Bill Hicks an Aspie?

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Having lived through Hicks' era, and being pretty familiar with his stuff, I would say...um, possibly.

It always struck me as very sad that for a comic who was so revered in his lifetime, who many of contemporaries admired, ended up dying in his parents' basement, with most of those admirers not even aware he was that sick. The comedy world usually is a pretty closeknit, highly social community. Hicks must have kept himself apart somehow, like simply not maintained contact with people, to have had such a high profile career and then simply slipped off of everyone's radar like that. There was a journalist from Chicago who had tracked him down during the last year of Hicks' life, only to find no one among the comedy scene knew where he went, that he was so severely ill and that no one had tried to contact him for a considerable length of time.



Actually he did have a youthful face for his age, until his started getting sick.

Hicks had issues, yes, and to dismiss him as simply angry and bitter--well, look at WP. You'd have to dismiss about 3/4 of he people here on those grounds. Hicks' primary problem was, it seemed, that he could not reconcile the mass hypocrisy. contradictions, irrationality and self-deceit of people around him. That was the root of his comedy. He did desire that things be clear, be consistent, be transparent, be logical. He also had social anxiety issues well into adulthood, hence the smoking and problems making eye contact.

Asperger's could possibly account for many things I've observed about Hicks and the polarizing way people react to him. I've never been a big fan of his comedy, but I have longed admired him as someone who was very authentic and his own person in a time being authentic and your own person wasn't fashionable at all. It was as if he couldn't help himself, that he couldn't have conformed if he wanted, and the world was nasty to him because of it, so he just got out there and said what he had to say, the world be damned.