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Hicks was born in Valdosta, Georgia. The family lived in Alabama, Florida, and New Jersey, before settling in Houston, Texas when Hicks was seven years old. He was drawn to comedy at an early age, emulating Woody Allen and Richard Pryor, and would write routines with his friend Dwight Slade. While attending Stratford High School, he began performing comedy (mostly derivations of Woody Allen material) for his classmates.
At home, he would write his own one-liners and slide them under the bedroom door of his older brother Steve, who he thought was a genius, for critical analysis. Steve told him, "Keep it up. You're really good at this.”
However, he was close with his family his whole life and he did not reject spiritual ideology itself, and throughout his life he sought various alternative methods of experiencing it. Kevin Slade, introduced him to Transcendental Meditation and other forms of spirituality. Worried about his rebellious behavior, his parents took him to a psychoanalyst at age 17. According to Hicks, the analyst took him aside after the first group session and told him, "You can continue coming if you want to, but it's them, not you.”
his career received a boost in 1987, when he appeared on Rodney Dangerfield's Young Comedians Special. The same year, he moved to New York City, and for the next five years performed about 300 times a year. On the album Relentless, he jokes that he quit using drugs because "once you've been taken aboard a UFO, it's kind of hard to top that", although in his performances, he continued to enthusiastically praise the virtues of LSD, marijuana, and psychedelic mushrooms.
He eventually fell back to chain smoking, a theme that figured heavily in his performances from then on. His nicotine addiction, love of smoking, and occasional attempts to quit became a recurring theme in his act throughout his later years.
Hicks often discussed popular conspiracy theories in his performances, most notably the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He mocked the Warren Report and the official version of Lee Harvey Oswald as a "lone nut assassin." He also questioned the guilt of David Koresh and the Branch Davidian compound during the Waco Siege. Hicks would end some of his shows, especially those being recorded in front of larger audiences as albums, with a mock "assassination" of himself on stage, making gunshot sound effects into the microphone while falling to the ground.
On June 16, 1993, Hicks was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that had spread to his liver. After being diagnosed with cancer, Hicks would often joke that any given performance could be his last; the public, however, was unaware of his condition, and only a few close friends and family members knew of the disease. He performed the final show of his career at Caroline's in New York on January 6, 1994; he moved back to his parents' house in Little Rock, Arkansas, shortly thereafter.
Hicks died on February 26, 1994 in Little Rock at the age of 32.
In early 1995, his family released a brief essay that Hicks had written a week before his death:
I was born William Melvin Hicks on December 16, 1961 in Valdosta, Georgia. Ugh. Melvin Hicks from Georgia. Yee Har! I already had gotten off to life on the wrong foot. I was always "awake," I guess you'd say. Some part of me clamoring for new insights and new ways to make the world a better place. All of this came out years down the line, in my multitude of creative interests that are the tools I now bring to the Party. Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books. Thank God for all the artists who've helped me. I'd read these words and off I went-dreaming my own imaginative dreams. Exercising them at will, eventually to form bands, comedy, more bands, movies, anything creative. This is the coin of the realm I use in my words-Vision. On June 16, 1993 I was diagnosed with having "liver cancer that had spread from the pancreas." One of life's weirdest and worst jokes imaginable. I'd been making such progress recently in my attitude, my career and realizing my dreams that it just stood me on my head for a while. "Why me!?" I would cry out, and "Why now!?" Well, I know now there may never be any answers to those particular questions, but maybe in telling a little about myself, we can find some other answers to other questions. That might help our way down our own particular paths, towards realizing my dream of New Hope and New Happiness. Amen. I left in love, in laughter, and in truth and wherever truth, love and laughter abide, I am there in spirit.