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Tag: Pauly Shore

  • Comedians Keep Banter Up Backstage at Fund-Raiser

    Comedians Keep Banter Up Backstage at Fund-Raiser

    By Mark Chalon Smith
    Originally printed in The Los Angeles Times
    Saturday, September 5, 1992

    ANAHEIM — Sam Kinison lived for confrontation. No sweet words and kisses from this comic–more like up-the-volume shrieks and hisses to get his message out.

    Knowing that about the man called “the beast,” a nickname Kinison did little to dispute, it was tempting to wonder what he would have thought about all the twinkling praise that engulfed his memory during a tribute at the Celebrity Theatre on Thursday. (Kinison, 38, died in April in an auto collision.)

    In fact, Robin Williams was asked that very question backstage during a tightly controlled session in which the show’s performers met with the press.

    “What–you want me to channel him?” Williams shot back. “We want an interview with the dead? . . . I’m sorry, but that would be Shirley MacLaine.”

    It was such moments that made the backstage affair as entertaining as the official show–and probably the reason that TV cameras were rolling on both sides of the curtain. (The tribute was taped by the Fox network for future airing.)

    When the good vibes weren’t on center stage, they were zipping about backstage courtesy of Kinison pals such as Williams, Rodney Dangerfield, Judy Tenuta, Pauly Shore, Richard Belzer and Jim Carrey.

    Williams called Kinison the adventurous “Chuck Yeager of comedy,” and Dangerfield described him as “electrifying–someone that can’t be duplicated.” Shore, in a lavish testimonial, said, “I just clung to him. He was my comic mentor.”

    Tenuta downplayed Kinison’s bad-boy image, claiming it was just a put-on for the spotlight. The Kinison that Tenuta knew was a sweetheart, good to his friends and family.

    Although obviously not an evening open to many hard looks at his controversial career–this was essentially a feel-good benefit to help pay off the $1 million in debts he reportedly left behind–some of the performers did allude to Kinison’s checkered past. There were a few surprising moments, especially with Tenuta.

    Angry with herself for forgetting to tell the audience a joke about her first meeting with Kinison, she offered it to the media. The gag parodied the longstanding feuds Kinison had with both feminists and homosexuals.

    “Off-stage, he was really soft and sensitive,” Tenuta cooed. “I remember when we met: It was at a NOW (National Organization for Women) meeting, and he was knitting an AIDS quilt… he told me he needed to be with other men where he could cry. I told him to go to a Dodgers game.”

    Williams, who pointed out that he mainly knew Kinison from his stage work and the times they ran into each other at comedy clubs, spent the longest stretch before the press, riding a wave of ad-lib.

    After explaining that Kinison “pushed the limits and told comics not to be afraid to try things,” Williams offered another little known fact. “One thing I knew about him that nobody else did?” Williams repeated in response to a question, “Well, he was a woman. A black woman.”

    Easily the most uncomfortable before the media was Dangerfield, who looked ready to flee at the first opportunity. (“Any more questions?” he asked–before any had been tossed out.)

    Dangerfield recalled that he gave Kinison his first national exposure by including him on a Dangerfield TV special. Later, Dangerfield created a small part for him as a crazed history professor in the 1986 movie “Back to School.”

    “Sam was different things to different people; I don’t know what he was,” Dangerfield said. “I do know that he was a tremendous artist; he had that stroke of genius. He had problems, just like everybody else. I do know that he must have made other comedians unhappy” because of his intimidating talent.

  • Comedy Review; It’s a Far Cry From Sobbing

    Comedy Review; It’s a Far Cry From Sobbing

    By Rick Vanderknyff
    Originally printed in The Los Angeles Times
    Saturday, September 5, 1992

    Tears aren’t on the lineup at Sam Kinison tribute taped in Anaheim, where comics irreverently honor their outrageous colleague

    ANAHEIM — In the ’80s, Sam Kinison served as comedy’s raw nerve, dipping below the surface of civility to become the screaming embodiment of blind, bewildered rage. If it was Morning in America, Kinison was our national hangover.

    Like most stand-up comedians, Kinison traded heavily in the commonality of everyday experience. But while most of the herd grazes contentedly among the banalities of air travel humor and glossed-up memories of bad ’60s TV, Kinison strayed off into the next field, where the grass was definitely not greener.

    Thursday in Anaheim’s Celebrity Theatre, friends and peers including Robin Williams, Rodney Dangerfield, Judy Tenuta, Pauly Shore, Jim Carrey and others gathered in what was billed as a tribute to Kinison, who was killed last April in a head-on collision on a California desert highway. The program was taped for later broadcast on Fox.

