Bill Hicks? Overrated or underrated?

I think Hicks is both overrated and underrated. The hero worship that exists around him is a bit much at times, but he was - without doubt - one of the greatest comedians of all time.

He's overrated partly because so much of his material has become part of the standard issue undergraduate cliche arsenal - it's a rite of passage for some people to quote Bill Hicks ad-nauseaum, as if everything he had to say was something not that far removed from the word of God. I think that's a lot of the reason that people get a bit sick of all the talking about him: his placement on a pedestal by others. I think part of his appeal is that he kind of flatters the ego of (some of the) people who like him - he's intelligent, he's talking about ideas as much as he's cracking jokes, therefore: if I like him it means that I too am intelligent and, if you don't, it means that you just don't get it. And a common knee-jerk reaction with people who are told they just don't get something is a "well, you're the stupid one, there's nothing to get... He's not even funny.

I don't think intelligence has got a lot to do with it, more just how you like your comedy served. Whether you like him or not has, in my opinion, more to do with taste than it has to do with braincells. I think Hicks probably turns a lot of people off because of the manner in which he ranted, raved and hectored his audience - a lot of people are going to immediately be turned off by that. And then to have people banging on about his genius!! A lot of his stuff is abrasive and hard to like - He suffered from smugness, picking on easy-targets, picking on the wrong-targets, having a sometimes simplistic view of the solutions to the worlds problems, sometimes making it feel like he wanted to put people through an ordeal rather than to make them laugh...

But, here's the thing - Despite all that, I do think Hicks was a genius. He followed his own path, did things his own way, spoke his mind and never hid his true feelings. Yes, sometimes, he could be needlessly bleak or hard to take, but I think if you listen to a lot of his material you could come around to the idea that he was actually really quite a hopeful guy, who had it in him to be, occasionally, pretty profound about life. He was complicated and you can't pigeonhole him. I like that about him. There was more to him that just rhyming off endless jokes - that wasn't his ultimate goal, I think - but that's not to say he wasn't funny. Some of his routines - Dinosaurs in The Bible, What are you readin for?, Terminally Ill People Meeting Chuck Norris, etc,etc, - are some of the most flat out hilarious bits of stand-up I've ever heard. When he was on the money, he killed. Some people here have said that he ripped off George Carlin. I don’t agree. He was definitely influenced by him, for sure. But Carlin was never as deep or as dark as Hicks. Hicks was unique. But he was, at the end of the day, just another guy.