Bill Hicks’ Legendary Letterman Set Aired At Last

February 2, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Comedy, Culture, Entertainment, Media 

What turned out to be Bill Hicks’ final appearance on CBS’ The Late Show with David Letterman was finally broadcast on Friday night, sixteen years after it was cut from the show.

I met Bill shortly after I joined NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman in the summer of 1987. He had been banned from the show a couple of years earlier for PWI — performing while intoxicated.   I was unaware of this backstory when I saw him at a club and was bowled over by his presence and his talent.

He had completely dried out and I vouched for him and he returned and became a friend of the show, regularly appearing several times each year.

My job was to decide whether a comic had enough material to fill a five minute segment, and then to help hone it into a set that would both fit into the context of Dave’s show and come in right on time.  Some comedians resented it, and I knew they were thinking “he sounds exactly like Nixon” when I told them that I understood how they felt.  (It wasn’t coincidental that Saturday Night Live’s “politically incorrect private investigator” was called Frank Gannon P.I.P.I.)

But I had no doubts about my ability to do my job because it didn’t take a comedian —much less a rocket scientist— to figure out that the sense and sensibility of Dave’s network show was different in every way from the freewheeling club atmosphere in which the comedians developed and performed their sets.  A TV set was tightly timed: at the pre-show production meeting I would have to tell the producer and director the set’s last word —the out cue— in advance.  The ideal Late Night five minute set included two or three runs of jokes on separate topics building to a big joke at the end.

Bill understood the necessary (or as he put it, necessarily evil) function I performed and enjoyed the irony of working with a man whose qualifications for the job of comedy arbiter consisted of studying history in grad school and working for Richard Nixon for seven years.  So we hit it off and hung out whenever he was in town working on a set.  He was amused when one of the introductions I wrote for Dave described his comedy as “relentless.”

At one point cameras from CBS’ 48 Hours examined the process by  following us around from club to club and then into the studio for the broadcast. The months of ribbing that followed from Dave and the Late Night crew, added to the fact that neither NBC nor CBS would reimburse me for the town car the cameraman required to film from the front seat, put paid to my interest in any further on camera work.

I left Late Night on 14 February 1992.  After his last show on my watch, Bill gave me a picture book of dinosaurs with the inscription “From one dinosaur to another.”

Later that summer Dave decamped to CBS.  On 1 October 1993 Bill was scheduled to do his first set on the Late Show; it would be his twelfth appearance with Dave but his first on the CBS show broadcast at the earlier, 11.30, hour.

His set was pre-approved in the usual way by my successor and delivered successfully at the Ed Sullivan Theater. But when Bill got back to his hotel, he received a call from Robert Morton, the show’s producer, informing him that, on consideration, the set was considered inappropriate and would have to be cut. He assured him that he would be invited back to do a different set. Bill called me, but aside from expressing sympathy there was nothing I could do.

What none of us knew was that Bill knew there wouldn’t be another time.  He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he died five months later, fifteen years ago this month, less than two months into his thirty-second year, on 26 February 1994.

In the last few years before he died, Bill had developed a large and growing cult following, particularly in the UK where they took his outlaw persona literally, and where he filled theaters with his one man shows (as you can see in the heavily produced BBC filmed version of one of his West End extravaganzas).

John Lahr, the New Yorker’s drama critic, was an early and ardent Hicksian. After the Late Show fiasco, Bill wrote him a 39-page letter, and Mr. Lahr incorporated this apologia pro vita sua into an earlier New Yorker profile to make an insightful and indignant and moving chapter in his book Light Fantastic.

Which brings us back to Friday night.

Bill’s mother appeared with Dave in an introductory segment that was about equal parts poignant and uncomfortable.  Dave apologized and eulogized, and Mary Hicks offered acceptance but not absolution.  In fact, although Dave rightly, and characteristically, accepted responsibility for cutting the set, the question was almost certainly first raised by the CBS Standards and Practices rep assigned to the show and the show’s producer.   If the five minute segment was the reality with which the comedians had to cope, the Standards and Practices constraints were the producers’ cross to bear.  

The set, with its unrelenting language and undercurrent of violence, delivered with Bill’s characteristic intensity, was undeniably disturbing.  Whoever made the decision, it was, in terms of the realities of the times,  certainly an arguable —and, arguably, the right— one to make.

The first shock watching this old footage was seeing how uncharacteristically healthy Bill looked.  The man always described as pasty and pudgy was now lean and trim.  The irony was painful.

On the page the jokes had seemed edgy but unexceptional. But in performance, with Bill’s charisma and intensity added, the whole became greater than the sum of its parts, and I could understand why it made the Standards and Practices already supersensitive needle flip into the red.

Bill begins by joking about hunting and killing Billy Ray Cyrus, Michael Bolton, Marky Mark and others; then he does some gay and lesbian material before attacking pro-lifers; he segues into some of his old smoking jokes and ends with a rant about Easter and people who wear crosses.

Even today, with all the changes the intervening years have seen, this is still a set that would still be challenging in terms of broadcast network standards.  It would probably be passed, but there would surely be some discussion.

The mistake was the preapproval that led Bill to perform with the expectation that the set would air.  But mistakes get made, and if Bill had lived, he would have taken the Mulligan, and the unhappy experience would have become fodder for later rants instead of the tragic legend at the end of his career.

If you seek Bill’s legacy — just look around.  His influence can be seen and felt and heard anywhere good comedy and craftsmanlike comedians are to be found.

Cynthia True’s biography —American Scream— tells Bill’s story.  And John Lahr edited Bill’s routines and writings in Love All the People. But the best sources are Bill’s own several CDs and DVDs.

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