Comedy is great. Stand up (or sit down) comedians are in a class of their own, because there is no other art form short of a solo musician in which one puts themselves in front of a group of people, and as a single individual, provides entertainment to potentially filled rooms, or theaters, or even stadiums. And doing so through the act of joke telling - being funny. People love to laugh and be around other funny people. However, a great deal of funny people who become "professional" comedians actually grew up with difficult upbringings or rough childhoods. That almost seems to be a prerequisite to greatness within the art form. Which may be credited to a mapping of polarity dynamic where you need to have not had your life be just sunshine, rainbows, and easiness to be able to output more full spectrum and hilariously joyful material. But with the rise of all things, most of those who do it are quite so so. Mediocre at best. And these mediocre people fill stadiums because they are good at producing mindless entertainment and talking about essentially little to nothing while also outputting chuckles. However, different types of comedians have existed through the hilarity of the decades who are usually not as known, or popular, or likely paid as much, yet are the highest quality comedians. They are the most timeless whose jokes became the most memorable and potentially life influential.
Some of our personal favorites we've mentioned in the past before. Names like (and pardon us not including any ladies in this one) David Cross, George Carlin, Steve Hughes, and even Robert Anton Wilson. Who were unique voices unlike any other. Yet another and most influential on us personally was Bill Hicks. Who died way too young of pancreatic cancer in 1994 - Although he performed for nearly 20 years, by that time most of America, his home country, had never heard of him. The first half of his comedy career was on the road at small venues. His television exposure along with any sort of AM radio, which at the time in the 80's and 90's was the only real way to reach more people in the genre and thus become more known, was small. He made only two albums during his lifetime with at least another five released posthumously.
Hicks, along with some of those other names, are and were great, because they use or used comedy to talk about deeper things in life. His content was not the urine filled baby pool of fluff and shallowness and distraction but instead went deeper. Into the political, cultural, philosophical, and perhaps deepest of all, the uncomfortably truthful. All of these comedians, and especially hicks, found that comedy could be a way to somewhat bypass people's conditioning systems. Of which there may be multiple layers from childhood. We have also spoken of the quote “if you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.” Which has had some debate around the originator but is primarily credited to Oscar Wild. This quote is likely a variant on an ancient Mongolian proverb which says “A man about to tell the truth should keep one foot in the stirrup” because in a culture awash of disinformation, telling the truth can be said to be a revolutionary act not to mention hazardous to one's health. While this is not the only death with truth quote we all know, another being “Don’t Kill Me, I’m Just The Messenger!”, the point of the otherwise they'll kill you quote, is to use a little sugar to help the medicine go down. In short, sugar coat it. Help to soften the blow. While the quote might have been speaking metaphorically about being killed, people in positions of power have been known to ruin careers or kill journalists over truth being shared about them. That's as impiral as Empire Pie. The machines of the empire and all of us complicit in it don't want to look at shadow, otherwise called darkness. Of both the culture let alone their own and how they are often complicit in the larger cultural shadow. Revealing that to them puts them on a psychiatrist's couch, where they don't want to be, and angers them due to the revealing of pain and confrontation - In Hermetic Kabbalah this is called Nachash and it is how you progress by not just confronting it but fixing the things that are causing it.
Humor can be a sign of immaturity if used to cover up real talk, but it can also be used to help with all sorts of aggravations and negative feelings - which is where the deepness lives in the dark depths of the ocean of the mind. At the same time however it's much harder to build an audience off your work when you do that as an artist. Trying to create difficult to swallow truthful content. But it will be timeless content - Like some wise person from the East once said from their meat suit, which has also been credited to Buddha - the only thing that will for sure rise is the moon, the sun, and the truth. So a main way Hicks was able to do this is he was not afraid to go up, in front of an audience, and make them a bit uncomfortable. By not only going deep but sometimes uncomfortably and truthfully deep. Never losing confidence and never adjusting his material to the crowd. Just instead being himself, with it being said that he went out of his way to make people fidget in their seats. He appeared not to care one bit about the crowd reaction, but in a deeper sense, that was all he cared about. He had so much of both mind and heart and thus his comedy came from a completely unique source, the story of what that is can be told at another time, yet always revolving around the hope of who we as human beings could become, versus the frustration of who we truthfully really are. Which is currently in a very dysfunctional state. Hicks knew we were the facilitators of our own creative evolution. Basically, he was further spiritually evolved, and thus had aspects of himself that were off at a 45 degree angle from homo-normalus and especially homo-vulgaris but still inherently wanted anyone who would listen to what he was saying to evolve with him. If one can crack a joke while being shockingly true, it also supercharges the joke. It takes jokes that would otherwise be just squared and makes them cubed. Or, if one inserts deeper spiritual philosophy into jokes that can smear them across all zeitgeists for all time. But that's not easy to do and most people don't have the eyes to see it or the ears to hear it because they are not mature enough to do so. But if an audience member is a young mind for molding or a flower for watering, and most importantly, more influential to truth than propaganda when they hear it, something that may be initially uncomfortable, and that is not dysfunctional enough to be walked out upon, will have the audience member lying in bed that night thinking about it, and be like, "that is so true!!!" And that nugget of truth was delivered to them through the parcel of comedy. Which made the data transfer of it more palpable.
