Brace yourselves, I'm not kidding.
-Sam Kinison. -Sam Kinison!
[narrator] He was an evangelical
preacher who had
lost faith in the church and turned to comedy.
Sam Kinison was the full-on, the American dream.
I woke up this morning, ha, somebody told me,
"You don't have to lose! You don't have to be defeated!
You can change your life!" You know, that kind of stuff.
Sam Kinison tapped into something raw, unexplored.
All eyes were like, whoa, this is really unique.
Who's this guy,
cause he's got something really different.
It's a shame that he has to die.
And Jesus is going, "Well, maybe I wouldn't have to if
somebody would get a ladder and a pair of pliers!"
He gave voice to the broken hearted man.
Strangle me, shoot me, run me over.
Whatever it takes, I'm in hell!
Agh! Agh!
His trademark scream catapulted him
into the stratosphere of comedy.
He was breaking rules that you weren't supposed to break.
He was changing comedy.
It was intoxicating to be around him.
He was out of his mind,
but he was a generational talent.
How the ---- are you, New York City?!
But Kinison wore his demons on his sleeve.
Sam cared more about the party than
he did the business.
I'm just celebrating with people and
having a great time.
He would just always have big cocaine parties.
He was like a real straight-laced preacher,
and boom! Got into the party and the rock scene,
the comedy scene.
I don't know how you handle that.
I'm snorting these foot-long ----ing lines of coke.
I don't get a straw,
I get a piece of a garden hose!
Every fricking night, I mean, every night-
strippers, and rock and roll stars.
Orgies, sex.
I miss having sex with women that you
never have to see again. Oh!
No subject was too sacred for Kinison to attack.
They say heterosexuals die of AIDS, too.
Name one!
He spread a controversial, angry gospel.
Thanks for giving us the black plague of the 80s!
Thanks!
He had extreme opinions, he had extreme thoughts,
he had extreme friends. He was extreme.
We're talking Roseanne times a zillion.
I mean, he would've been canceled now, for sure.
People count on me for ----ing bad taste.
He had way too many demons.
He was just a, a tortured soul.
There's no other way to put it.
Plunging full-on into the darkness,
he pushed his career to the brink.
----ing cunt that ----ed her boyfriend's brother,
----ing bitch!
How did a man of God fall into an abyss of
addiction and self-destruction?
[Overlapping voices] Ladies and gentlemen!
You're about to be entertained!
Getting the laugh is the greatest addiction.
They want more of it, they want more of it.
She was getting death threats.
It [beep] with your head! ...he's out of his skull!
That's what took her down. This is a crazy story.
♪
Together with his 3 brothers,
Bill, Richard, and Kevin,
Sam Kinison is raised in Peoria, Illinois.
We lived in a church, you know,
cause my dad probably couldn't have afforded
to preach if we didn't, you know.
The household that Sam grew up in
was a very religious household.
You have to live this bible belt life.
I'm Bill Kinison, and I'm Sam's brother and
was his manager.
We were hardcore Pentecost.
Our dad was a fantastic-
one of the greatest preachers ever heard.
And, if you're a preacher's kid,
you're supposed to be a preacher.
Well, Sam was acting like anything other than
some kid that's gonna grow up and
end up being a preacher.
He was the type of guy,
you couldn't make him do anything.
My mother, she wasn't ever able to handle him.
You know, he was a crafty little guy.
Raised in a strict environment,
Sam finds escape listening to comedy records
he secretly brings into the Kinison home.
There was a comedian that most people probably
don't even know now, named Rudy Ray Moore.
Girl, you may not know I'm in there,
but you damn sure know I'm on there.
[Laughing]
Sam bought his album, and we would have to go
up in the attic of our church that we lived in,
and listen to this album 'cause we knew
that our parents would kills us.
He looked at us and said, "Why in the world did you
bring me these carrots and lettuce out here?
She looked at him, said, "Mother----er,
you ---- like a rabbit, you might as well eat like one."
[Laughing]
Sam is drawn back to the church in his late teens,
when the Kinison family is hit with a sudden tragedy.
My father passed away, so it was kind of a spiritual
experience, and I went into ministry for a while.
You have to understand that my dad,
at least for he and I, was our hero.
That was probably one of the hardest times that
Sam and I went through together.