    While show-biz tributes to even the living can be treacly affairs, this nearly two-hour toast to Kinison’s memory was no place for maudlin sentiment. Said Williams: “He’s one of the few people who’d make you want to say, ‘Cremate him, and we’ll snort the ashes.’ “

    Comics did routines of five to 10 minutes, separated by film clips of Kinison projected onto screens that rose niftily from the stage. Most of the performers in a very strong lineup offered pared-down, TV-ready versions of their stage acts, with Kinison’s name evoked to varying degrees.

    It was the ever-mercurial Williams who offered the night’s most memorable set, using the occasion to launch into a manic rumination on matters of life and death, complete with a hilarious impersonation of Kinison trying to hustle his way through heaven’s gate.

    “I’m on the list! I got backstage access. Let me in!” Williams screamed in an accurate take on Kinison’s trademark howl. “Stevie Ray Vaughan–I know him!”

    Tenuta, chauffeured onstage on a Harley, offered only tangential references to Kinison (“We used to go cruising for chicks together”) but provided the evening’s most striking visual image: about 30 volunteer female “virgins” from the audience, on their backs and shaking their legs in the air while Tenuta screamed, “Release your eggs!” Jim Carrey, from the cast of “In Living Color,” offered a mock testimonial to how the real Kinison differed from the stage Kinison: “Shy, retiring, never quick to judge–that’s the Sam I knew, and I’m sorry if I’m bursting your bubble.”

    Dangerfield opened the show with a rapid-fire set of his signature one-liners (“I looked up my family tree and found out I’m the sap”) before introducing a clip of Kinison’s first TV appearance, on a Dangerfield HBO special in 1984. The bit, a crude-but-deadly take on TV coverage of the Ethiopian famine, was an audacious and entirely appropriate introduction of Kinison to the world at large.

    “You know the film crew could give him a sandwich,” Kinison said in the clip, describing a television image of a starving child. Then, taking on the role of the director: “Don’t feed him yet! He’s gotta look hungry.”

    Kinison made it his goal to be funny and discomfiting at the same time. His public struggle with personal demons and onstage airing of his uncensored thoughts made him the target of charges of everything from blasphemy to misogyny to homophobia–charges that cannot always be easily dismissed.

    “Sam loved doing everything he could to shock you, because he knew it would make you think,” said comic and close friend Carl LaBove. The argument that Kinison was merely being honest is true enough to be unsettling–Kinison usually struck closer to the bone than the more cynical shock-meisters who have found notoriety in his wake.

    But the argument that it’s healthy to freely vent our baser impulses has a dark side: the creeping implication that it is somehow dishonest to apply the test of reason and compassion to those impulses. While Kinison’s bracing presence in a too-often-staid comedy field will be missed, the demons he unleashed are likely to stick around for some time.

  • Kinison’s Friends Recall His More Compassionate Acts

    Kinison’s Friends Recall His More Compassionate Acts

    By Dennis McLellan
    TIMES STAFF WRITER
    Originally printed in The Los Angeles Times
    Wednesday, September 2, 1992

    Colleagues remember shock comic’s off-stage kindness. But the tribute they’ll tape in Anaheim won’t be syrupy

    Pacing the stage like the Pentecostal preacher he once was, Sam Kinison would work himself into a primal heat as he railed against homosexuals, AIDS victims, organized religion and one of the topics closest to his heart: Marriage.

    “Oh, Oh-h-h -h-h! Marriage is hell-l-l-l-l!” the twice-divorced comic would scream.

    With an infectious giggle and his signature banshee wail, Kinison soared into the public consciousness in the mid-’80s as the King of Shock Comedy. His detractors–and there were many–called him obscene, vitriolic and annoyingly loud. His fans–and they were legion–called him an innovator, a biting social commentator for whom no topic was taboo. Not the Crucifixion. Not sex. Not even necrophilia.

    When the 38-year-old comedian was killed in a head-on collision on his way to a show in Laughlin, Nev., in April, media reports referred to the wild stage persona and the equally wild personal life of the man who joked that his cocaine use was once so heavy he used a garden hose to inhale.

    But his friends, many of whom will be honoring the outlaw comic at a comedy tribute Thursday at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim, remember another Sam Kinison.

    “The partying is legendary, but there also is a side of him that was very sweet and loving, and he was very good to a lot of people,” said Richard Belzer, who first met Kinison in 1980.

