Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by borepop 1585 days ago
Sometimes I find these kinds of link submissions pretty baffling. "Here's a nearly 30 year old article about a dead comedian!"

Thanks, I guess. But also: why?

Why this arbitrary New Yorker article, as opposed to any other article written in the last three decades?
4 comments
throwanem 1585 days ago
Apparently a lot of people around here like Bill Hicks, and why not? He was a brilliant comedian, and maybe the most viciously accurate (and just vicious!) satirist there ever was of the grossly self-satisfied smugness that typified post-1989 American culture. He was easily worthy of being remembered alongside Carlin and Williams, and I think would've been had he not died of cancer just as his career was starting to really take off.

You can find a lot of his stuff, full shows as well as excerpts, on YouTube, and I'd recommend doing so. You'll find your question better answered there than here.

link
cafard 1585 days ago
Post-1989?
link
throwanem 1584 days ago
After the Berlin Wall fell. That was one of Lenin's "weeks where decades happen", and the decade that happened in that week was the 90s, when the United States believed it had won the world forever and behaved accordingly.
link
pvg 1584 days ago
It's not really one of Lenin's

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/07/13/decades-weeks/

link
low_tech_love 1585 days ago
A post is just a suggestion, a proposition. If there was no place for it, or interest, then it would die in oblivion. But apparently people like bill hicks here!
link
dang 1584 days ago
Historical material is always welcome here, and the only criterion for a good HN post is gratifying intellectual curiosity. I had no idea that the New Yorker had profiled Bill Hicks while he was still alive. That's already interesting!

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

link
tagoregrtst 1585 days ago
Bill Hicks saw what most 30 years ago wouldn't and that has become painfully obvious today.

- The war on drugs

- Imperial hubris

- Safetism

The foresight of Hicks is evident by the fact that most Republican voters agree with Hicks on these issues; the last two maybe more than Democrat voters - at least the ones who havent been purged by the neoliberals (Tulsi, we love you!).

link