Leary supposedly stole Louis C.K.s "Asshole" bit and made it into the song that made him famous...

Did Leary really "steal" his act though? I mean anyone pissed off on a stage ever ripped off Hicks, then? People have said that for decades, both guys came out around the same time. You could say the Deftones ripped off Korn, but they were just two weird bands that happened to hit around the same time, they didn't even know of each other.

If anything I feel like Leary would have ripped off Sam Kinison more, he's so over the top angry and animated. It always seemed to me like Denis is a dick and didn't treat people very well, so people started saying "oh you ripped off Hicks" to start a backlash against him. I don't know. Hicks never did anything for me, I know he's an important guy and I respect him for his stuff, but personally I wasn't a fan.

Leary stole a lot of Hicks' jokes. So yes, he did "steal his act".

He stole line for line jokes? I never knew that. I thought he just stole his personality. (Personality? Mingia da kakkity keekity personallll-ah)

My bigger problem is that I didn't even hear of Bill Hicks til I was like 20, and No Cure For Cancer came out when I was about 12, and I heard it about 7,000 times. So (sadly, I suppose) by the time I heard Hicks I was like "This is nothing new..." Kind of like when every American director ripped off John Woo, when I finally went back to watch the Woo films years and years later, it was pretty boring in comparison. Even though he started it.

God damn it, I love Denis Leary's specials though, both of em. I still quote something from No Cure For Cancer almost weekly, a few friends of mine grew up watching it and will just text random lines of it to each other and shit. What a bunch of fags.

Just Youtube "Bill Hicks Dennis Leary" or something like that and there are a lot of examples.

I did, I saw that. He certainly helped himself to some shit. Then I heard an old Louie CK clip saying how Denis stole a bunch of his shit when he was really young. Damn him.

That's why I get so annoyed by these modern coddled comics who look back at Hicks like, 'whateeeever bro, that guy's act is like sooo dated, you'd think he died like twenty years ago or whatever'. While they're fucking playing alt comic rooms in NY thinking they're being edgy by talking about smoking weed and laughing at the way Mexicans talk they feel like they're in a situation to judge a guy who traveled the Deep South in the 80's in a tiny car, going to working men's pubs and screaming Eastern philosophy at violent rednecks.

Hicks was great at what he did, but a majority of his bits (while brilliant) are not very funny. At all.

Tell another shit or weed joke Ari. Dumb Hipster Jew rants about the TSA like he's trying to be hicks. Fuck off. I don't hate Ari but he's over rated for sure.

I don't mind Ari, but I don't think the guy is funny whatsoever. He strikes me as a dude that's not naturally funny, but knows how to write jokes, like he's a purely technical comic. He knows what works for an audience, but there's no natural ability to it. If this was Aliens, he would be "Gorman." Like a dude that learned everything from books or something.

I've heard him on tons of podcasts and stuff, and seen his stand up plenty, nothing he does makes me laugh. I get the feeling he thinks he's much smarter & more insightful than he really is too, like a pseudo-intellectual? I don't know.

Seems like a nice guy so I don't want to throw him under the bus, but I have no idea how he got so famous. (I know he worked his balls off. His boring, technical-joke balls.)

I'd take Hedberg over Kinison all day.

And Giraldo over Hicks. Hello, down-votes!

That's a rough one. I goddamn miss Giraldo.

Suicide pact?

I'm in

Just don't start thinking about Stanhope.....

psych up votes my nigha- THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE

I'll agree with that. Honestly... Hicks didn't really do much in the way of crafting comedy. He was just acerbic. I say that as a Hicks fan who kind of grew up enough to see that. Did he have some interesting insights sometimes? Yeah, if you were under 25 or 30. If you wanna be cynical (and a faggy reddit douche) you could call him /r/lewronggeneration: the standup. I dunno.

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I'm glad hedburg and his cringeworthy followers are pretty much gone. Gee guys lol it sounded like he was going this way and BOOM he zings that way!

Ari is an unfunny mumbling shit bag he stinks

Who?

