Original Airdate: 05/24/1989
Tag: Johnny Carson
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An Appreciation: Kinison’s Unfinished Howl
By Lawrence Christon
Times Staff Writer
Originally printed in The Los Angeles Times
Monday, April 13, 1992His piercing anger, protest now will never know a resolution we can share
None of the TV anchors knew quite what to make of Sam Kinison when news of his death came over the wire early Saturday morning. “The loud comedian,” most of them called him, struggling to make do with a meaninglessly vague adjective, then running a silent interview clip in which, with brushed shoulder-length blond hair and faintly rubicund face, he looked like an amiable Friar Tuck dispensing words of comfort and reassurance to his unseen listener.
If anything, Kinison was a manifestation of acute discomfort, and that’s why he’s remembered, even if TV’s public memory is shrouded with incomprehension.
The circumstance of his death–a head-on auto collision with an allegedly drunk driver speeding along the wrong side of a highway double line–may well have made the news on the strength of its spectacular brutality regardless of who the victim was. Obviously, Kinison made the top of the hour because he was a celebrity of sorts, a famous comedian, a show-biz person. But there’s more. While it’s saddening to see any career cut down before its arc has been completed, Kinison represents unfinished business, a piercing howl of anger and protest that now will never know a resolution we can share.
There’s no denying he was a base figure. Sam Kinison came along in the mid-’80s as a shock trooper of the American subconscious. On top, we had the sunny Reagan presidency and its fond avuncular approval of the get-rich-quick ethos–BMWs and lucrative paper chases for insiders and the thirtysomething crowd, and “Morning in America” promises for the rest of the electorate left holding its hand out. Hidden underneath, we had the palpable beginning of what now festers in abundance: urban rot, virulent racial and ethnic division, sexual rage, the dumbing-down of the young, the relentless commercial manipulation of our modern social coin–the public image.
Kinison planted his squat legs like a fierce troll by a bridge, skewed his face into a florid rage, and screamed. That was his act. There was no pretense of comedic refinement, of structure and build and the bait-and-switch line that is comedy’s stock in trade. A Sam Kinison joke didn’t hit the media wire and zip through the country like one of Johnny Carson’s political zingers. It was usually crude, misogynistic, homophobic or wrongheaded–for a while he was the most aggressively misinformed comedian of his generation when it came to understanding AIDS.
Nor was his fury particularly new. “Network’s” irate Howard Beale galvanized the country in 1977 with the line, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” In the ’60s, what else could you hear first in Jimi Hendrix’s rhythmically twisted “Star-Spangled Banner” but dizzying distress? In the ’50s, Allen Ginsberg delivered “Howl” and William Burroughs gave us the precursor to the primal scream–the sensation of waking up in the morning with thick petroleum jelly smeared on your lips.
But Kinison was a creature of the ’80s’ excesses and frustrations. His alcohol and drug habit were common knowledge, and he tried to do what the other prevailing wild things did. He made record albums (“Louder Than Hell” and “Have You Seen Me Lately?”). He made a stab at the movies (Rodney Dangerfield’s “Back to School” and the aborted “Atuk”). He appeared on TV’s “Saturday Night Live” and “Late Night With David Letterman” and was an MTV regular. He also played Tim Matheson’s conscience on Fox-TV’s “Charlie Hoover.”
But he really wasn’t cut out for anything other than live performance (he was driving to a gig when he was killed), and his wrestling with Jessica Hahn on his “Wild Thing” video seemed a damning symbol of the visible degradation some people will endure to achieve celebrity. Watching that video, you couldn’t tell if he was making a statement or if he was trying to see how far he could fall.
Comedians are the shrewdest judges of each other’s talent. It’s telling that none of his peers begrudged him his success. “He’s honest,” you’d hear them say. Or, “You may not like his material, but it comes out of a core of real conviction.” The comic they name as his ostensible colleague but de facto opposite, the figure they generally disdain as a phony, is Andrew Dice Clay.
Kinison was the unhappy son of an impoverished Pentecostal minister in Peoria, Ill., and for a while became a minister himself before he married (at 21) and divorced (at 25), and then gave up the calling (“I was getting too hip for the room,” he told an interviewer). He married and divorced yet again. Years later, one of his brothers committed suicide. His spiritual and sexual pain formed an underlying emotional truth that carried him a lot farther into his audience’s sixth sense than did his actual comment. There are times when it all gets to be too much, when there’s nothing to do but scream. For that, he was the man of the hour.
It’s impossible to tell now if Kinison would ever have been able to get out of the shockmeister ’80s, when he made this statement: “I’m so tired of men who’re afraid to hurt women’s feelings. Then you turn on the tube and you watch somebody like Roseanne Barr or Joan Rivers who just slam men: ‘Men are jerks . . . losers’ and we’re supposed to stand around and act like women are perfect.” It needed to be said then, but cannot with good conscience be said now, not after the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearing. And where that primal scream once seemed tonic and even cathartic, now it would only unnerve us as we make our way through the white noise of everyday anxiety and urban terror.
Who can tell? He was capable of enlightenment, and maybe his new marriage might have brought him the peace he never knew. But the violence of his end is particularly haunting: a troubled man meeting a senseless, smoldering end on a strip of desert highway under a half-moon. His was a peculiarly American story.
