It's also extremely bewildering to an unsuspecting comedy club patron. It is no wonder then why most people -- even the people who paid to enter the audience at Hicks' show -- never understood him. It's for the same reason that he would often tell the audience they looked "like a dog that's just been shown a card trick" -- confused by their ignorance, even if they were smiling and laughing. After all, even college students who have passed Philosophy 101 have trouble fully digesting this message. Hicks was proud to be a walking paradox, seeming to despise our entire society, but still harboring a keen optimism for the human race. So how did he end up so far out there? Was there a purpose to his pessimism? Why has his message endured, and even strengthened, since his death?

First of all, Hicks was never a regular comedian. He was fully capable of assuming that role, and he even passed into prurient topics on occasion, but it seems that he never let an audience off the hook without first testing their brains and their spirits. On some recordings, he repeatedly told the crowd not to worry because the philosophical arguments would soon be done. He would then ensure the audience that the "dick jokes" were coming, but even though that simple mention elicited laughs from the fans, he would leave them hanging -- at times never providing the dumb humor.

What he did provide pretty much every show was a dissection of politics, religion, sex, drugs, alcohol, smoking, pop culture, abortion, the military, and on and on through every other controversial topic that existed in the late '80s and early '90s. But the way he dove into a controversial point was usually by cleverly diverging from a more comfortable one. For example, he'd first tell the crowd that he was horribly addicted to the show Cops. Then after a few minutes of stirring up laughter with little real effort, he'd shift into his analysis of what that show actually stood for -- basically that the government is in control, and if you try to test them they will destroy you. People watch Cops for entertainment, because they want to see folks (whether criminals or not) get chased and busted. But the real message is, "We are in control. Do not fuck with us." Hicks forced the crowd to confront the truth without giving them a chance to ignore or deflect. That's not to say that the crowd never missed the point, which they likely often did. And that could explain Hicks' repetition from show to show.

He paid particular attention to the ways that the public is manipulated and taken advantage of, as with the Cops segment. Another was the abovementioned "acid news story" joke, which was intended to point out the constant and unnecessary negativity of TV news. In fact, Hicks told many personal stories about his own drug use, emphasizing that -- while he had generally stopped experimenting -- he had had some amazing times on drugs, especially hallucinogenics. He talked about marijuana and psilocybin mushrooms as if they were gifts from God, placed on the planet to accelerate human evolution. He claimed that America's war on drugs was actually no more than "a war on personal freedom." Hicks' theory was, if we open up our third eye -- that is, our mind's eye, or the interface between consciousness and the outer world -- then we will begin to recognize the one loving truth at the core of humanity. Obviously I'm skipping some points in the connect-the-dot picture, but it's an extremely complicated philosophy.

The fact that Hicks' believed in a God at all was incredible, given his general pessimistic nature. He was extremely critical of Christianity, especially the evangelicals he had grown up with in the American South. He insisted that Christianity and southern politics were both founded on ignorance and immoral behavior. This ranged from calling George H. W. Bush the anti-Christ, to pointing out that Creationists usually look very un-evolved. He'd tell of a Christian's claim that God put dinosaur bones on earth to test our faith, to which he replied, "I think God put you here to test my faith." Hicks' God reflected the argument that existing religions are no longer relevant, that the only path to a God (if there is such a being or presence) lies within.

Hicks would consistently pick out the strongest examples of American dull-mindedness and turn them into humorous anecdotes. To the "man" who said, "My daddy died for our flag," he'd say, "Really? Wow. I bought mine." The man returned with, "Yeah, he died in the Korean War for that flag," which Hicks followed with, "Oh, what a coincidence. Mine was made in Korea." The goal was not to undervalue American death, but to point out that most patriotism is really the result of brainwash propaganda intended to win approval for a war. And that topic would lead to jabs at American foreign policy and militarism, especially a statement of the fact that no country in the world will ever be a threat to the U.S. But again and again he would return to the core subjects. He believed that we were carrying an enormous load of negative psychic energy, fed by the "fevered egos" of the world: the politicians, priests, media pundits, pop stars, and more. His target was anyone with the power to affect or control human beliefs and behavior, but who did so without adhering to a moral code or rational thought process; in other words, anyone who did much more harm than good in the world, especially those ignorant of their own destructive nature.

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