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Now let me share a personal problem with you.
The difficulty about being a professional comic is that after about 40 years of it
you have heard most of the jokes. You do know most of the patterns.
So the comedy you now see is...
It's fine. There's nothing wrong with it but...
it's just not special like the first time you saw Chaplin or Milligan or Cook
and in the last decade there's only one comedy hero who's really thrilled me,
Bill Hicks, and he does stand-up.
After the show I go to a waffle house. I'm not proud of it, I'm hungry.
I'm eating, I'm alone and I'm reading a book. Waitress walks over to me...
"Hey, what you're reading for?"
Is that like the weirdest question ever? I have never ever been asked that.
Not "What are you reading?" but "What are you reading for?"
***, you stumped me.
Why do I read?
"I guess I read for a lot of reasons, you know, and one of them is so I don't end up
being a *** waffle waitress, alright?"
Then this trucker at the next booth gets up, stands over me and goes:
"Well, looks like we've got ourselves a reader."
Great delivery and very good at the modern world, you know
really felt it was a tortured soul in there sort of making jokes on behalf of us all,
to try and make us more sane and making us laugh at the same time.
A lot of christians wear crosses around their necks, you think when Jesus comes back
he ever wants to see a *** cross?
It's kinda like going up to Jackie Onassis with a little sniper rifle pendant, you know.
"Hey Jackie, just thinking of John. We loved him."
"We loved him."
Stunning! Hicks seems to me to be all that Lenny Bruce was supposed to have been but never was. Look at this!
I did that joke in Alabama, this three rednecks met me after the show...
"Hey buddy, come here! Hey Mr.Comedian, come here!"
Yeah, I love that move, "Come here".
Not a physics major, I think that's a safe bet.
"Mr.Funnyman, come here!"
Hey buddy, we're christians, we don't like what you said."
I said "Then forgive me."
A great satirist but now the bad news:
A few months later Bill Hicks was dead, pancreatic cancer, just like that.
What a loss! Because deep down I do feel that comedy is best when it's about something
even though it has never changed anything I think we should all pretend that it sometimes does.