I first came across Bill Hicks thanks to a tape stuck to the front of Select magazine at the time of the (first) Gulf War. Now, you'd have to be 100 to remember either of those things but, trust me, it was a discovery. GW1 felt scary at the time: the first large scale post-Cold War conflict, complete with fears that other, more sinister forces could get involved (Israel, Russia, the Wolverines from Red Dawn) and then was Saddam and his radio-controlled Scuds which he'd fire indiscriminately at Tel Aviv. So indiscriminately, it turned out, most landed just outside Baghdad.
While everyone else bought the official line on the war, overlooking the fact that Bush, Rumsfeld etc had created the thing they now had to blow to smithereens, Hicks alone seemed prepared to question it. What made him maddest, though, was the compliant way the media parroted every line the Bush administration fed them. And he was funny when he was mad.
People said, "Uh-uh, Bill, Iraq had the fourth largest army in the world." Yeah, maybe, but you know what? After the first three largest armies, there's a real big fucking drop-off, all right? The Hare Krishnas are the fifth largest army in the world, and they've already got our airports, okay, so I think that's the greater threat right now.
This was before comedy became the cosy domain of Michael McIntyre and skits about traffic jams. When comedy was a means of saying something about the state of the world, exposing hypocrisy and blowing up myths. All while smoking enough fags to fell the cast of a '30s film noir.
My favourite Hicks routine, though, is this very silly riff on the Gideons which don't really do any of those things.
I guess it was the product of too many nights spent in too many hotels, but it was his observational genius to a tee. And proof that no sentence can't be made 26% funnier simply by adding the word 'ninja'.
American: The Bill Hicks Story is out on Friday 14 May.
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