That's when he decided, since he was named
after my father, "I gotta do it for dear old dad."
My brothers and I got together,
and we laid our hands on the casket, and we said,
you know, "We're gonna go out there and be the greatest
preachers in the world and we're gonna really, ah...
do our best to live for God."
He's a good preacher, and to him,
a good service was if he could get people laughing.
And so, after the service was over, he'd come back
and go, "Brother, that was great."
But Sam struggles with one vital aspect of
the preaching game...
raising money.
I didn't do very well actually.
You were not a good minister?
No, well, not financially.
I didn't, I didn't rake in the bucks.
When Sam was in the ministry, he,
he married a, a young lady named Gail.
And, they had only known each other six weeks.
They were married for two years.
And then Sam found out she had been cheating on him.
After Sam went through all the emotions,
he somehow gets it out of her who the guy was.
And where he's living.
Sam went over to his apartment with a gun.
Sam sticks a gun right underneath his chin,
then he tells him, "I want you to go get everything
she's ever given to you." And,
so this guy's going around in his apartment bringing him
pictures, and notes, and cards, and pie pans,
and everything- it ended up filling up a big box.
The failure of Sam's marriage proves disastrous
for his career as a preacher.
I was 23, and I'd been ministering for
about 5 years, and...
it wasn't a good thing to have on your spiritual resume.
In that Pentecostal circle, the worst thing that could 'a
happened to you is to get a divorce, if you're a minister.
They used to say, "If you can't take care of your own
house, you're not fit to take care of the house of God."
So, Sam knew it was over.
I think that his background in the Pentecostal church
left him with questions, frustrations,
disillusionment with scripture and religion.
I told him, I said, "Sam, I want you to take
some time and think, and look down in your heart,
find out what you really want to do."
He took about 3 seconds and said,
"I always wanted to be a stand-up comedian."
He figured, well, if I can't make it as a preacher
I'll be antithesis of that.
He went from one end to the other,
but he was always an entertainer,
he was always onstage.
It was like two different ends of the same animal.
Leaving the ministry behind, Sam heads to Houston,
intent on making a career in comedy.
He immediately makes an impression on another
up-and-coming comic named Bill Hicks.
Sam Kinison showed up, who had a background of
intense individuality, and personality, and charisma,
and went up and killed, and the crowds loved it.
You guys ready for a show?!
[Audience] Yeah! [Laughing]
The success Sam finds in Texas inspires him to
try his luck in the mecca of comedy, Los Angeles.
Sam started off as a doorman at The Comedy Store.
He, like everyone else, that my mom
Mitzi Shore liked,
"Oh, you're awesome, You could park the cars,
you can answer the phones. Seat people."
And when you seat people,
you get to watch the comedians.
There was a system in place that
all the comics were doormen.
It was a way to live at the place.
Sometimes you could get onstage if there was
no one around, 'cause you were a comic.
I was a free spirit in the next stage of life.
I walked in the cosmos not imprisoned by a
body of flesh, but free in a body of light.
I knew all things, there were no questions, only answers!
No weaknesses, only strength!
I was light, I was truth, I was a spiritual being!
I was a god, but you had to ----!
When Sam first came to the Store,
I think he would go on periodically, but not a lot.
I was standing with him one night-
Mitzi's boyfriend at the time might have been
roughing her up by her car.
He was choking her, and Sam stepped in and
pulled him off of her and...
I think maybe hit him.
And from that point on,
she gave him midnight every night.
At The Comedy Store when you're new,
you go on late at night.
People just sat through 14, 15 acts.
These were all power hitters, late at night, you know,
the crowd's a little burned out and you have to
go out of the way to get the attention.
Sam believed that you figure it out,
how to make an impact in the middle of the night.
The first time I saw Sam Kinison,
he was just this force.
And it was like, who the ---- is this guy?
This guy's ----ing nuts.
[Screaming]
They didn't get him at first. They would just walk out.
And, to make matters worse, he would yell,
"I wipe my ass with the name of your sacred dead,"
as they were leaving, just to endear himself.
He would scream, "Out of my house,
this is my house," and then he'd take a stool and
he'd throw it at the audience.
And the audience would kind of like
scamper off and run off.
And from that, eventually he built up
a late night following.
