By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself.

And it's very difficult to watch something like this so many years removed from him actually

doing it and from the culture that produced it in a way that's removed from the prism of

everything that's happened since. and of all the kind of

trends in comedy and culture you know many of which are extremely annoying and and irritating

and which in some cases you know feel like not that they originate in hicks but that they're

definitely kind of reflected in things that he does but of, that wasn't the case when he did them.

So I think it's hard to say definitively, at least about parts of this, that they're actually

bad or that they're good. It's just they are, they are a product of the time that produced them.

And I think like Lenny Bruce, were probably a lot more transgressive at the time.

I hear what you're saying because I remembered that when Bill Hicks was at his peak,

it was actually something of a novelty to be a political comedian.

In fact, it was something of a novelty as recently as, oh, I want to say five years ago.

As recently as like a year after you wrote your Lenny Bruce article.

Yeah, I mean, there was Lenny Bruce, there was Mort Saul, I guess there was George Carlin,

although he was really only 30% a political comedian.

And there was like Dennis Miller and Bill Maher, who were guys who very consciously staked

out territory as being, I'm the political guy.

But the default of a comedian, particularly a TV comedian, was somebody like Johnny Carson,

or after him, David Letterman and Jay Leno, were all very, very consciously apolitical.

It was their mission to appeal to the broadest possible audience. The philosophy

being that if you take a stand, you're going to alienate half your potential audience. And actually,

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