Modified On August 13, 2012
It was anti-climactic.
Dave seemed weak, almost hoarse during his monologue. (Perhaps it was the HD TV we watched it on, but he seemed weary and older. We haven’t watched the show in some time, so maybe it was just that we forgot what Dave looked like.)
We have a theory: The bit that got Hicks’ set yanked wasn’t the anti-Pro-Lifer bit (that was actually pretty innocuous, when you analzye it), but the opening joke, the one where he advocates hunting Billy Ray Cyrus down.
Folks sometimes forget that when the show moved from NBC to CBS, it also dropped down from 12:30 AM to 11:30 PM. There was much fretting about whether Letterman’s humor and style would play well in the new time slot– and conversely, it was said that Letterman’s style was better-suited to the later slot. (In similar fashion, so do folks worry about Conan O’Brien’s new timeslot.)
The new time slot was probably the most important factor in the decision to cut the set. You can put a shotgun in someone’s mouth and pull the trigger at 1:24 AM (maybe), but you can’t put a shotgun in someone’s mouth an hour earlier. That was a Late Night set, not a Late Show set.
The images, the suggestions, are rather violent (even though they’re clearly meant as a joke), but folks get antsy when a comic advocates such violence. (And Hicks added the extra graphic details–“…catch that fruity little ponytail of his, pull him to his Chippendale’s knees, put a shotgun in his mouth and ‘pow'”)
Perhaps whoever vetted the set failed to make the adjustment– an hour’s difference is significant when it comes to standards and practices. The set should never have been approved in the first place.
It’s not a stretch to think that the folks who represent Cyrus (and the other celebrities targeted in the opening bit– Markie Mark, M.C. Hammer, Michael Bolton) had some “input” into the decision– explicitly or implicitly. Advocating the brutal murder of three or four of the biggest-selling recording artists of the previous four or five years might make a giant firm like ICM or William Morris a bit… testy. And you don’t want to alienate them if you’re a new show on a new network. (By October of ’93, Vanilla Ice was well along his way into oblivion, so we figure no one spoke up for him.)
Or was it the “Daddy’s New Roommate” bit? Political correctness had reached a peak at just about the time Hicks’s 12th appearance on the show was taped. It’s possible that the bit, though far from “homophobic,” could have conceivably make some flinch in 1993, such was the sensitivity at the time.
Hicks had made quite a name for himself tweaking those who might squirm– on both the left and the right– so it isn’t a slam dunk that his set was axed because of the pro-life bit or the Easter bunny bit. It might well have been a collision of commerce, violence, ideology and hyper-sensitivity that precipitated the decision. (And, in any event, we would argue that what took place cannot be described as “censorship.” A calamitous series of bad decisions by several parties, perhaps, but not censorship.)
After seeing the set, and keeping in mind the context, it’s completely understandable why it might have been excised from the broadcast. And again it’s totally baffling that the set was vetted in the first place.
Re-running it might have been a bad move for the show. Letterman looked weary last night and viewers might have gotten the idea that perhaps he wasn’t as cutting edge as we all thought 15 years ago when the incident originally took place.
Dave says he felt guilty. We would say that he had little reason to feel guilty because– as was pointed out on the show last night– Hicks had been on the network showcase 11 times prior. Letterman may have done more than anyone to certify Hicks as a comedy star. And, had Hicks lived, the bumped routine would have added to his legend and cemented his reputation as a rebel. (The fact that he died soon after the incident is something that Letterman could not have foreseen and is something therefore that could not have been factored into the decision.)
We would have preferred to have seen the set presented in the context of a tribute to the artist, a celebration, perhaps, of a comedian who had appeared on the show multiple times in the space of eight or nine years. And we could have done without the apologies– we’re well aware that Hicks was allegedly crushed by the exclusion from the show, but we’re inclined to believe that was the cancer talking, a classic case of displacement, perhaps. After all, Hicks wore such slights as a badge of honor. The 39-page letter that Hicks sent to The New Yorker reporter seems out of character for a guy who called for genocide for the whole of humanity and called Hitler an underachiever.
Putting all that aside, watching the performance of a man who died 148 days later was quite dramatic and tragic. Knowing that he knew that he was staring death in the face made it all that much more bizarre and poignant.