It’s safer to become a podcaster than tell a good joke
The most exciting stand-up comedy show I’ve ever seen was Bill Hicks in a student union in the autumn of 1992. Being a comedy naïf probably helped. I had seen Hicks’ sensational Channel 4 special Relentless earlier that year but I was unprepared for the rock-star electricity in the room. The 30-year-old Texan could be righteously indignant or disarmingly sweet, hilariously petty or shockingly sincere, flamboyantly profane or deeply moral — and he thrived on the dissonance of these tonal shifts. “Please relax,” he said during a particularly intense riff. “There are dick jokes coming up.”