All eyes were like, "Whoa, this is really unique.
Who's this guy cause he's got something
really different."
And people would say, "You gotta go see this guy,
he's crazy. He's the devil."
The thing that filled me with fear when
I first saw Kinison is...
Just that he would say anything to get a reaction,
It was so powerful.
Mitzi Shore knew he was special.
We all knew he was out of his mind.
He was breaking rules that you weren't supposed to break.
I pulled him aside one night, and I said,
"You have no fear." He said, "Well, Allan,
I used to have to heal them. Laughter is much easier
than giving them their eyesight."
Every day you wake up, you look in the mirror,
and you go, "What did I do? What did I do?"
Rr-argh!
When he'd scream at the audience, and scream,
it came from this real place, which made it a lot funnier.
[Screaming]
It wasn't really a character, it was really like this guy
that was free from the church,
and this guy that was free from
these shitty relationships.
It's when he stumbled onto the primal scream,
that- "Agh!"- that everybody related to.
Sam starts to win the respect of his fellow comics,
and is welcomed into the notorious
Comedy Store party scene.
The Comedy Store in 1984, 1985, was the wild west.
There were a lot of drugs.
That was just an insane time.
Sam, first 25 years of his life,
never had a drink, never smoked.
He never really started getting into cocaine and
drinking heavily 'til he went out to LA.
When Sam got around these big stars like
Richard Pryor, Robin Williams,
who pretty much introduced him to cocaine,
they would all party after the shows were over.
He was like a real straight -laced preacher and
boom, got into the party and the rock scene,
the comedy scene.
I don't know how you handle that.
He was a kid in a candy store.
After years of religious abstinence,
Sam dives headfirst into the rock and roll comic
lifestyle, and becomes a fixture of late night parties.
Well, Sam was always a partier...
from the day I met him.
He would just always have, you know, big cocaine parties.
Every frickin' night, I mean, every night Sam
was doing copious amounts of cocaine.
He was just a person that didn't understand limits.
He kept going and going, he'd pull all-nighters.
You can only sustain that for so long.
♪
There's a buzz around Sam Kinison
in the comedy community.
But what he needs now is an opportunity
that will push him to the next level.
He'd been asking me to manage him,
and I just went out there- not knowing if it's gonna
work or not because he'd been out there for 7 years,
nothing had happened.
But it just so happened that Mr. Rodney Dangerfield
came into his life, and that changed everything.
Rodney would go into the Store and he would
find comics that were about to break,
and he'd put 'em on his show.
Rodney Dangerfield and young comedians,
and he shot it in New York.
And he would come out onstage,
and he would host it, and he had Saget, Dyce,
and he had Roseanne, and all these comics.
Here's a guy who's rather unusual.
And I love people who are different, you know.
When I say, "rather unusual," you'll know
what I mean when you meet him, okay.
We all love him here.
Let's have a nice, warm reception for Sam Kinison.
Okay, here we are, Sammy!
-[Applauding] -Ah, there you are!
The first time that I remember Sam really popping
on a national level was that Rodney Dangerfield
HBO special.
Anybody here that's never been married?
You never been married?
[Laughing] What's your name?
Michael?
Well, Michael, if you ever think about getting married,
if you ever think you've met the right woman,
you want to settle down, change your life...
will you do me a favour, Mike?
Remember this face.
[Screaming]
-[Laughing] -Agh!
'Cause if you get married, Mike,
that's gonna be your ----ing face every day, man.
6, 7 minutes, 8 minutes of just like holy ----,
you know, this is the real deal.
Best thing about marriage is that
these are connected. They don't come off.
Cause if they did, your wife would
take it as soon as you got married.
She'd go, "You're married now,
you won't be needing that."
[Laughing]
He was just on fire.
And he just lit that special up.
Everybody was talking about that special
when it aired on HBO.
It went viral, big time.
Do you love me? Can you do me a favour?
-Kill me. -[Laughing]
Kill me- strangle me, shoot me,
run me over- whatever it takes, I'm in hell!
Agh! Agh!
[Applauding]
You guys have been a great crowd.
Thank you very much. My name's Sam Kinison,
good night! Thank you.
That 6 minutes started his career.
I got a 4-special deal with HBO.
