The Devil and Sam Kinison
Sam Kinison is pissed, man. Onstage, the squat, neckless Beast of Comedy bellows his anger — at televangelists, sobriety, women, gays and anything else that irks him. But backstage between two shows at Santa Barbara’s Arlington Theater in December, he is talking calmly, spicing his friendly chat with more casual fucks and mans than Dennis Hopper uttered in all of Easy Rider.
The comedian’s current tirade is about his former manager, Elliot Abbott. Abbott severed their relationship last February after Kinison’s first leading-role movie vehicle, Atuk, was canceled on its first day of shooting. The two are co-defendants in a $5.6 million breach-of-contract lawsuit initiated by United Artists.
“I can’t believe how on the hook I was to this guy,” says Kinison, 35, who had also been renting his notorious $3500-a-month Hollywood Hills party pad from Abbott. “What a scumball, man.”
Up close, the former preacher’s daunting charisma and imposing bulk are undercut by a Muppet-like cuteness. Sitting in a folding chair, he’s wearing his trademark knit cap atop his frizzy mane and one of his own Out of Control Tour T-shirts torn halfway down his sweaty barrel of a chest. In his dressing room are two women, both of them pregnant (not by him): Christy LaBove, his adoring personal assistant, and Trudy Green of Front Line Management, which signed Kinison after Abbott dropped him.
“I just heard that Elliot had a million-dollar life-insurance policy on me,” Kinison says, glowering. “I did business with the guy for two years, and the guy’s going, ‘Kinison gets a record deal or he kicks — either way, I win.’ Now I understand why he didn’t care how fucked up everybody got.”
Trudy and Christy nod knowingly. Kinison takes a swig of soda, the only liquid refreshment available backstage at his shows, and giggles giddily.
“Somebody told me he can still pay on the policy and keep it,” Kinison continues. “I’m gonna cancel him. Take him out in the front yard and shoot him in front of his kids. ‘I don’t care if I burn, I want to see you fucking die, man.'”
“Uh, well,” says Trudy, trying to lighten the mood, “success is the best revenge of all.”
“Yeah,” says Kinison, “success is the best, but still, the other thing has a great visual.” He stands, brandishing a pantomime gun, then gets on his knees, as Abbott, and screams in terror, “Oh! OH! AAAAUGH!”
That unearthly scream — a supersonic boom born of bile — is Sam Kinison’s comedy calling card. It doesn’t matter that he later learns Elliot Abbott never took out any such insurance policy. For that moment, Kinison believed it, and his anger converted the room. The source of Sam Kinison’s power, both onstage and in his decade-long battle to build a career, is this preacher’s ability to believe what he wants to believe — no matter how wrongheaded — and make others act accordingly. “He’s always losing his keys,” says Christy LaBove. “And instead of looking for them, he just gets new locks.”
The fantasy of shooting Abbott is quintessential Kinison; he is godfatherlike in his loyalty to his friends but utterly intolerant of everyone else. The problem, however, illustrated by the nonexistent insurance policy, is that Kinison — a high-school dropout raised on the Bible — is not always well informed. And though he is not without feeling — he seems devastated by the suicide of his brother Kevin last May — his capacity for insensitivity is boundless.
Yet the grosser he gets, the bigger he gets. Despite Kinison’s limited national exposure — the usual stand-up spots, a 1987 HBO special, appearances on Saturday Night Live and a cameo in Rodney Dangerfield’s movie Back to School — he has built up such a following that he plays 5000-seat venues at rock prices. And in an era when comedy albums are virtually unsalable, his debut, 1986’s Louder Than Hell, sold a respectable 100,000 copies, and his current effort, Have You Seen Me Lately?, is going gold, thanks to a heavy-metal cover of the Troggs’ “Wild Thing,” reworked with Kinison’s cartoonish bitch-hating rants.
Have You Seen Me Lately? bears an unusual sticker that warns, The Material On This Album Does Not Reflect The Views Or Opinions Of Warner Bros. Records, his label. (Employees there had been so put off by the antigay and antiwoman material on Louder Than Hell that they petitioned their bosses not to release it.)
On Lately, Kinison struts his bad-boy ethos, railing against drunk-driving laws (“There’s no other way to get our fucking car back to the house!”) and Rock Against Drugs (“It’s like Christians against Christ — rock created drugs!”). It’s a testament to his stage presence and charm that he pulls off such material.