    Scheduled to join Belzer on stage are Robin Williams, Rodney Dangerfield, Judy Tenuta, Carl LaBove, James Carrey and Pauly Shore. The show, which will include video clips of Kinison’s career, will be taped for a later TV broadcast on the Fox network.

    Tenuta, the accordion-playing, self-anointed Love Goddess who met Kinison in a Denver comedy club in 1985, joked that “we used to hang out cruising for chicks together, Sam and I.”

    “He was the most compassionate person I ever met in my life,” said LaBove, Kinison’s best friend and longtime opening act. “He was always there for me.”

    But don’t expect a stream of sugary testimonials Thursday night. According to Belzer, “The tribute is going to be a life-affirming thing rather than maudlin.”

    “There won’t be a lot of reminiscing,” said Bill Kinison, Sam’s brother and manager who is serving as executive producer of the show. “It will be kind of a ‘Heaven Can Wait’ type set with a lot of smoke and things like that. The story line is basically whether or not Sam makes it (to heaven).”

    That seems an altogether fitting premise for a tribute to the outlaw comic with the hell-bound persona. Yet despite Sam’s penchant for the sacrilegious on stage, Kinison said, his brother never lost his own faith.

    “He was a strong believer,” he said. “His unhappiness was with religion and never his commitment to God.” With a laugh, Kinison added, “I don’t know if you’re going to have a lot of Christians who are going to believe that.”

    Proceeds from the tribute, according to Kinison, will go to his brother’s estate. At the time of Sam’s death, Kinison said, he was nearly $1 million in debt. “After he died and I looked at the estate I thought, ‘Well, if you can die a million in debt, you can say you enjoyed life.’ “

    Kinison feels a comedy tribute is the kind his brother would have wanted. “And I think just about all the entertainers who are involved are involved because of the contribution he made. When I watched ‘Comic Relief’ this year, there was not only the (raw) language but the (controversial) viewpoints that you probably wouldn’t have seen on HBO or on television if it hadn’t been for Sam breaking down all the walls.”

    Bill Kinison believes his brother belongs in the same camp as such boundary-stretching predecessors as Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor. “What he brought–and they also brought–is being totally honest on stage. Even to a fault. There’s a lot of people who would not have agreed with Sam’s views on things, but he was honest on stage about it.”

    Tenuta agreed.

    “He was dealing with his demons on stage,” she said. “It was really refreshing to see someone just sort of take issues by the horns and really go to the root of it. He was just very funny. And you never felt that there’s this structure of ‘joke,’ like it’s a newscast.”

    Says LaBove: “Sam was the first guy to bring that kind of everyday anger, that stress you have in a car, in a marriage–all that stuff–and just blowing it out.”

    LaBove remembers first meeting Kinison in Texas in 1979 when they both were starting out in stand-up at a legendary Houston club called the Comedy Workshop.

    From the start, LaBove said, “Sam always had the stage presence because he had come from the ministry. Even when he didn’t have great ideas, he was always interesting.”

    As for Kinison’s legendary use of drugs, LaBove said “he was repressed as a preacher’s kid and as a preacher he was someone people looked up to for spiritual guidance. He didn’t have a lot of opportunities to experiment. He started late in everything, so actually he was going through his teen-age years when he passed away.”

    LaBove was riding in a van with Bill Kinison behind Sam’s car when the pickup driven by a teen-ager who had been drinking slammed into the comedian’s Pontiac Trans-Am. Malika, Sam’s longtime girlfriend and wife of less than a week, was knocked unconscious.

    It was LaBove who held Kinison just before he died. At first, the comedian protested that he didn’t want to die. But as LaBove told The Times after the accident, Kinison paused as if listening to a voice from above. Then he said, “OK, OK, OK.” And then, softly and sweetly, he uttered a final “OK.”

    “At the time I knew in my soul it was the moment of death,” said LaBove, adding that he has since found a sense of peace from hearing Kinison’s final words. “I’ve watched my father pass away and other people pass away, and there is a moment where it seems someone comes to get you or you see something and it really relaxes you. When Sam’s moment came, it seemed like Sam listened.”

    LaBove said that preparing his six-minute portion of the tribute has been an emotional ordeal.

    “As far as I’m concerned, everybody else is the stars of the show; I’m his best friend.’ I’m actually going to use this spot as my last public goodby to Sam.”

    Speaking late last week, LaBove said that “at this point, I’ll either tell stories about a friendship the public didn’t see and tell those funny stories of things he did off stage–and actually just talking to him, just staring up. I want a powerful moment. He was a powerful friend.”