3 appearances on David Letterman.
4 appearances on Saturday Night Live.
A 4-record deal with Warner Brothers.
All of this within two or three weeks.
♪
When Kinison came, it was the era of Reagan.
Where money was king, and here all these little,
dirty street urchins, where suddenly people
are paying attention, and they didn't care
how they were perceived when the rest of society
cared how they, themselves, were perceived.
Like everything in culture, there's a pendulum.
The comedy that characterized sort of
the 60s and early 70s
was born out of the counterculture.
That is very much about the Vietnam War,
and the JFK assassination, and Watergate.
So, it was a lot of social consciousness.
But by the time the 80s comedy boom came around,
suddenly it was the disco era,
it was the me' generation, it was Reagan's America.
There was probably a, a vacuum for someone to
come and scream at the heavens like Sam Kinison.
Sam Kinison is the comedian of the moment,
seemingly satisfying a hunger for
a different kind of comedy.
I know a lot of you come here, you watch TV,
you wait every night...
[Laughing]
For somebody to come on here and give you
an answer for your lives, waiting for someone that'll
come and say, "Hey, this is it!
I don't have to settle for defeat anymore!
I can rise up out of my routine!
I can get a hold of myself!
I don't have to lose! I can win!
There's something inside me that's not gonna let me
go down anymore!" But I'm not the guy.
[Laughing]
He came across as a preacher, definitely.
A comedy preacher.
It was like a revival meeting except with like,
he had dirty material, and real funny material.
I think what Sam conveyed, and what people responded to
was that there was an authenticity.
All of his material about religion came from that place.
It felt like he knew what he was talking about.
Jesus had a tough life, boy, I read about that guy.
Jesus was the only guy that ever came back from the dead
that didn't scare the ---- out of everybody, man.
[Laughing]
That was a revelatory kind of joke.
It was smart, you got it, and you went, like,
"I trust that this guy kind of knows
what he's talking about."
I don't know if Jesus has actually spoken in
an audible voice to anybody in about 2000 years.
I think his last words may have been-
[Hammering]
Oh, agh!
[Indistinct shouting & screaming]
[Hammering]
[Cheering & applauding]
Besieged with offers and now a headliner
at The Comedy Store,
Sam takes up residence at Crest Hill,
a house next to the club owned by Comedy Store
owner, Mitzi Shore.
Sam looked at Crest Hill as a lane to party.
So, he would just always have big cocaine parties and
invite girls over there.
In Sam's phase, it became the party house.
I mean, it was a party house to begin with,
but it became the party house.
I'd set up the house so, I was sort of the host
of all the, the Sam-related riff raff.
And then we'd just start doing Sam's blow
sometimes for two, three days straight.
It was crazy.
Sam did have his share of binges.
Usually about 3 days.
That's when I'd see the biggest comedians there was,
and they'd have a rock of cocaine.
It's not cut up or anything else,
and they literally take a knife and just
scrape off the stuff to snort.
Then, people would come in and out.
Sometimes they would fold in and out over the 3 days.
The parties were around the table,
because everybody's a comic
trying to hold court and top each other.
And that was always fun.
The uglier cocaine parties, you know, involved women,
involved orgies, sex, and...
I don't think we were particularly
picky about where the girls came from.
His excessive way of life got more excessive.
You know what I mean?
Now you don't have to be nice to people to get your coke.
Now you got some pockets.
If you got into that inner circle,
sooner or later you got the gun pulled on you,
you got the drink thrown in your face,
you got yelled out, you got slapped around.
It was ugly.
When shit started to get gnarly,
that's when you want to bail.
You're like, ----, I'm out of here.
And then if he'd see you, he'd stop,
and he'd rip his shirt, and he would scream,
"Party goalie, party goalie!
You can't leave, the bees are, 'r-r-r'!"
SFX: [Groaning]
He gave loyalty to you, but he wanted loyalty back.
So, if that meant that you're gonna be sitting there
for 3 days doing drugs and stuff,
you're gonna do it or you're never gonna be
sitting there when he does it again.
He was not in the dark about what he was doing.
He was completely self-willed.
You're gonna try to outdo me, you're gonna try to
out-drug me, you're gonna try to out-drunk me,
you're gonna try out----- me.
That was his thing.
