Live in Montreal

Hicks spent much of his stage time angry that the world insisted on being dumber than necessary. That frustration centers here on media panics, particularly around drugs: he questions why television news never reports on the millions of people who take psychedelics and have a pleasant afternoon listening to the birds, fixating only on someone jumping out a second-story window. When he turns to the Persian Gulf War, he treats military briefings like late-night product demonstrations, mocking cable news viewers who treated live-fire combat footage like sporting highlights.

Recorded in July 1991 at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre during the Just for Laughs festival, the set served as the foundation for his 1992 video release Relentless before Comedy Dynamics issued it as an audio album in April 2017.

At the time of the taping, Hicks was performing roughly 300 nights a year across American clubs, often alienating local bookers while steadily building an impassioned following in the United Kingdom. The Montreal appearance helped bridge that gap, opening doors to the British theater tours that marked his creative peak before his death from pancreatic cancer in 1994 at age 32.

The rest of the performance leans into his favorite obsessions. He defends chain-smoking by mocking the theatrical coughing fits of non-smokers, rants against pop artists who treat songwriting like advertising, and wonders aloud what an atheist yells during an orgasm.