Groundhog day
by awindram
Groundhog day: an annual display of cutesy Americana in rural Pennsylvania. My immediate response to whether there’s to be six more weeks of winter was “screw it, I’m in Cally, bitches!” then I remembered a Bill Hicks routine about someone with a similar attitude and I really didn’t want to be that dick.
LA is a nightmare place, man. You always meet this one guy out in LA, you always – this real smarmy guy. He always says this. ‘Yeah, I love calling back east January 1st. What are y’all doing? Snowed in, huh? Bummer. Me? I’m out by the pool! Ha ha ha haaa!’ What a dick this guy is. It’s why I used to love to call LA when I lived in New York: What are y’all doing? Talking to TV producers, huh? Bummer. me? I’m reading a book! Yeah, we’re thinkin’ back east. Yeah, we’re evolving. Is that the big one I hear in the background? Bye…
Bill Hicks
How’d you first come across Bill Hicks? You probably know he was a lot more popular in the UK than in the US. I finally watched the doc about his recently and I understand why (he was too confrontational for the States), but am haven’t figured out why you Brits loved him so much.
It was via an older cousin who showed me his stand-up specials on video. This was around ’95 so a few years after Hicks’s death. I’d probably have discovered him anyway, as he was one of those comics whose videos were very easy to buy in the big music stores and channel 4 would air his stand-up specials fairly regularly.
I think channel 4 were a big part in his UK success. They would air his specials uncensored and in doing so gave him a larger audience than any of the main US networks would have been prepared to give him at the time.
There is also an often unexpressed anti-American streak in the UK psyche – I think Hicks’s act probably appealed to that, too. His routines weren’t so ‘close to the bone’ for us as they would have been for a US audience and did allow a certain smug self-satisfaction on our part.
I’ll have a look at a book of his routines and letters I was reading recently and see if he has any thoughts on his acceptance in the UK.