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How It Works
Splitsider Presents is a digital comedy store selling great comedy directly to you. There are no hoops to jump through, and you don't need to hand over your identity. Buying is simple and straightforward; you don't need a credit card or an existing account. You can complete payment and be watching a show in seconds, choosing to pay via either Amazon or Paypal.
Splitsider keeps only 20% of the cost of the purchase after transaction, bandwidth and legal costs, with about 70% going directly to the artist.
You can stream your purchases on whatever device you like, or download them to your computer to keep forever in DRM-free file formats.
Purchase/Playback Info
For $5 you get 5 HD or SD DRM-free downloads and 3 streams, allowing you to watch on your computer or any other device. You can choose to pay via either Amazon or PayPal, and you'll be able to log into the site whenever you want to re-download or stream your purchases.
Need Help?
Buying and watching shows on Splitsider Presents should be simple, quick and undemanding, but if you run into trouble, we have an excellent <A href="http://splitsider.com/store/docs/help">help section and customer service</a> to assist you.
On Legendary Comedian Bill Hicks Was Definitely a Legend, but Was He a Comedian?
This wasn't the Unpopular Opinion I was hoping for, really. 'Bill Hicks was a smart, impassioned man who used comedy to educate people'; 'an inspired and inspiring truth teller, dangerous and brave and scary, all at once'; 'He will correct your vision.' You keep painting him as a truth-teller, someone who taught people to think clearly, someone who cut through the bullshit, as it were. But his irreverence is confusing and violent; it's destructive. His anger carries with it a brutal arrogance. He believes in the virtue of his own isolation and cynicism (sometimes he comes dangerously close to blind adolescent rebellion). I have laughed at and enjoyed some of his bits, but on the whole the content of them carries either simple messages (x is evil etc) or deliberately false, alienating assertions (the headline bit you quoted is a good example of this). I'm always surprised at his cult popularity; in general, people who hate the world earn the world's contempt, yet somehow people see Bill Hicks as some sort of moral crusader. I suppose those same people think there is some sort of 'natural, good' state to be in that society acts as an obstacle to. I've never discovered a Bill Hicks who realised that life and humanity are much more complicated than that. And that's the point of his stand-up, it's irreverently and furiously moralistic, something which comedy, a great upsetter of truth and belief and fact and clear-sightedness, is usually incompatible with. That's where his originality came from: he made those elements work together. But we shouldn't hold him up as a holder of 'truth' and moral authority: if he ever hated anything well, it was authority.