There was never a mediocrity with him.
It was either all-in or all-out,
and ordinarily it was all-in.
♪
Within a year, the opportunities that Sam
signed onto after the Rodney Dangerfield special
are coming to fruition.
♪
He is on an unstoppable roll.
♪
He played a part in Rodney's movie, "Back To School".
I wish I could, but I was there.
I wasn't here in a classroom.
[Mike Binder] And he just killed!
He just destroyed.
...with guns, and then we're going up against Charlie,
slugging it out with him, while pussies like you...!
[Cheering]
But it's his HBO special, 'Breaking The Rules',
that makes him a household name.
I think as a comedian,
Sam Kinison might be one of the greats.
His HBO special, in my mind...
is one of the finest ever done.
I know about ----ing the dead, I do.
[Laughing]
I know what it's like to stick your dick in a corpse.
I was married for two ----ing years!
I ----ed the dead a lot, pal!
That special was so good,
the best thing he'd ever done.
I remember being back in Michigan,
and everyone was talking about that special.
[Cheering & applauding]
You guys have been great, I appreciate you coming out!
[Cheering & applauding]
Sam's debut live comedy album,
'Louder Than Hell,'
the first record of his Warner Brothers deal,
lands securely on the Billboard Charts,
drawing rave reviews.
That first record, it's pretty precise.
I don't think he ever beat that first record.
I don't think you get any better than that.
Ladies and gentlemen, Sam Kinison!
[Cheering & applauding]
Riding a wave, Sam takes his act on the road,
playing to bigger and bigger houses.
I remember when he first started doing theatres,
and we were all in the basement of this theatre,
and the crowd started going crazy and
stomping their feet.
And I just remember being in the bowels of this theatre,
and feeling the building shake and be like...
comedy has changed.
He was the first comedian to ever
sell out Madison Square Garden.
Now his ego...
started exploding to where, you know,
he and I would have friction.
It got to the point that I think he thought
he was the god of comedy.
How the ---- are you, New York City!
[Cheering & applauding]
It is the beginning of 1988, and Sam Kinison
is arguably the biggest name in comedy.
His approach has just completely shifted.
There's no sense of him being an underdog.
There's no sense of him sort of being this, you know,
loser who's licking his wounds.
A lot of people are starting to find out about me.
There's been a lot of articles written on me.
Everywhere I go, people scream, you know.
People walk up to me, they act like
they're looking at the angel of death.
It's like, "Oh! Agh!"
I think he was too seduced by his own PR.
Fell in love with fame, and power, and success.
Falling in love with this image of himself.
Sam signed to do a movie called Atuk',
and he never read the script until he got into the trailer.
And, you know, as comedians,
you're just used to doing things your way,
right or wrong.
And he said, "Well, I'm just gonna rewrite it."
And they said, "What are you talking about?
We're here, we're filming it."
And, of course from there it went into a lawsuit.
He didn't pay attention to anything.
I just had to go to ----ing court because they're
suing me for $5 million for not making a bad movie.
Agh! I love my life.
As he became more popular, cared more about
the partying than he did the business.
As Sam plays fast and loose with his career,
his off-stage behaviour continues to escalate...
spilling out of the Crest Hill house,
into the uncontained Los Angeles night life.
Yeah! [Laughing]
One time we were all ----ing drugged up,
and we ran out of coke. I was like,
"Alright, well, I guess that's it."
He's like, "No, man, let's go get more coke."
It was like 3:30 in the morning, we get in my car.
We're driving through Hollywood to this
dealer's house, whacked out of our skulls,
and I just remember Sam's like in and out of
consciousness, and at some point he wakes up and he
looks at me and he's like, "I don't even know you, man,
you could kill me." And I'm like,
"Where are we going, dude?"
And we get to this apartment, like,
"Hey, man, it's me, hook me up, hook me up."
He was a hairdresser, this guy,
but he was a coke guy.
And he's like, "What do you want?"
So, "Got anything, man, you know?" And he's like,
"Just be quiet, my roommate's sleeping,"
you know, this poor roommate.
And he gives us some coke.
And then Sam's like, "Got any booze?"
And, so he gives Sam this little miniature Smirnoff,
and Sam's like on the floor drinking a miniature.
