20 years on from the invasion of Iraq, I revisit a comedy album

Do comedians actually speak truth to power?

The idea of stand up comedians speaking truth to power has become a joke in and of itself, best encapsulated by Alasdair Beckett-King: 

Too often the idea of transgressing social norms is seen as inherently valuable, even when those social norms might have developed in response to recognising how certain groups of people have been historically marginalised. Or sometimes, comedy isn’t really transgressing social norms at all, it’s just about having a trash can stuck on your ass. 

I was something of a comedy nerd in my early teens — in particular, for the largely wholesome comedy of Weird Al Yankovic, which I think holds up pretty well. I also had Jerry Seinfield’s album I’m telling you for the last time (which is kinda funny I guess?) It was after the US invasion of Iraq that my taste in comedy evolved, following a similar trajectory to my taste in music—-think going from the irreverent punk-pop of Blink 182 to the angry political nu-metal of System of a Down. 

I discovered Bill Hicks via clips played on the edgy youth orientated radio station Channel Z, but soon amassed a collection of albums and bootleg recordings. I was starting to check out books by Noam Chomsky from the library and here was a comedian who had referred to himself as “Chomsky with dick jokes”.It wasn’t the pedestrian observational humour of Jerry Seinfield of the wacky antics of Weird Al, and it was just what I needed at that point in my life. 

“People often ask me where I stand politically. It's not that I disagree with Bush's economic policy or his foreign policy, it's that I believe he was a child of Satan sent here to destroy the planet Earth. Little to the left.”

—Bill Hicks

Hicks had died in 1994, but his comedy still felt topical. Hicks had made jokes about US President Bush, and the war in Iraq. Ten years later the US had a new president Bush, and was again going to war in Iraq. “shit, a decade after Bill left us, they [the jokes] still sound as if they could have been made yesterday.” wrote Hicks’ friend and biographer Kevin Booth in Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution “Even history has conspired — Bush, Iraq – to keep the material headline-fresh. In ten more years, there will be different politicians and different wars, but the jokes, the principles and observations they were based on, they will still play and still make people laugh.”

I’m not so sure about that, now that we’re closer to twenty years on. In addition to writing the biography and producing most of Hick’s videos and albums, Booth also co-produced the Alex Jones directed Martial Law 9/11: Rise of the Police State, a conspiratorial take on the 9/11 terror attacks and their aftermath. Hicks was also something of a conspiracy theorist, especially when it came to the Kennedy Assassination, and while his political comedy stands out, Hicks’ worldview is incredibly misanthropic, and much (if not most) of his material has women—in particular working class women, who are portrayed as unintelligent—as the butt of the joke.

“I was in Nashville, Tennessee last year. After the show I went to a Waffle House. I'm not proud of it, I was hungry. And I'm alone, I'm eating and I'm reading a book, right? Waitress walks over to me: 'Hey, whatcha readin' for?' Isn't that the weirdest fuckin' question you've ever heard? Not what am I reading, but what am I reading FOR? Well, goddamnit, ya stumped me! Why do I read? Well . . . hmmm...I dunno...I guess I read for a lot of reasons and the main one is so I don't end up being a fuckin' waffle waitress.”

—Bill Hicks

“I must have missed his sketches about union rights for immigrant workers.” wrote John Doran in 2013, “I mean, for Christ sake, Michael Moore is a level-headed, even-handed Marxist revolutionary stood next to Hicks.” Had cancer not taken him at the age of 32, Hicks might have had a lot to say about George W Bush and his invasion of Iraq, but he almost certainly would have dabbled in 9/11 “truther” conspiracy theories throughout the 2000s and had he lived to the 2010s would probably be talking about “cancel culture” and have a Netflix special called something like “Hicks: Trigger Me.” But this isn’t an article about Bill Hicks. Sorry for the misdirect. It’s an article about Mark Thomas, and specifically about the album The Night War Broke Out. 

Mark Thomas. Photo by Tore Sætre. CC BY-SA 4.0

The album was released in 2004, but it was recorded live in Edinburgh on the evening the US and UK military began the invasion of Iraq with the bombing of Saddam Hussein's palace. Earlier that day anti-war protestors engaged in civil disobedience, blocking the main streets of the city. Over 4,000 people defied police in sit-down protests and school kids attempted to storm the Scottish Parliament. A few weeks earlier people in 600 cities had participated in what remains the largest anti-war rally in history.