Two-thousand-four was a pretty good year for smart, culturally conscious comedians; election years inevitably are. And every time somebody like Jon Stewart speaks loudly, we hear echoes of Bill Hicks, the acclaimed, innately controversial stand-up comic who — despite never achieving widespread recognition in America — succeeded in influencing a generation of socially critical humorists before dying of cancer, at the young age of 32, in 1994.
Even better, every time insurgent comedy makes a ping on the pop-culture radar, we also usually get an opportunity to hear from Hicks himself. Reissue-king music label Rykodisc has been releasing the late comic's provocative rhetoric sporadically, on audio CD, for a while now; new titles tend to appear whenever edgy comedians obviously inspired by Hicks (David Cross and Patton Oswalt, for example) capture the nation's attention. This time around, it's a DVD rather than a CD, the first compendium of Hicks' hilarious and thoughtful rants available in the format.
Bill Hicks Live trumps the majority of the canonized stand-up's previous releases, and is a near must-have for both Hicks devotees and comedy fiends in general, for three reasons.
1. Most of his top-notch material is represented. The collection of three large-hall performances from 1991 and '92 includes the famous bits (on subjects like smoking, why drugs are good and the use of terminally ill patients as stunt-people in action movies) and the not-so-famous (moths, untalented wannabes fellating Satan in exchange for stardom, British pornography). Also included is a mid-'90s Comedy Central Hicks biography It's Just A Ride. It's pretty much all here.
2. These shows — a taping for HBO's One Night Stand in Chicago, a one-man show from the '91 Montreal International Comedy Festival, and a fairly widely circulated headlining set at London's Dominion Theater — are from a critical point in Hicks' career. Relentless touring, countless recommendations by more famous peers, and a few late-night talk-show appearances had placed him at the edge of a breakthrough. The breakthrough never happened, but here we see Hicks refining prodigious natural talent into an expertly compelling performance; in fact, we see it happen over the course of these gigs.
3. Hicks was an eminently watchable comic, often incorporating contortions, stage-stalking, hand gestures and outrageous, hyperbolic action. In-concert comedy albums always suffer from a lack of such integral, illustrative physical movement, but everything is presented here. Hicks was also, like Lenny Bruce, a master at building tension during his routine, going long minutes without triggering a laugh. What might come off as empty air on an audio CD becomes tautly alive on DVD — seeing it helps you feel it.
Bill Hicks Live isn't perfect. There's material that hardcore fans have heard over and over. There's a noticeable drop in the video quality of the Montreal set, lasting several minutes. And there's a dearth of Hicks' infamous interaction with audience members — he suffered neither ignorance nor disinterest gladly, and small-club performances often degenerated into confrontation. (Hunt down the VHS release Sane Man for some excruciating early-days footage of him going at it with a crowd.) But on the whole, it's both a thorough, excellent introduction for interested parties, and yet another worthy collectible for those of us who can't get enough of Hicks' singular blend of anger, instigation and hope. (www.rykodisc.com) 
—Scott Harrell
This article appears in Jan 5-11, 2005.