Before 1998, the last brothers simultaneously to have been state governors were Nelson and Winthrop Rockefeller, a quarter of a century ago. Always passion, never anger.One of the truly remarkable aspects of Hicks was that however much he ranted, whatever shocking bile he spewed forth, he remained utterly lovable He was a true hero, saying the unsayable for us.. Hicks’s maniacal laugh and his body language as he stalked the stage spoke just as eloquently of the passion this original thinker felt. I want to see pro-lifers opening caskets shouting, `Get out’.”)Neither were they too impressed with Hicks’s thoughts on Christians who wear crosses (“Do you think when Jesus comes back he’s ever going to want to see a cross again? That’s like going up to Jackie Onassis with a rifle pendant”), or his plans for a new TV game show called Let’s Hunt and Kill Billy Ray Cyrus and its follow-up Let’s Hunt and Kill Michael Bolton.Quoting Hicks’s words, elegant though they usually were, tells only half the story, though. (“If you’re so pro-life,” said Hicks, “don’t lock arms and block medical clinics, lock arms and block cemeteries. Hicks did a brilliant routine about the Assassination Museum established in the Dallas Book Depository.

(“I think it was set up after Kennedy was shot,” says Hicks, “but I’m not sure of the chronology here.”)Bruce and Hicks both suffered censorship, too. Hicks, shortly before he died, famously had his act cut from the David Letterman show. Letterman’s people were particularly concerned about Hicks’s attack on anti-abortionists. Both died young; both spoke up for recreational drugs; both were highly political, even touching on the same subject matter in the Kennedy assassination.

That is something you can’t learn, can’t copy, can’t fake.A skilled comedy craftsman such as, say, Jerry Seinfeld, who pushes all the right buttons and is undeniably funny, is not really in the same business as Hicks. He really did want to change the world.The comedian with whom Hicks is most often identified is Lenny Bruce, but since Hicks was not born until 1961 and Bruce died in 1966, any influence the sophisticated New Yorker might have had on his kindred spirit in the South must have been indirect.There are extraordinary parallels, though. Hicks’s mother, interviewed on a Channel 4 tribute to the comic, displayed a quarter of an inch of space between thumb and forefinger and said: “He was just that far from being a preacher” – which is as good an insight into Hicks as any. The tendency to overpraise anyone emerging from the morass of mediocrity that is modern comedy with an act that is sharp, original and – praise be – has a point, should not be discounted, but Hicks quite clearly was inspired.If you listen to the four CDs of Hicks’s act that have been issued since the comedian’s death from pancreatic cancer in February 1994, you can detect influences – Woody Allen and Richard Pryor, whom he acknowledged; Jack Nicholson scolding the waitress in Five Easy Pieces; Martin Luther King at his fieriest (especially Martin Luther King) – but Hicks’s voice is defiantly his own. That probably explains why the scabrous, high-energy performance put on by Bill Hicks at the 1990 Edinburgh Festival was so rapturously received by the critics, and why the Texan comic was immediately hailed as a genius.
Strange thing is, Hicks really was a genius.

SOME TIME in the Eighties serious newspapers started appointing critics to review stand-up comedy, which must have been about the most dispiriting job on the paper unless you actually enjoyed spending endless nights listening to jokes about airline travel and fast food (American comics) or daytime television and masturbation (Brits). We find it hard to understand, and therefore to respect earlier generations for whom these ideas did not seem so strange. But if we are leaving Great Times behind, is this necessarily a bad thing? This violent century – in which war-related death became a more intimate part of people’s lives than ever before – has left its mark upon us and taught us the mundane benefits of peace.Dr Mark Mazower’s latest book is `Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century”, published by Penguin Books. All such concepts seem impossibly outmoded to most people in Europe today, with the possible exception of the Balkans.