A Filmmaker's Review: "American: The Bill Hicks Story" (2009)

Bill Hicks was, as we all know, one of the greatest comedians in human history. I personally think of him as a man who changed the face of comedy and satire forever and he was so good that people in power were actually scared of him. His comedy was intelligent and related to his time, his day and the political history in his country. When I started watching this documentary, the truth was is that I knew I needed a laugh. I needed something to laugh about and so, what better thing to watch than Bill Hicks? I didn’t know it was going to get so deep though. It starts right at the beginning with his mother talking about how she had ‘a girl, a boy and a baby’ (the baby was Bill Hicks). And now, we get introduced to his siblings who have some really touching thoughts about him. We get told stories about how he first started off in his teens as a comedian going around making sketches in his school with his friends, making people think and most importantly, making people laugh. The one thing that shocked me is that Bill Hicks started off as a clean comedian who didn’t swear on stage at all. I don’t think I have ever sat through a Bill Hicks video where he doesn’t swear for more than a minute. The thing is, Bill Hicks doesn’t use swearing to make something funny, he does it to imitate normal speech in his day in which people swear because it is the ‘new cool’ thing to do because it is satirical.

I grew up watching Bill Hicks videos because he died only a couple of years before I was born and he is also my older brother’s favourite comedian. One other reason I watched this documentary is because I feel that even though I love his comedy, I don’t really know a lot about him. I know that he is intelligent and because of the way he does his comedy, he has definitely done a shit ton of research into his day’s political situation. But, I feel like when it came to his life I was only aware that he had cancer and died at 32 years’ old. One thing I got to see was the way he made a comedian out of himself in a world that was trying to make him do otherwise. You saw his parents who went to college and his brother and sister who went to college, but then he didn’t. The depressing message he leaves on a tape about not being able to write new material after just getting rejected on a co-written script is something incredibly touching because you get to see his real struggles in making what we know now as Bill Hicks.

Another thing I loved about this documentary is the fact that it is made by all the people who knew him, the people who worked with him and the people who went on his journey with him. It is a brilliant story which has some really cool anecdotes from specific times in his life, such as when he and his friend were in the meeting about the script they were writing and when his sister first saw him on stage doing his comedy after his brother’s wedding.

All in all, I have to say that you must watch this documentary because it will fill in all those gaps about Bill Hicks. And there are a lot of gaps. He was a dangerously funny man but there was also a story behind it, there is a struggle behind it and there are many different things that people remember of him. None of them are negative towards him and it seemed like he was a passionate guy who had an incredible amount of intelligence. He always knew what he wanted to do and got it from a young child however, as he got older, he broke free and changed the way people viewed comedy. He was doing comedy in the same realms as Robin Williams and Richard Pryor and yet, he is still remembered as they are, as some of the greats. And he too, worked very hard for it.