He looked like a little giant.
And then he just passes out.
♪
With Sam's life of excess serving as a backdrop,
he releases his second comedy album,
Have You Seen Me Lately?'
♪ Wild thing, I think you move me. ♪
Placed at the end of the record is a full-on cover
of the classic rock song, 'Wild Thing'.
♪
♪ OH! WILD THING! ♪
♪
That video catapulted Sam into rock star status.
We were driving around in Studio City,
on Ventura Boulevard...
every car, you could hear 'Wild Thing'!
♪
When Have You Seen Me Lately?' lands on the charts,
Sam puts a band together.
♪
He takes his rock and roll comedy show on the road.
♪ [Screaming] ♪
The show went to a whole different level
when that curtain opened.
From that, he became the rock and roll comic.
The Wild Thing, Mr. Sam Kinison, y'all.
[Cheering]
Bon Jovi asked us to come play to
84,000 people in Jersey.
The last song they did was Wild Thing'.
It was insanity.
And I think because he was so counter everything that was
stand-up, it made him even more popular.
I think he believed in and lived the rock and roll myth.
♪
Sam Kinison is at the height of his career,
seemingly an unstoppable force.
[Cheering & applauding]
But a tragic event is about to
pull him back down to Earth.
Kevin, Sam's brother, my sister,
and myself were in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Sam, my sister, and myself were staying at a hotel.
We were gonna go shopping and,
I hear five, six ambulances.
I was like, "What's going on?" And,
it turned out that Sam's brother had killed himself.
Shot himself in the head, in his mother's room,
on Mother's Day.
Kevin was 28.
He wasn't just our little brother, he was our baby.
Wouldn't have hurt anybody.
It was very difficult for Sam and I, both,
to handle that.
But Sam suffered the most.
Why would a kid that's 28,
that had everything going for him,
that was great looking, that had a great personality,
just was a wonderful person,
take a gun and shoot himself?
That was a big turning point.
Sam had buried himself in alcohol and drugs
to numb the pain.
He wouldn't take a break to mourn his brother,
and this was kind of like the beginning of the end.
The sudden death of Sam Kinison's brother
threatens to overwhelm him.
This was a very dark period because he wouldn't
take off time to mourn Kevin's passing.
Sam kept partying, and partying, and partying, and...
he was grieving so much.
The problem is when you get past the grief,
or you stop grieving, ah,
you're left with those bad habits.
I wanted to take Sam off the road for a while to
get him emotionally healthy enough to do shows.
He said, "I need to work it out."
The next city that we went to was New York.
We were at the China Club.
The owners just locked us in the club.
Sam had a gun,
and Sam would not stop crying about Kevin.
High out of his mind, drunk,
that he wasn't there for Kevin.
And he got so angry we didn't know what to do,
because what are you gonna say in the basement
of the China Club?
Sam, after Kevin's death...
he would go on rampages sometimes.
Sam kept getting deeper and deeper.
He felt like that Kevin's death was his fault because
what he believed happened was a result of them
partying all the time.
So, that's why he felt so guilty about it.
And I'll have to admit for a while, I, I...
I kind of blamed Sam, too.
I think Sam may have turned his back on God
after his brother committed suicide.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the undisputed king of comedy...
the leader of the band, Mr. Sam Kinison!
Unable to lift himself out of the tailspin of grief,
Sam keeps working.
Oh, wild thing I think I want to ---- you in the ass.
♪
But the humour is different now-
darker, meaner.
You two are the nastiest ----ing bitches
I ever met in my ----ing life.
[Laughing] Was Sam misogynistic?
Yes, he was, because he didn't have respect for women.
These are the operators we have standing by.
Misogynistic?
Sam is everything that comes with that word.
Hello?
He might be the picture
when you look it up in the dictionary.
[Phone] Hello?
[Sam] Hi, Kate? [Kate] Yeah?
[Sam] Do you remember Kevin? [Kate] Yeah.
Did you used to go out with him?
[Kate] Ah, a long time ago.
Well, that's what he was telling us,
and we were looking for a girl who was a ----ing cunt
that ----ed her boyfriend's brother, and you won,
you ----ing bitch!
How do you live with yourself, you piece of shit?
Yeah, you're a ----ing bitch!
