Hee Haw the book
In one of his stand-up comedy routines, Bill Hicks recounts his bizarre interaction with a waitress and a customer in a small-town restaurant:
Get this! Another true story. This is gonna frighten you, cause it’s absolutely true. I’m down in that town Fyffe. After the show I go to a waffle house–I’m not proud of it, I’m hungry. I’m eating, I’m alone, and I’m reading a book. Waitress walks over to me… “Hey, what are you reading for?” Is that like the weirdest question ever? I have never, ever been asked that. I mean not ‘what are you reading?’, but ‘WHAT ARE YOU READING FOR?’ “Shit, you stumped me…. Why do I read, hmm, I don’t know… guess I read for a lot of reasons, one of them is so I don’t end up being a fucking waffle waitress, alright?” Then, this trucker at the next booth gets up, stands over me and goes: “Well, looks like we’ve got ourselves a reader!” “What the fuck’s going on here? Like I walked into a Klan rally in a Boy George outfit or something… It’s a fucking book, I read, there, I said it.” Waitress goes: “Why read when you can just flip on the tube?” “Cause it’s not the same.. What do you think I’m reading, Hee-haw the book?” She said: “Huh?”
— Bill Hicks
I love that phrase, “Hee Haw the book,” so much so that I sometimes wake up thinking about it. It would go on ringing in my brain for several hours, and I would whisper it to myself until it was out of my system.
Hee Haw, apparently, was an American television program in the 70s and 80s that was based on country music. In this joke, Hicks is using it as an example of lowbrow entertainment.
Apart from loving the musicality of the word hee-haw, and the subtle comedic genius of the coinage “X the book”, I find myself agreeing with what I take to be the subtextual moral of that punchline: Hicks is saying that reading books is good, but not just any books.
A prevailing theory in media studies, captured in Marshal McLuhan’s aphoristic phrase, The medium is the message, states that a communication medium’s influence in culture goes beyond the content of the message it carries. According to this theory, books as a medium can be deemed good not because they contain something special that is absent in other media, but because of something inherent to them–for instance, the fact that you interact with them through reading, a unique mental process. Reading, one could say, is useful–or harmful, for that matter–rather than the specific content of books.
Conversely, the logic of “Hee Haw the book” harks back to a more commonsense understanding of media: Books are good because they do in fact carry better content than other media, and that is precisely why they’re ‘superior’. Furthermore, Hicks seems to imply that books containing material equivalent to that of ‘inferior’ media–case in point, the show Hee Haw–are not really books as such.
Without the cloak of comedy, the joke’s content, or at least this interpretation of it, seems elitist. But is it, really? To require that the definition of a book be more specific than an authored collection of words on bound pieces of paper (or their electronic equivalent) seems to me rather useful.
One way to add this specificity is to define books by negation, stating what they are not. This could be done in the same vein by which the invention of photography ruled out “faithful representation of reality” from the definition of painting–one could still paint faithful representations of things (which, ironically, came to be known as photorealism), but thanks to photography, you could guarantee that faithful representation was no longer (or had never been) part of painting’s essence.
Since books are too broad a medium, let’s focus on a subcategory: novels. Roughly defined as long, narrative fiction written in prose, novels had to emerge as a distinct form (or medium) from earlier forms that were similar but not the same. So novels were not oral folk tales, not theater, not epic poetry, and so on.
More interesting for the point I’m struggling to make is the way later media influence the definition of a novel. Luckily for us, the large variety of media available today gives us plenty of options: A novel is not a written prose narrative version of films, serial TV shows, magazine articles, or TikTok videos; it has to be something else.
There has always been a positive side to cross-contamination between media (or genres, or forms), or at least in the way that cross-contamination is received: prose can be poetic, films literary, novels cinematic, TV serials theatrical, pop songs operatic, and so on. These modifiers are positive because they come from media that are perceived as equivalent to the ones being modified (a hip hop-infused rock song) or even ‘superior’ (a poetic... advertisement?). But if someone were to tell you that they’ve read an Instagram-esque novel, they probably didn’t like it.
A friend once told me that reading shouldn’t be heralded as a unique activity, and that doing so is elitist. He himself reads in his spare time but regards reading as part of his carefree, escapist toolbox; no different from watching television, web browsing, or scrolling on social media. He, like many readers, is very wary of coming across as elitist or reactionary.
If he were right, then what would be the point of persuading a teenager in 2026 to read a book? I have teenage nephews who are intelligent and very broadly informed. They also have never read a book, and the way things are going, may never read one. If I had to evangelize reading to them, I’d be remiss to make the case that books are like printed versions of Google, Wikipedia, ChatGPT, or social media. I should argue, instead, that there are things worth knowing and experiencing that only books could provide, and that would require suggesting specific types of books. In this regard, I agree with Bill Hicks’s anti-anti-intellectualism: Hee Haw the book, Fortnite the book, TikTok the book, and so on, are not worth reading.
I recently read a novel called The Opposite of a Person by Dutch author Lieke Marsman, who used to be her country’s poet laureate. The book contains many hallmarks of egoistic social media posts: pseudo-intellectual navel-gazing, unstructured and unfinished thoughts, and self-important drivel. Those were forced into the physical form of a novel by randomly leaving a lot of empty space between passages (I wish I was kidding). Overall, the author seemed to operate on the unnamed principle of “I thought about it, or felt it, therefore it matters.”
If all books were like this, then my nephews and their ilk may as well not bother with reading, honestly.
Then it hit me. I wasn’t reading a novel at all (despite the publisher's decision to print "a novel" on the book cover's top left corner; lest anyone forget what they were reading). Instead, I was reading (thanks, Bill!) r/im14andthisisdeep the book.
