Twenty years after the tragic injustice of his goddamned death, isn’t it time we canonised Bill Hicks as the best goddamned stand-up comedian contemporary broadsheet newspaper critics have ever heard of? If only for belatedly providing dozens of desperate hacks and pro-celebrity columnists working in the last days of dying print media with the opportunity to crap out 1,000 words-plus of cliched lazy banality, often in curious and inexplicable mid-Atlantic idioms, in every British newspaper costing more than £1.20.

The garbled hagiographies of the last week are doubtless what Bill P Hicks would have wanted, whoever he was, I expect. I don’t know. I was on a bill with him in Edinburgh some time in the early 90s, but when he started going on and on about how he hated anti-smoking legislation I mistakenly thought he was just another Denis Leary clone and went off to the bar. But not knowing anything is no bar to writing a Bill Hicks’s death anniversary column, it seems. So here goes:

Hicks came. Hicks saw. Hicks poured scornful, bilious, bileful scorn. Dude! Goddamned pancreatic cancer claimed that lonesome preacher’s boy child to its cancerous bosom at the dagnabbit tragic early age of 33. And broadsheet newspaper critics shan’t see his like again – not in the main big four venues with the private media hospitality bars at the Edinburgh fringe, not from a press seat in the audience of a television stand-up showcase full of acts represented by the management arm of the production company that made it, not anywhere – in their lifetimes.

On the anniversary of his death, last Wednesday 25 February, broadsheet newspaper critics started smoking again, mixed up some of those legal high pills from Camden market in a saucepan of Waitrose cream of celery soup, and stared at their own melting, frightened faces in their shaving mirrors for two hours while listening to Hicks’s orange drink packaging bit over and over again on repeat. They wept, remembering that they are now much older than they were in 1994, touched themselves downstairs through wet driving gloves, and breathed through gags made of clementines stuffed with Nicorette chewing gum. Great, so far as it goes, but all this was only a small token of esteem scaled against Hicks’s immense talent. He made rare sense of the crazy rollercoaster ride we’re all a-rollin’ on.

Some people, I guess, might admire Hicks for the superficial allure of his self-destructive antics, which broadsheet newspaper critic eunuchs are secretly all jealous of: the smoking, the tight trousers, the kissing of women, the ridiculing of orange drink packaging, the dangerously high platform shoes, and the over-eating, all of which saw him lose his way. But Hicks wielded his comedy like a pointed stick with some dog muck on it, against an undead holocaust of orange drink packaging and anti-smoking legislation and, in one riff, all of Billy Ray Cyrus.

It’s no-prisoners-barred stuff. This Southern Baptist preacher’s son was the Shiva-esque scourge of society, but he pointed his dog muck-smeared stick at his own failings too – his love of hardcore animal pornography, his fear of certain smells. And he was more than a stand-up comedian. He was a preacher. Dagnabbit, he was more than a goddamned preacher. He was a philosopher. Hell, he was more than a philosopher even. He was a prophet. Goddamit! Strike that from the record your honour, if ye so please! Hicks was more even than a philosopher and yea even so more even than unto a simple prophet. He was a philosopher preacher prophet, a philosopher preacher prophet sage, a philosopher preacher prophet sage magus, a prophosopheacher sagus, no less, but dealing his sage-like prophetic philo-preach-ophy not in stone tablets sent down from on high in a bush, but in dick jokes shot out across a thousand pee-stained stages in the very worst dive bars of red-necked America. Hicks learned his craft in places where people only went out to see live entertainment in order to attack and denigrate it, their hatred for performers exceeded only by their inexplicable desire to pay to watch them. We imagine.

Who is there that broadsheet newspaper critics have ever heard of who even comes close to what Bill H Hicks was about? Frankie Boyle might have the same kick-to-the-nuts brain-freeze punch but it’s too often focused through a filthy working-class Scottish ashtray lens that offends middle-class English critics’ sensibilities. Russell Howard has been inspired by Hicks, and at his fulminating best – his recent riff on Golden Wonder Nik Naks a case in point – achieves the catalytic conversion that Hicks so often managed, like acrid cat’s piss hitting offensively shiny linoleum. And when Peter Kay talks about higher planes of consciousness, there are clear points of comparison too. But who else except Hicks seems to have been injected as an unborn egg with such manifest semen of destiny to become the unfettered inner-Leveson inquiry of his own race, righteously baiting the uneducated, the ignorant, the fat, the poor, Billy Ray Cyrus and orange drink packaging?

Broadsheet newspaper critics on the right imagine Hicks’s goddamned incredulity and dagnabbit derision would have sustained him against the holier-than-thou tyrannies of political correctness with which we have apparently been afflicted since his death. Indeed, to read some of them, you’d imagine that if he were here today, Bill Z Hicks would have a weekly Daily Telegraph online blog alongside that bloke who keeps denying climate change and the one from the free schools movement. But the fact is, the right has never had anything cool to call its own in popular culture, and it never will, and it’s too late to try and appropriate a dead man now, who can’t defend himself against having some confused journalist’s oiled fist rammed up his anus in an attempt to make him a ventriloquist puppet for the anti-PC movement.

Hicks’s first two albums have dated badly, with their adolescent potshots at inoffensive figures from popular culture, and self-conscious rock’n’roll cool. But the bit on one of the later ones, where he uses Shane as a metaphor for American foreign policy, is a masterclass in performance, writing and softly-spoken, polemical, sleight of hand. It ought to inspire anyone to do better, to be better. But it’s easy to be a dead comedian, beatified for three hours of material. By twats and ghouls. The hard thing is to stay alive. And keep knocking out a new three hours every year. Gradually degrading the quality of your own obituary.

Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle is on BBC2 at 10pm on Saturdays, except in Wales, where it appears randomly