[Indistinct shouting]
Yeah, you ----ing cunt! You ----ing bitch!
I think he had drugged himself into a place
where he couldn't generate material
anymore that was very good.
I mean, here's the thing about comedy- if you're
saying so many edgy and dangerous things,
and you're really going out on a limb,
and you're living on that limb and
you're staying up for three days in a row,
you're not gonna be terribly focused.
Sam raises the ire of women's groups across the country,
and the media grabs on.
You're a ----ing cunt! You deserve to die!
You ----ing bitch! How do you live with yourself,
you ----ing pussy?
But at this moment, Sam is too popular to bring down.
You're always gonna be looking for something
even more shocking to say.
I mean, that's the thrill of it.
It's playing Chicken with words.
Sam, as this powerful figure,
would scream, you know,
profanities and obscenities at this woman.
It just felt like misogyny and bullying.
He definitely wasn't dancing with the devil.
He had become the devil.
Defiant in the face of charges of misogyny,
Sam Kinison continues a scorched earth approach
to his comedy.
I'm a triple X-rated ----ing comedian.
People count on me for ----ing bad taste.
[Cheering]
It was a lack of respect for anything he was doing,
or anybody else.
I miss ----ing total strangers.
I miss having sex with women that you
never have to see again. Oh!
He didn't care.
He was going to do what he wanted to do in his comedy.
Kinison openly provokes the gay community,
daring them to respond.
Yeah, I guess you would lose weight if you're gay.
Who the ---- wants to eat after they've had a dick
in their mouth all day!
[Retching]
His lampooning of AIDS in the midst of the disease
decimating the community becomes a flashpoint.
Comedy and controversy, the two went hand-in-hand
tonight at Syracuse's Landmark Theater.
[Protesters chanting]
They marched tonight, angry at the
appearance of comedian Sam Kinison.
Angry over his comments on women and Blacks.
Angry about his stance toward AIDS and gays.
And in one joke, I said, I said,
"They say heterosexuals die of AIDS too.
Name one!"
Alright? Just, just as like a little social commentary.
Sam was controversial.
But if Sam felt like something was funny,
he'd do it.
Man, they came out of the ----ing woodwork.
"You ----ing son of a bitch, how could make fun of such a-"
[Chattering]
The condemnation goes nationwide when Elton John
calls Sam out on live television.
I'm doing this show under protest.
I'd like to congratulate Sam Kinison on being the first
pig ever to introduce a rock and roll show.
I don't think Sam was anti-AIDS and anti-gay.
I think they were jokes to him,
and they seemed like low hanging fruit.
And, you know, Sam's one of those guys that
it might be low hanging fruit, but it's still fruit.
So, he went for it.
It's just comedy, yes.
But it's at the expense of thousands of people
that are dying every day from AIDS.
It's at their expense.
It's not at the expense of Sam Kinison.
[Cheering]
AIDS, with Sam, that was a problem.
And that started on David Letterman.
And I'm in the green room with the other people that's
gonna be on, and Sam's talking to David.
Then he just goes off the cuff.
I told a joke, I said,
"They say heterosexuals die of AIDS too. Name one."
You know, just as a joke, and, and, man,
they act like, "Oh, it's the most hideous joke of all time!
It's the worst joke that involves
drinking human blood." [Retching]
And as soon as he says that, I know I got my hands full.
I just want somebody to name one.
[Laughing]
So... so what you're saying is you're just,
you're just misunderstood?
When he's saying that, I'm just going,
"Oh, God, no." We got death threats.
Everything else that we never had before, over that.
[Chanting]
Minneapolis was not good. They raised our tour bus.
Portland was not good, they threw acid in on
the side door on people that were sitting in the show.
Seattle wasn't good.
They had probably 300 protestors that
the police had to, had to clear out.
They caught 78 people carrying guns into
Madison Square Garden.
And so, we had to carry extra security, ah,
for probably a year because,
because we had death threats everywhere.
That was, that was probably the biggest bump
we ever had in his career.
♪
I saw something in Sam one of the days that
he was being picketed, Warner Brothers with the
records and everything, they were saying, like,
"We're just gonna ban him."
We were in the limo.
The gay community was coming out with signs going,
"Sexist, racist, anti-gay, Sam Kinison go away!"