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Hate-Mongers Are a Sad Chapter in the History of Comedy
By Randy Lewis
Originally printed in The Los Angeles Times
Sunday, April 22, 1990The most important comedians have always been those who helped knock down the social, racial, economic and/or cultural barriers that keep people apart.
In the ’30s, Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers made sure that society’s little tramps didn’t get steamrolled in America’s desperate quest for the better life. Though they worked from greatly different vantage points, Lenny Bruce and Bill Cosby contributed during the 1960s to the condemnation of culturally ingrained racism. And Woody Allen has built a career on giving hope to nerds throughout the world.
Along the way, comedians often have assumed the role that the sage assigned to journalists–“to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.”
Unfortunately, some new-generation descendants of the greats have begun to worship the tools some of their forefathers used–stinging insults, graphic language, sexually explicit situations–without understanding the job for which those tools were employed. I refer to two of the today’s hottest stand-up comics, performers who have reached rock ‘n’ roll-star status capable of filling huge concert halls and arenas: Sam Kinison and Andrew (Dice) Clay.
Each is scheduled to play Orange County this week: Kinison in a club date at the Laff Stop in Newport Beach and Clay at the 18,765-capacity Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa. (Sam usually does larger facilities, but he booked this one himself, reportedly to help pay his considerable alimony bills.)
Both have captured the attention (I would have said “imagination,” but that’s far too complimentary) of the MTV-generation audience. Both appeal primarily to teen-aged males–no surprise, considering the heavily misogynist content of both their acts. If I were a woman and a date took me to see either of these wild boors, I’d ask for his money back–then hail a cab.
Though I’m at a loss to explain the popularity of either, Clay is the bigger mystery. (By the way, if you’re looking for lots of examples of their “jokes” here, forget it. The amount of each man’s material that can be quoted in a family newspaper probably weighs less than a stegosaurus’s brain.)
With Kinison, it’s easier to identify (if not identify with) the primal catharsis in some of his routines. On his first album, there was an underlying sense of true frustration at the hypocrisy he experienced in the life he led as a preacher before turning his back on the church and becoming the antichrist of stand-up.
Also, Kinison, unlike Clay, knows how to structure a joke that is created out of a unique (albeit generally base) perspective. And Kinison knows how to deliver a punch line.
One old routine about how difficult Jesus might have found it to explain his Crucifixion and Resurrection to a wife displayed originality, intellect and absurd juxtaposition of the real and the far-fetched. Sound comic principals, all.
But since then, Kinison has been caught up in his own fame: He spends nearly as much time on his latest album responding to Rolling Stone comments about his reputed wild lifestyle as he does creating “new” material. And that consists of inflaming racist attitudes toward Iranians, gays, women, the physically disabled and just about anyone in the world who’s not Sam Kinison.
Dice Clay, however, doesn’t even have that much going for him. How he has so quickly become a national phenomenon is a mystery that ranks up there with how TV execs ever thought Pat Sajak would one day unseat Johnny Carson.
If there’s more than meets the eye to Clay’s act–a leather-jacketed New Yawk street thug who brags about every bizarre twist on intercourse he knows–I can’t find it. Clay substitutes unbridled repugnance for viewpoint, odious epithets for insight. He’s as funny as a gang rape, as clever as a midnight mugging.
Lenny Bruce showed that comedy can be tough, brutal and sometimes even ugly in skewering the objects of his scorn. But those targets were small-mindedness, bigotry and hate–traits that Clay and Kinison would rather lionize. Their loathsome attacks on women, homosexuals, ethnic minorities and others aren’t pointed or thought-provoking. They are simply imbecilic. Perhaps Clay doesn’t make jokes about the chronically stupid because they would hit too close to home.
If there’s any rationalization for Clay’s moronic-punk persona, it could only be that he really is a brilliant performance artist whose very presence exposes how easily America can fall in line behind a crude, unthinking, spectacularly unfunny delinquent.
Could it be that both are so hugely popular for the simple reason that they accurately reflect, and give voice to, the values of their audience? That a young generation bred on the senseless brutality of slasher movies like “Friday the 13th” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” have become (to borrow Hunter S. Thompson’s pet phrase) a nation of swine?
Is it possible that, because celebrity worship has been elevated to the rank of religious experience, we have surrendered the ability to think critically when in the presence of a “star”? Otherwise, why would audiences grant not just their approval but their delight at attitudes and behavior that, if expressed by a child or a stranger at the supermarket, they would greet with the back of a hand?
More disturbing yet is the realization is that Kinison and Clay, because they are at the top of the stand-up comedy heap right now if only in terms of their ticket-selling potential, undoubtedly are spawning dozens, maybe hundreds of imitators who are dying to step into their dung-encrusted jackboots.
Remember the scene in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” when a question–how does one respond to neo-Nazis–pops up at a posh party of left-wing intellectuals? “We should go down there,” Woody suggests, “get some bricks and some baseball bats and really explain things to them.” When one haughty woman opines: “Really biting satire is always better than physical force,” Woody retorts: “No, physical force is always better with Nazis.”
But the best course of action simply may be the one you’d take with bratty children who misbehave just for the attention they can draw: ignore them and hope–no, pray–they’ll go away.