"Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye"
About this Quote
Hicks lands the punchline like a curse: TV doesn't just waste your time, it vandalizes your inner life. The "third eye" borrows counterculture mysticism - intuition, spiritual perception, the part of you that can still notice you're being lied to. "Black spray paint" is perfect because it's cheap, instant, and irreversible-looking. It's not a slow moral decline; it's an act of desecration carried out in seconds, often willingly, with the can handed to you by the remote.
The intent is pure provocation, but not random shock. Hicks is attacking passive consumption as a political technology. In his era, television was a near-monopoly on national reality: three big networks, a flood of ads, the soothing cadence of anchors delivering war, markets, and crime like weather. Calling it spray paint frames TV as obscurantism: not ignorance, but engineered blindness. You don't forget how to think; you get coated, dulled, made glossy and compliant.
Subtextually, Hicks is also indicting the bargain viewers make. Spray paint is something you use to cover up or to tag - to hide what's underneath or leave someone else's mark. Television, in his view, doesn't merely distract; it overwrites, replacing your private sense-making with prefab desire and prefab fear.
The line works because it's grotesque and intimate. He doesn't say television is bad for society; he says it attacks your mind's most sacred room. In the 1990s culture-war and advertising boom, that sounded less like mysticism than a brutal media-literacy lesson delivered as stand-up.
The intent is pure provocation, but not random shock. Hicks is attacking passive consumption as a political technology. In his era, television was a near-monopoly on national reality: three big networks, a flood of ads, the soothing cadence of anchors delivering war, markets, and crime like weather. Calling it spray paint frames TV as obscurantism: not ignorance, but engineered blindness. You don't forget how to think; you get coated, dulled, made glossy and compliant.
Subtextually, Hicks is also indicting the bargain viewers make. Spray paint is something you use to cover up or to tag - to hide what's underneath or leave someone else's mark. Television, in his view, doesn't merely distract; it overwrites, replacing your private sense-making with prefab desire and prefab fear.
The line works because it's grotesque and intimate. He doesn't say television is bad for society; he says it attacks your mind's most sacred room. In the 1990s culture-war and advertising boom, that sounded less like mysticism than a brutal media-literacy lesson delivered as stand-up.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Bill Hicks — line attributed to him in his stand-up; cited on the Wikiquote page 'Bill Hicks'. |
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