Word Violence.

It's not just music that makes me a better person. It takes comedy as well. Occasionally, I need a little black humor to supplement my protein-rich diet of grinding thrash and soul-devouring noise, just to keep my balance. It's like bran in audio form. Bran for the soul. Hmm. This isn't looking too good. Let's start again...

Sometimes, there is the funny. Almost all comedians have to be funny, otherwise they're just "storytellers," or "poets," or "performance artists," or "terrible." Being funny puts the food on the comic's table, the "bread and butter," as it were. I'm sure even some of the more horribly offensive comics want to entertain and retain their audiences, when all is said and done. To maintain the balance of being controversial without being too controversial. It can be a fine line. I mean, who would want to actively drive their audiences away? Not a sane, career-oriented individual, certainly.

With that in mind, at the other end of this link is a performance by Bill Hicks. This show has many of his standard bits, and includes some I have never heard before. Which is nice, if you're a fan. There are also a lot of hecklers, and he hurls some pretty horrific abuse on them. Hicks really goes off the deep end several times, coming off more frightening than funny. Here is what Wikipedia had to say about it:

In a gig in Chicago during 1989, later released as the bootleg "I'm Sorry, Folks", resulted in Hicks screaming possibly his most infamous quote, "Hitler had the right idea, he was just an underachiever" to a heckler shouting "Free Bird" over and over. Hicks followed this remark with a misanthropic tirade calling for unbiased genocide against the whole of humanity, suggesting that it was not an anti-Semitic comment but rather an expression of his disgust with humanity in general. Hicks often veered between hope and love for the human race and utter hopelessness. He would often unsarcastically refer to humans as "God's perfect and holy children" while in the same performance suggesting that humans were turds.

I have actually seen a terrible quality video of this blistering verbal show of force. It is brutal and ugly. Also, very very funny. If you ever have a chance to watch it, you should.

As for the audio portion, if you decide to listen to this at work, I suggest the use of headphones. To say that the language was salty would be a gross understatement.