Preaching a gospel of irresponsibility to impressionable followers, though, raises serious moral questions. It’s hard to tell if Kinison’s audience is being entertained or simply getting led down his highway to hell. The most heated debate is over the album’s routine called “Rubber Love.” “Safe sex?” Kinison snarls. “GET OFF OUR BACK! Because a few fags fucked some monkeys… because of this shit, they want us to wear rubbers… ‘Heterosexuals die of it, too.’ Name ONE! It’s not our dance.”
An advance copy of the record reached Randy Morrison, who had produced the informational dance single “No Condom, No Sex,” by Cruise Control. Morrison couldn’t believe that Kinison’s misleading, gay-baiting comedy was being released by Warner Bros. — the label behind an AIDS public-awareness program called Musicians for Life.
“To make fun of gay people for a group of people who hate gays is not adventurous comedy,” says Morrison. “And blaming gay people for AIDS is like blaming heavy metal for teen suicide.” Morrison and many advocacy groups helped persuade the label to insert an AIDS information sheet into later pressings of the record.
Yet Kinison, who has never taken criticism well, wears such protests like a badge. He opens his current act by defending his AIDS joke. “Nothing to start a fucking fag war over,” he says, pacing the Santa Barbara stage in his long overcoat. “They say my jokes aren’t medically correct. They don’t have to be. They’re not prescriptions, they’re fucking jokes. They say I’m not sensitive. Sensitive? Aren’t you the same guys that tape up gerbils and shove them up your ass?” The crowd — seventy-five percent male, mostly in its twenties — cheers and stomps.
Kinison recently told the Los Angeles Times that he can’t help the way people interpret his material. “I think people get anger out of their system by seeing me,” he said. “You can’t ignore anger. If the gay community thinks there isn’t a major resentment by the American public for the disease they’ve caused, then they’re nuts… I can’t be responsible for the way every single person reacts to my act.”
Yet after the Santa Barbara show, it seems pretty clear that Kinison’s effect on his followers is not one of furthering global understanding. In the lobby, a volunteer passes out business cards for a local AIDS hot line. Many of the fans streaming out take a card, read it, scream, “AAAAUGH!” and drop the card as if it were infected.
Although Kinison’s moral standing is questionable, his marketing instincts are impeccable. His rude rise has been fueled by the popular video for “Wild Thing,” a veritable time capsule of late-Eighties sleaze delivered with sledgehammer subtlety. It features Kinison and the newly busty PTL harlot Jessica Hahn rolling around in a pit, cheered on by heavy metalers — including Billy Idol and members of Bon Jovi, Poison and Guns n’ Roses — who befriended Kinison at his Sunday postshow parties at L.A.’s Comedy Store. (Kinison and Hahn were briefly linked in the tabloids. All he’ll admit is “she has a crush on me,” but in his act he says that during the taping of the video, all the heavy metalers were shouting, “Fuck her!… Do it for Jim Bakker!” “So I did it,” he says.)
Kinison obviously feels an esprit de corps with loathed celebrities like Hahn and the heavy-metal boys. He sent many audiences screaming from the room during his climb to stardom. But he’s always stuck to his guns. In 1979 the Comedy Workshop in Houston suspended Kinison for breaking a stool onstage and inciting a riot; he went to the Stop N Go across the street and, in full view of the club’s picture window, tied himself to a mock cross and doused himself with ketchup. Two weeks later, he returned in a limo — and his shows sold out. Ejected again for repeatedly doing a routine about a prankish baby Jesus, he picked a fight with the club’s artistic director and unintentionally broke the man’s leg.
In 1986, granted a stand-up spot on Saturday Night Live, Kinison ignored censors and imitated Jesus screaming as he was nailed to the cross. Thanks to the attendant publicity, he was asked to host the show two weeks later. He demanded to do more stand-up — including a bit about premature ejaculation — because, he says, “I didn’t want to look like I’d been corrected.”
Not all his material is inflammatory, but his outrageousness is what gets him publicity, so he’s likely to get only more extreme in the future. But being naughty for naughtiness’ sake is a dubious achievement, and Kinison’s bullylike obstinacy is finally taking its toll.
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