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Hedburg blows Opie's spot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7auvTMm47uM&t=4m14s

I assume you mean the Pepperidge Farm bread thing? What tits almost always forgets to mention (and only did when a caller asked him) is that his Mom bought discounted bread directly from Pepperidge Farm. They have a store where I live too. Since the bread is preservative free, it's hard and awful when it's past its prime. Hence, the extreme discount and tits despising it.

Hicks is influential but I think he's not as funny as he should've been. Stanhope, in my opinion, took the kinda attitude Hicks was trying to do and made it way funnier

Hicks wasn't even remotely funny or cool.

I think Ari's point was that Hicks wasn't doing his job as a comedian. I vaguely remember some comedian who knew hicks saying to him on a podcast that Hicks was hilarious before he took himself too seriously.

I think it is very popular to deify certain comics who died young/a long time ago. Saying that you're a Bill Hicks fan in comedy circles is seen as you displaying some kind of taste, so it's popular to do even among people who don't know his material other than him screaming "cunt" at that lady that one time.

I think Hicks was on the path to being amazing, but death and his obsession with unfunny, basic political commentary took him off that path. He had all the potential in the world. I love all his apolitical jokes. Marc Maron was sort like a Bill Hicks-lite in his early days, but he evolved. The reason Maron was like that is the same reason Hicks was like that, which is that they both hung around Sam Kinison a ton. Kinison's influence is clear on both of those guys.

If Hicks would have evolved the same way Marc Maron eventually did, to focus more on other aspects of life, great. He also could have gone the other way, down the Dennis Miller and Janeane Garofalo path of post-9/11 becoming an even bigger political blowhard. He'd do basically a Bill Maher-esque preaching to the choir, interchangeable stand up special every three years, except with more anger and better performance.

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I liked Hicks when I was in college almost a decade ago. It was the Bush era, everyone was being all liberal and defiant, thinking it meant anything. And Hicks' stuff was really popular at the time. Now that I look back on his material, a lot of it isn't funny, and a lot of it is douchey. That he'd ever call his stuff "Chomsky with dick jokes" is the height of self-delusion.

A comedian that I find entirely unfunny trashing another comedian that I find entirely overrated.

He would never say it if he was alive. I think part of it is Ari trying to make a name for himself, Ari is funny but he is basically unknown outside of podcast nerds

Proof?

I didn't think he was very funny. Except when he would pounce on hecklers.

As if I needed another reason to hate Ari Shaffir. That fucking Dandy Warhols drummer looking hipster douche. I strongly disagree with pretty much every political or philosophical point Hicks ever made but the guy was just naturally hilarious. I do wish he'd have let himself just be funny and knocked off the preaching but even at his most political he's so much funnier than Ari fucking Shaffir.

'The amazing racist' See.... It's funny because he does racists jokes likes what your pig ignorant truck driver uncle would so but he's not really racist. That was such embarrassing early days of the Internet Limp Bizkit level shit. I've always despised that hipster dudebro fuck. Even this reassessing of Bill Hicks as a standup is so fucking hipster. Okay we get it, you're too cool to like Hicks, the sheeple might have enjoyed him but you saw through the bullshit maaaaan. Get back to serving coffee in Williamsburg you disgusting aging hipster fuck.

I would like to point out that the anger in this comment doesn't stem from some sense of being offended about him not liking Hicks, I've fucking despised Ari since I first heard of him, this was just a good excuse to vent.

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Remember how fucking cute that chick tambourine player was from the Dandy Warhols? Jesus Christ. It shows her playing topless at a show in that documentary Dig! What cute tits. Loved that broad. (Sorry)

I don't think you know what a hipster is, even though you mention them 4 times in that post.

Ari is Hipster, look at the fucking idiot.

No he isn't. He isn't even close.

I never liked Hicks that much either, but what I do find funny is how he and Carlin are two of the only stand-ups that Jim Norton will admit to watching.

It just puts Jim's weird, unfunny, pontificating style of comedy into context. He really wants his words to have the same resonance with people that Hicks and Carlin did, only problem is there's nothing profound about fucking trannies and self-deprecation.

Jimmy has never watched Hicks before.

Norton says Pryor is his favorite comic. I don't think he is trying to be like Hicks at all.