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As Bob Hope was to Bob Monkhouse, as Mort Sahl and Tom Lehrer and Lenny Bruce were to the Beyond The Fringe generation (i.e. both icons of American otherness, and an object lesson in just how much might be achieved by British comedians who were willing to study them hard enough), so were Denis Leary and Bill Hicks to the people who saw them at the Edinburgh Festival in 1990-1.⁷³

There were some similarities between the two – both were gravel-dry iconoclasts with beguilingly rough-and-tumble sensibilities – but a fairly general feeling prevailed that had Hicks not hit the ground running first with the cancer material, Leary might have thought twice about following him out of the low-flying helicopter. And even while Hicks was still alive, some people were buffing up a pernicious duality.

Hicks, the story went, was chiselling nobly away at a Platonic ideal of comic integrity, while Leary was ‘just an opportunist’ (like that’s not what all comedians are meant to be). And then, a few years afterwards, Bill Hicks died. Which was tragic. Worse still – in terms of his subsequent apotheosis by comedians (and indie bands) in search of a higher purpose – he died at approximately the same age as Jesus. Denis Leary, meanwhile, bought shares in the MTV version of himself, made some OK films and was seen about town with Liz Hurley a lot.

In a year (1994) when death cast an abnormally long shadow over what are sometimes called the lively arts, Hicks – with River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain – made up a trio of prematurely departed icons who proved that whatever else you might think of the Grim Reaper, he certainly has taste. Their passing left a spiritual hole in the middle of each of their respective fields that was too big to walk around.

While for both Cobain and Phoenix the end was – purposely or otherwise – self-administered, Hicks was different. His act celebrated hedonism; he spoke out in favour of recreational drug use and was a fanatical defender of the right to smoke. Early on in his career, his profligate lifestyle seemed to court the kind of excess-fuelled, rock-star-style premature death which eventually befell his fellow Texan ‘outlaw comic’ Sam Kinison. Yet he finally died of natural causes in the ugly form of pancreatic cancer, having long since given up not only drink and drugs but cigarettes too.

‘The comic is a flame – like Shiva the destroyer,’ Hicks had told the New Yorker critic John Lahr (the same man who made such a meal out of not getting Reeves and Mortimer) in a rather vainglorious moment in 1992. ‘He keeps cutting everything back to the moment.’

Comics are so much of the moment that it is difficult enough to capture what is good about them on TV when they are alive, and harder still for them to sustain an afterlife. Even when they do – as, say, Lenny Bruce has – anyone who didn’t see them perform will often find it hard to remember what was funny about them.

The only hope, as so often, lies in commercial exploitation. ‘It’s Just a Ride’, the tribute film which makes up the first part of the hastily patched-together Channel 4 video Totally Bill Hicks, offers some fascinating insights into Hicks’s life and work. There are revealing interviews with his parents—God-fearing Southerners who ‘couldn’t understand why Bill used the f-word so much’ – and with the geeky friends with whom he used to sneak off to perform at a rough-and-tumble Houston comedy club at the tender age of fifteen.

The affection and envy mingling in the eyes of his fellow professionals speaks volumes about Hicks’s talents (comedians are competitive people after all, not usually given to abasing themselves at the feet of their peers). Eddie Izzard and Sean Hughes represent Hicks’s UK fan club – it could just as easily have been any number of other people – but the most illuminating insight comes from the American comedian, Brett Butler. Hicks’s treacle-voiced fellow Southerner, star of Channel 4’s Grace Under Fire (which was quite funny for a while, until it got all syrupy), observes astutely that ‘For all the talk about Bill being like Hendrix or Dylan or Jim Morrison, it was Jesus he wanted to be’.

These Messianic tendencies are all too apparent as Hicks emerges from tongues of fire on to the Dominion Theatre stage on the last night of his 1992 Revelations tour. But it’s the ordinariness of his appearance which is striking once he’s taken his cowboy hat off – slicked-back hair, button eyes, face like a potato in a stocking – and which throws the brilliance of his performance into even sharper relief.

Bill Hicks’s command of the stage and of his material is so complete that it sometimes seems like he’s using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, even when he isn’t. His intensity – especially when personifying his own libido as the demonic Goat-boy (motto: ‘Let me wear you like a feed bag’) – is almost frightening. Like the preacher he often fancied himself to be, Hicks could be self-righteous and he could hector, but he could also be devastating.

‘Ever noticed’, he muses, ‘how creationists look really unevolved?’ The industrial-strength sarcasm which went down so well in Britain sometimes landed him in trouble in his less sarcastically minded homeland, especially when applied to such notoriously humour-resistant targets as fundamentalist Christianity. In October 1993, when Hicks turned his scorn on anti-abortionists in a routine being recorded for The David Letterman Show—‘These pro-lifers…You ever look at their faces?…[screws up face and assumes bitter, pinched voice] “I’m pro-life”…Boy, they look it, don’t they?’—he became too hot for even the supposedly cutting-edge Letterman to handle.

The fact that the cancelled slot had been recorded in the same theatre where Elvis’s rotating pelvis was deemed unsuitable for The Ed Sullivan Show did nothing to lessen its mythic significance. And when the ensuing censorship furore spurred Hicks on through the rigours of chemotherapy to a final epic bout of creativity – ‘It was like Bill to the tenth power,’ said friend and producer Kevin Booth. ‘He couldn’t be involved in any kind of mundane situation for even a second’ – the foundations of his martyr cult were firmly in place.

It does not diminish what was special about Bill Hicks (in fact it rather underlines it) to say that comedians, as a rule, are meant to be involved in mundane situations. That is what encourages them to think up funny things to say.

‘Two options are open to him,’ Harry Secombe wrote of the aspiring laughter-maker in his preface to Roger Wilmut’s Tony Hancock: Artiste: ‘either he gives them [the crowd] what he wants, or he provides them with what they want. If he takes up the former he is liable to finish up returning to the rice pudding factory from which Hughie Green plucked him.’

You don’t have to subscribe fully to this extreme mechanistic view of the comedian’s proper relationship with his or her audience (after all, as Vic and Bob have shown us, many of their art form’s richest possibilities are bound up in the utter bemusement and confounding of the paying customer) to think that the whole Shiva the Destroyer thing is a bit of a blind alley.⁷⁴

What the legend of Bill Hicks offers is an excess of mythological armour. And, just as later English monarchs would struggle with the weighty chain-mail of Richard the Lionheart, so other comedians who tried to put on Bill’s heavy suit would generally end up blundering around, bumping into the antique furniture. Take Rob Newman, for instance, cruelly sustained by Hicksian example in the delusion that his post-Newman-and-Baddiel career was actually a heroic one-man struggle against the evils of capitalism.

Denis Leary meanwhile – blessed by destiny with the chance to go on living, with all the failures and compromises that entails – has had a different kind of afterlife. While the bones of Hicks’s ceuvre have subsequently been picked clean by well-meaning vultures, and the endless slew of commemorative videos and live CDs have inevitably become subject to the law of diminishing returns, Leary’s 1992 A&M album, No Cure For Cancer, now stands – from its savage assault on the culture of complaint (built around the healing mantra ‘Shut the fuck up’) to its rabble-rousing redneck anthem, ‘(I’m An) Asshole’ – as a gleaming comic monument.

Untarnished by the oxide of sainthood, it’s both the perfect refutation of late-eighties bullshit and a brutally ironic reversal of the pop culture myth-making’s founding principle of living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse.