Bill Hicks, Axed from Letterman: Bill's Side of the Story
Mucho thanks to Kate Capps <kate@violet.berkeley.edu>for taking the time to punch in a piece of an article from The New Yorker from November 1st, detailing Bill Hicks' side of Why He Got Cut from The "Late Show" way back when...
Reproduced without permission.
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From: kate@violet.berkeley.edu (Kate Capps)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.letterman
Subject: Bill Hicks/New Yorker/LONG
Followup-To: alt.fan.letterman
Date: 20 Jan 1994 20:56:12 GMT
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Someone left a copy of the 11/1/93 The New Yorker Magazine in my staff lounge. The following is an excerpt from a profile of Bill Hicks (very interesting) written by Jim Lahr (The Goat Boy Rises, pages 113-121). This is Hicks' version of the infamous "edited" LSwDL. I don't remember reference to this article before and thought it might be of interest. I apologize if I am being redundant (and for typos...I used a text scanner and only did a quick spellcheck!).
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On October 1st, the comedian Bill Hicks, after doing his twelfth gig on the David Letterman show, became the first comedy act to be censored at CBS's Ed Sullivan Theatre, where Letterman is now in residence, and where Elvis Presley was famously censored in 1956. Presley was not allowed to be shown from the waist down. Hicks was not allowed to be shown at all. It's not what's in Hicks' pants but what's in his head that scared the CBS panjandrums. Hicks, a tall thirty-one-year-old Texan with a pudgy face aged beyond its years from hard living on the road, is no motormouth vulgarian but an exhilarating comic thinker in a renegade class all his own. Until the ban, which, according to Hicks, earned him "more attention than my other eleven appearances on Letterman times one hundred," Hicks' caustic observations and mischievous cultural connections had found a wide audience in England, where he is something of a cult figure. I caught up with Hicks backstage on a rainy Sunday last November at the Dominion Theatre, in London, where a record-breaking crowd of two thousand Brits was packed so tight that they were standing three deep at the back of the dress circle to hear Hicks deliver some acid home truths about the U.S.A., which to him stands for United States of Advertising. Hicks thinks against society and insists on the importance of this intellectual freedom as a way to inspire others to think for themselves. 'To me, the comic is the guy who says 'Wait a minute' as the consensus forms," Hicks told me as we climbed the stairs to his dressing room. "He's the antithesis of the mob mentality. The comic is a flame-like Shiva the Destroyer, toppling idols no matter what they are. He keeps cutting everything back to the moment."
Even then, the talk about courting comic danger had Hicks worrying about his prospects in America. "Comedy in the States has been totally gutted," he told me when we'd settled into the dressing room. "It's commercialized. They don't have people on TV who have points of view, because that defies the status quo, and we can't have that in the totalitarian mind-control government that runs the fuckin' airwaves. I can't get a shot there. I get David Letterman a lot. I love Letterman, but every time I go on, we have tiffs over material. They love me, but his people have this fictitious mainstream audience they think they play to. It's untrue. It doesn't exist. I like doing the show, but it's almost like working a puzzle: How can I be me in the context of doing this material? The best thing I do is make connections. I connect everything. It's hard to do it in six minutes."
Hicks certainly went for broke and pronounced his real comic self in the banned Letterman performance, which he'll be reprising in New York at Caroline's Comedy Club on October 27th, and which he wrote out for me in a thirty-nine-page letter that also recounts his version of events. Hicks had to write out his set because the tape of it, which the Letterman people said they'd send three weeks ago, had not yet reached him. He doubts it ever will. But the routine, which he had prepared for a Letterman appearance a week earlier (he was bumped because the show ran long), had been, he wrote, "approved and re-approved" by a segment producer of the show. Indicating stage directions and his recollection of significant audience response, Hicks set out some of the "hot points" to which the network took exception.
(Begin quotation)
You know who's really bugging me these days? These pro-lifers. . .(Smattering of applause )
You ever look at their faces? . . . "I'm pro-life!" (Here Bill makes a pinched face of hate and fear; his lips are pursed as though he's' just sucked on a lemon.) I'm pro-life!" Boy, they look it, don't they? They just exude )joie de vivre. You just want to hang with them and play Trivial Pursuit all night long. (Audience chuckles.)
You know what bugs me about them? If you're so pro-life, do me a favor-don't lock arms and block medical clinics. If you're so pro-life, lock arms and block cemeteries.
(Audience laughs.) . . . I want to see pro-lifers at funerals opening caskets - "(Get out!" Then I'd really be impressed by their mission. (Audience laughs and applauds.)
I've been traveling a lot lately. I was over in Australia during Easter. It was interesting to note they celebrate Easter the same way we do commemorating; the death and resurrection of Jesus by telling our children a giant bunny rabbit . . . left chocolate eggs in the night. (Audience laughs.)
Gee, I wonder why we're so messed up as a race. You know, I've read the Bible. Can't find the words "bunny" or "chocolate" in the whole book. (Audience laughs.)
I think it's interesting how people act on their beliefs. A lot of Christians, for instance, wear crosses around their necks. Nice sentiment, but do you think when Jesus comes back, he's really going to want to look at a cross? (Audience laughs. Bill makes a face of pain and horror.)
Ow! Maybe that's why he hasn't shown up vet. (As Jesus looking; down from Heaven) "I m not going, Dad. No, they're still wearing crosses - they've totally missed the point. when they start wearing fishes, I might go back again.... No, I m not going.... O.K., I'll tell you what - I'll go back as a bunny."
(End quotation)
Hicks, who delivered his monologue dressed not in his usual gunslinger black but in "bright fall colors - an outfit bought just for the show and reflective of my bright and cheerful mood," seemed to have a lot to smile about. Letterman, who Hicks says greeted him as he sat down to talk with "Good set, Bill! Always nice to have you drop by with an uplifting message!" and signed off saying, "Bill, enjoy answering your mail for the next few weeks." I had been seen to laugh. The word in the Green Room was also good. A couple of hours later, Hicks was back in his hotel, wearing nothing but a towel, when the call came from Robert Morton, the executive producer of the Letterman show, telling him he'd been deep-sixed. Hicks sat down on the bed. The following is a condensed version of what Hicks remembers from the long conversation
"I don't understand, Robert. What's the problem? I though the show went great.
"You killed out there," Morton said, and went on to say, according to Hicks, that the CBS office of standards and practices felt that some of the material was unsuitable for broadcast.
"Ah, which material exactly did they find . . ."
"Well, almost all of it."
"Bob, they're so obviously jokes."
Hicks protested that he had run his routine by his sixty-three-year-old mother in Little Rock, Arkansas, and it passed the test. Morton insisted that the situation was out of his hands. He offered to set up another appearance and, according to Hicks, shouldered the blame for not having spent more time beforehand editing out the hot points."
"Bob, they're just jokes. I don't want to be edited by you or anyone else. Why are people so afraid of jokes?"
"Bill, you've got to understand our audience."
"Your audience! Your audience is comprised of people, right? Well, I understand people, being one myself. People are who I play to every night, Bob. We get along just fine. We taped the show at five-thirty in the afternoon, and your audience had no problem with the material then. Does your audience become overly sensitive between the hours of 11:30 P.M. and 12:30 A.M.? And by the way, Bob, when I'm not performing on your show, I'm a member of the audience of your show. Are you saying my material is not suitable for me? This doesn't make any sense. Why do you underestimate the intelligence of your audience?"
"Bill, it's not our decision."
Morton apologized to Hicks, explaining that the show had to answer to the network, and said that he'd reschedule him soon. The conversation ended soon after that exchange, and in the intervening weeks Hicks has had no further word, he says, from Morton or Letterman. He has, however, heard indirectly from the CBS standards-and-practices office. A man who heard an interview with Hicks on the radio and was outraged over the censorship wrote to CBS to upbraid the network for not airing Hicks' set. He faxed the reply from CBS standards-and practices to the radio station, which faxed it to Hicks' office. "It is true that Bill Hicks was taped that evening and that his performance did not air," the letter said. "What is inaccurate is that the deletion of his routine was required by CBS. In fact, although a CBS Program Practices editor works on that show, the decision was solely that of the producers of the program who decided to substitute his performance with that of another comedian. Therefore, your criticism that CBS censored the program is totally without foundation. Creative judgments must be made in the course of producing and airing any program and, while we regret that you disagreed with this one, the producers felt it necessary and that is not a decision we would override."
Hicks, who refers to the television set as Lucifer's Dream Box, is now in Lucifer's Limbo. He can't get the Letterman show to send him a tape of his performance. He can't get to the bottom of who censored him. And, as yet, he has no return date on Letterman. I called Robert Morton two weeks ago, and, when pressed, he finally grasped the nettle. He had begun by saying that the decision not to show Hicks' routine was made jointly by the Letterman show and CBS and ended up telling me that the producers of the show were solely responsible. "Ultimately, it was our decision," he said. "We're the packagers and owners of the program. It's our job to deliver a finished product to the network."
"It's been a strange little adventure for Willie," Hicks told me at the Dominion last year, referring to his American comedy career. And so it has proved stranger, in fact, than Hicks' most maverick imaginings. The farce came full circle in the week following the Letterman debacle. A friend called Hicks to tell him about a commercial she'd seen during the Letterman show a pro-life commercial. "The networks are delivering an audience to the advertisers," Hicks said later. "They showed their hand. They'll continue to pretend they're a hip talk show. And I'll continue to be me. As Bob Dylan said, the only way to live outside the law is to be totally honest. So I will remain lawless."
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Kate Capps/University of California at Berkeley/kate@violet.berkeley.edu