People need to get over this "Bill Hicks just repeats himself over and over" thing. A vast majority of the recordings we have of Bill's act come from a period of FOUR YEARS. Of course we're gonna hear the same bits in a lot of those recordings. Comparing him to comics who recorded their performances for DECADES, of course it's gonna seem like he didn't have as much material. And if you listen to the five compiled albums (not the official or bootleg recordings that documents entire shows), there is no repetition. It just so happens that with Bill, there are more bootlegs than proper albums because he died so young, and didn't have a chance to continue touring and coming up with new bits. He couldn't release album after album of fresh new material. Because he died.
Comics work the road, and don't come up with a whole new set every night. They have their bits, and they perform those bits at every show. They improvise, and they evolve those bits, but they DO use the same material, more or less, in every show on a given tour. I still think it's interesting to hear Bill say something as a brief throwaway, then to hear it expanded as a four or five-minute bit on a later recording. But yeah, when you're listening to whole shows, you're gonna hear variations on material you've already heard before, because his albums are essentially compilations of his funniest stuff. And you're still gonna hear some bits that never made it onto the albums, so that makes it doubly worthwhile. You get to hear different versions of familiar routine, often with different punchlines, and also, you get to hear some things you've never heard before.
When I saw George Carlin live in 2001, he performed a whole slew of material that I'd never heard before. When I watched his subsequent HBO special, 90% of its content was comprised of bits that he'd done when I saw him live. Do I begrudge him this? No...because I understand how stand-up works. Carlin toured and honed his act, tweaked the bits as he went along, found out what worked and what didn't, and got the set refined to its best possible form, so that his HBO show would be as strong as it possibly could be. That's what comics do...they evolve their act. They don't perform a completely different set every time the get on stage.
If Hicks had lived on, and continued recording his performances for the next fifteen years, this would not be a point of discussion. He would have continued to write and perform new material, and there would be a lot more variety in his available performances. That just didn't happen because he died at 32.
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