topics that most people found too serious to be taken lightly: drugs, abortion, organized religion, the government, and war. If you listened to his classic bit about the first Iraq War in the early 90’s (which Bill dubbed “the Persian Gulf Distraction”), you could swear he was talking about the recent Iraq War, right down to the name of the President… Bush.
Hicks never desired to become a television or movie star like many of his peers in the stand-up world, preferring to hone his material on the stages of comedy clubs around the world and write novels and screenplays that were never realized. Bill Hicks may be gone from this mortal realm but his legacy will endure for generations to come, and Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe is preparing to do his part.
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