So in the later half of his nearly 20 year career Hicks did become more well known, never of course becoming a household name, but becoming appreciated and respected by his peers - with many of them knowing he was special. But that was after a decade of doing small shows, on the road, many of which he would essentially clear the room with due to his truths. Eventually finding more success in the UK due to the political environment of the time being a bit less polluted with regression and also likely due to the fact that Hicks was from Texas which is full of churches full of Texicans, is hotter than the fires of hell, is the shitkicker mothership where the world's cowboys emanate out from, yet that would not stop him from still often ripping into the corporate aspects of non real religion there and in other regressive red stateness. Since Europe, having gone through their holy warring during the crusades, chucked more of their past most religious bonkers-ness than America had, they were more open to what Hicks had to say at that time and he was met with still some but less resistance there. He likely still made British audiences uncomfortable but not as much so as he would with American audiences of the time. So eventually, with an American, and especially British, and somewhat global audience, a small percentage of an international audience eventually begged for his scolding view of politics and his commentary on international chaos. Continuing to use comedy to say deeper truthful things about what the majority of (especially) Americans were doing with their lives and culture. Which if you really think about it, was primarily, mundane at best, if not even completely empty and meaningless and people were like "I don’t wanna hear this, I gotta be at work tomorrow."
So for the previously mentioned reasons around Hicks, who was in influence on our work, we have long thought that much of our material would be better communicated through music and especially stand up comedy, instead of extremely obscure narrated documentary film or obscure narrated spoken-word essay. But over the years, as our work related to these podcasts, essays, and documentaries started flying the flags of being interested in alternative areas such as spiritual philosophies, which are not welcome in the mainstream consumerist corporate culture, we came to realize that much of the alternasphere, which comprises some very good things such as indigenous & ancient wisdom, nature's medicines, anti-imperial journalism, esotericism, and permaculture, but also not so good areas such as bad pseudo woo spirituality, snake oil alternative medicine, geopolitics, pop-occultism, and especially conspirituality and conspiracy did also not contain truth but were sometimes just as untruthful as mainstream culture. Seeing how many people went off the deep end with Covid-19 has been a real eye opener for example, so if anything this latest plague, and there have been ones in the past and there will be more in the future, has made us less conspiratorial.
We have plans for a future feature length narrated piece, to be made into either a documentary or if we don't end up spending the time on the visual component, a longer form spoken-word audiobook only around patternicity of what we have seen in many of these fields and with some folks who we might call past teachers, much of whose work focuses around the alternasphere. To cut to the bone of what the thesis of that piece will be, is that the majority of what these teachers were saying along with guests you might hear on especially conspiracy related channels, were claiming to be more conscious about reality and the world's problems, but instead solely and exclusively actually just talking about politics in disguise. And not from a standpoint of being pro-democratic and having more faith in our electoral process, but in fact the opposite. Sometimes identifying problems fairly accurately, but then oftentimes if not always proposing bat shit crazy pro-authoritarian hyper off balance right-wing homo-vulgaris solutions to such problems. Much of which is completely opposite to the indigenous wisdom we have come to respect and be shown by nature - which basically teaches in its most simple form that we must re-become homo-naturalis - reconnecting to spirit and return to be caretakers instead of just takers.
While we and likely you as well, are sick and tired of being sick and tired of corporate big legacy mainstream mockingbird media gaslighting us, and that's speaking to more false balance both-sides centrist media financed by sure, if you're more conservative leaning you'll thrown in the anti Jewish dog whistle of being "Soros backed." Yet that's not even speaking of the regressive lie with every breath extreme right wrong wing propaganda media that's bankrolled by sith lords with last names such as Koch, Devos, Murdock, Walton, and Mercer. As someone whose created alternate media as both a host and guest, we have also become sick and tired of being sick and tired of hearing the majority of folks in the aforementioned not so good areas, and especially conspiracy channels - books, podcasts, etc... promoting solutions which are in alignment with a very much minority but still concerning section of what makes up red America which has become a theocratic fascist cult as well as fascist movements across the world rising to concerning levels as a backward reaction to mass migration of climate refugees. Whose even more unswallowable untruthful material has worked decades out of the Goebbels "a lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth" playbook and have become professional at firing up pathos emotions using hate fueled talking point ecco chambers that claim they are actually the arbiters of truth when instead they are really in up-side-down world of endless lies through projection, inversion, and confession.
So in closing we share a reminder that we not only release these essays as a podcast feed, but also bundle them up in volumes of 25 and make them available for a modest fee at our website www.nilesheckman.com and perhaps one day many years from now on archive.org. Meaning after we get 25 of them finished we are onto the next volume. For the first three volumes, which this essay you are listening to now is going to be one of the last in Vol III, our essays in all three volumes, comprising the first 75, have typically been about more overarching themes of self-development related to our personal life philosophy of growth + balance + creativity (meaning what is inside, what is a center point of equilibrium, and what manifestes externally) and have only occasionally touched on the political in the past. However, for our fourth volume, of which we have already released half a dozen essays at the time of this writing, will solely comprise our pro-democracy political philosophy series. Because if much of the conspiracy is just politics in disguise, we might as well speak about political philosophy and decoding transparently. So while no, this is not now exclusively a political podcast, we are committing to making a 25-part series which is related to the human enactment of a spiritual idea that is democracy, peppering this series' original slow drip release via the podcast feed mixed in with other occasional stand alone new essays but will likely take us at least the next year or two in order to complete that fourth volume. And also knowing that a large percentage of our past audience has had past interest in such aforementioned not so good areas, our ongoing pro-democracy and eventually Vol IV series of essays is a bit of our own attempt to clear the room. Since truth can make us uncomfortable, and also be hard to swallow, and is also paramount, we will continue to try and create it with at least some sprinkles of comedy, even if it clears the room.