Humor & Life Quote by Bill Hicks

Hicks lands the punch with a bait-and-switch that turns “pro-life” from a moral badge into a PR slogan that can’t survive a literal reading. The setup mimics the cadence of a reasonable request - do me a favour - then yanks the listener into an absurd image: protesters guarding cemeteries from bodies. The joke works because it forces the movement’s language to face its own implied logic. If the goal is “life,” why is the chosen battleground the clinic doorway rather than the graveyard gate? The cemetery line is comedy as argumentative judo: using the opponent’s stated premise, then flipping it until the hypocrisy is visible.

The subtext is less about debating abortion’s ethics than exposing where power is being exercised. Blocking clinics is framed not as reverence for life but as control over women’s decisions, performed in public, with coercion substituted for persuasion. “Lock arms” is crucial: it’s intimate, communal, almost tender, yet deployed as human barricade. Hicks spotlights that contradiction - sanctimony expressed through obstruction.

Context matters. Hicks was operating in a late-80s/early-90s America where clinic blockades were a signature tactic of the anti-abortion movement and culture-war language was hardening into identity. His persona - furious, lucid, allergic to platitudes - treats euphemisms as the enemy. By redirecting activism to cemeteries, he’s not proposing a policy; he’s puncturing a narrative. The laughter is the sound of a slogan failing a stress test.