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This handwritten letter from the comedian Bill Hicks in response to my 1993 New Yorker piece about him is one of my cherished objects. When I met Hicks, in England, the burden of his song was that the American audience was eluding him, that it didn’t quite get what he was doing. The piece broke Hicks out in America, which is for me the thrill and the purpose of criticism: to make a case for artists I admire. It’s rare that a critic has the opportunity to do that ahead of the work. (It also happened with Joe Orton, who was murdered before he could make his own case, as all great stylists do.)
I didn’t know at the time Hicks wrote me that he was dying of pancreatic cancer—he told nobody—and had only a few months to live. But those last months were lived with the sure knowledge that the message in a bottle of his comedy had been received by the culture that up to then had resisted him.
Hicks is now the subject of a documentary titled “American,” which opens on April 6th. Although the film omits some of Hicks’s late and hilarious bits—such as his rant against the comedians Carrot Top and Gallagher, in which he takes a mike stand to a watermelon—it’s a fascinating look at the suburban origins of a wild child. And it honors the gorgeous fuss Hicks made in the world: his emerging standup skills, his struggles, and his cauterizing, even messianic mission to attack America’s unrelenting refusal to think. Hicks was the real Dionysian deal. He called himself Goat Boy; here the Goat Boy rises again, and we can see why he was glorious.