O.C. COMEDY REVIEW : Bill Hicks: Heat but No Warmth

A lot of people on the club scene have been high on Bill Hicks for years. A cult figure in London, he was the subject of a recent New Yorker magazine profile, shortly after he was bumped off the David Letterman show allegedly for being too controversial (which says something about Letterman’s putative iconoclasm). Hicks has just concluded a brief Southland run--Tuesday night at the Improv in Brea and Wednesday at Igby’s in West Hollywood.

Maybe the Brea crowd (in which this reviewer sat) was overpolite, or maybe it didn’t know what to make of Hicks. He does come out swinging from a lot of angles, and he goes for the underbelly. Late in his act he peered out at the audience and characterized it as “100 apathetic complete strangers who look at me like a dog that’s been shown a card trick. That’s where my career is now.”

No comedian likes to dance alone. The Brea club, though functional and capacious, is as sterile as a medical clinic. But the wary inertia he worked against was partly Hicks’ own creation.

At one point the 31-year-old Texan mentioned that stand-up was all he has wanted to do since he was 15 because it is a venue for truth-telling, and one can see how talking out loud is for him a way of working through dilemmas, or pointing out the preposterous that the rest of us conveniently overlook while getting on with our workaday lives.

Like the abortion issue. “I wanna see pro-life people lock arms in front of a cemetery.” Or watching “Cops” on TV and seeing the same battered wives in the same trailer parks hanging on to loutish husbands and breeding litters of kids destined for dead-end lives (“What is their family tree? A stump?”). There are a lot of religious references (as in “Where does the chocolate Easter bunny show up in the Bible?”) and he’s not coy about his politics (“Old Clinton turned out to be just what I thought: A whore”). He’s not shy about the dewy sanctity of child-bearing, either.

Hicks brings a lot of heat in his act, which often takes off in gorgeous verbal riffs, and he’s free of the standard club setup and punch rhythms (though he is infected with the epidemically smarmy Richard Belzer drone). There are no McDonald’s jokes, airline jokes or dating plaints.

But outside of his moral outrage, there’s no unifying element either, which makes it a crude, scattershot, hit-and-miss thing. Hicks is unequivocal in his observations, which can leave us cold (“I hate people,” he tells us. “I’m sick of ‘em. We’re a virus with shoes.”).

His passion is stalemated by his take-it-or-leave it unreason. He could be on to something, for example, in his film clip that (contrary to official reports) shows U.S. government tanks setting fire to the Waco compound--incinerating the Branch Davidians inside as well as the children the government purportedly had set out to save. But there’s no explanation of who shot the film or who’s narrating it, or the possibility of any other interpretation of what we’re seeing. In this and many other charges, Hicks could just as well be a crackpot as prophetic.