By October 1, 1993, Bill Hicks had appeared on David Letterman’s different late-night talk shows 11 times. That evening, he made what he thought would be his 12th appearance on Letterman, performing nearly seven minutes of stand-up material. He had a great set, and although the material was dark at times, the audience responded well from beginning to end. Hicks wouldn’t find out until he returned to his hotel room later on that somebody at CBS had decided to cut his routine out of the show.
Naturally, he was confused by the decision. After all, Letterman himself had congratulated him on having a good set immediately afterward. What could’ve possibly gone wrong? The executive producer of Letterman’s show at the time, Robert Morton, told Hicks over the phone that Standards and Practices thought parts of his set were “unsuitable for broadcast.”
When pressed about which material in particular they had a problem with, Morton said, “Well, almost all of it.” His performance left them with plenty to take issue with. His opening bit was about him hosting a new TV show called Let’s Hunt and Kill Billy Ray Cyrus. He closed the set by criticizing Christians for wearing crucifixes around their necks, and suggested that it might be the reason Jesus hasn’t come back yet.
But Hicks suspected that his material about pro-life people was to blame for him getting clipped out. “You know, if you’re really pro-life,” he says at one point, “do me a favor, don’t lock arms and block med clinics, OK? If you’re so pro-life, do me a favor: Lock arms and block cemeteries, OK? Let’s see how committed you are to this idea.” A few days after he was told he wasn’t making the cut, Hicks got a call from a friend who informed him that she’d seen a pro-life commercial during one of Letterman’s shows that week.
Hicks never cleared the air with Letterman and died the following year from pancreatic cancer. Letterman later invited Hicks’s mother, Mary, onto his show in 2009, where he apologized and accepted responsibility for not allowing the material to air. After showing the unseen footage for the first time, Letterman said, “What was the matter with me? What was I thinking? That was just tremendous.”
You can watch the full interview with Hicks’s mother as well as Hicks’s full 1993 set in the video below.
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