And they're pounding on the limo with their
picket signs, and Sam started crying.
And it was such a poignant moment, like,
he wouldn't turn around.
And it wasn't just that he was being banned.
There was something else going on.
♪
I just think he had too many things, mentally,
that he was fighting.
I think a lot of it was he was just a tortured soul,
there's no other way to put it.
I think Sam's comedy came from a need to be heard.
What makes people stand on a corner and scream?
It isn't because things were happy-go-lucky
during their life.
I can't speak to what actually happened to Sam,
but I can...
guarantee nothing good.
You know, I mean, I've been through a lot of
family death, I've been through a lot of...
ah, mental, mental torment.
And, pressure, life pressures like divorce,
and broken marriages and, you know.
Unprocessed trauma and grief stays there.
It, it simmers underneath the surface,
and it starts to come out in other ways in your life-
in the choices that you make,
in your interpersonal relationships.
It's an escapist behaviour.
I can't deal with this, so I'm not gonna deal with it,
and I'm gonna use drugs.
I don't have a home.
I don't have a car, I didn't eat yesterday.
I had to borrow these clothes.
She took it all!
When we're betrayed in a marriage,
or in any interpersonal relationship,
we start to feel that no one is trustworthy.
And so, we start living our life in a way that...
no one can be trusted.
The person who was supposed to love me
the most in the world, the person that was
supposed to have my back has now betrayed me.
I believe all of the anger that came out of Sam onstage
in regards to women, or anything,
is because of him being so damaged.
Anybody that was decent to him, he ran off.
He wasn't honest with anyone in his life,
and that's profound.
That lack of trust can turn to anger,
it can turn to substance abuse,
it can turn to misogyny, it can turn to
your own way of functioning in the world.
It's amazing when I hear people say, "Oh,
I was so close to Sam," and how well they knew him-
nobody knew who Sam Kinison was.
Nobody, because how can you know who anybody is
if there's no honesty?
By mid 1991, Sam has a reputation in steep decline.
The press has turned on him,
his comedy is a shadow of what it once was,
and his addictions have overwhelmed him.
Sam Kinison, he had that five-year run from
Letterman to the Rodney Dangerfield to the HBO,
and it was this capsule.
And then it got, you know, obviously sad because
he became a caricature of himself.
There's a certain point, he was doing shows,
not preparing for them, not caring,
and more importantly, going out totally messed up.
The shows were tragic.
Sam was booed offstage.
He was an absolute nightmare.
You know, it wasn't fun, it wasn't silly,
it wasn't whacky.
You know, it was disgusting.
It was like seeing your hero just fall beneath the cracks
before your very eyes.
And...
You know...
Yeah.
♪
We got back to California.
I told him, I said, "Come out to my house."
So, he came out, and I had the tape from his show.
"I want you to watch this."
I put the tape in the player in the bedroom,
and I leave him there.
When it's all over, I come back in,
and I go, "What do you think?"
And he goes, "I was ----ed up, man."
I said, "Well, let me tell you what that
----ed up cost you.
It just cost you a half a million dollars,
probably closer to a million dollars because of
the bonus money you would've picked up.
Your contract's not being renewed.
So, you can mark that off of your income."
And I told him, I said, "I'm done, I quit.
I'm off your party train."
♪
And so, for the first time I ever can remember,
he said, "I got a problem." I said, "Yeah, you do."
From then on, he, he...
he cleaned up.
I had enough of that stuff, man.
If you're involved with it, get dis-involved with it
because you're either gonna get busted,
or you're gonna die, so you know...
Get, get rid of it.
With renewed focus,
driven by a newfound attempt at abstinence,
Sam sets out to rehabilitate his career.
I got him on a Bernie Brillstein series
called Charlie Hoover'.
I know Amish people having more fun than you!
Oh, oh!
...in Charlie Hoover!
It's a palatable version of me.
I've crossed over, actually like family entertainment,
so it's kind of fun.
Charlie Hoover lasts a mere 7 episodes,
but it helps pave the way for
changing the perception of Sam.
The reviews were, Sam was too good for the show.
Honey!
But it is an appearance on
In Living Colour' that
shows how far Sam is willing to lampoon himself in the
service of his comedy,
and the love of his audience.
Happy anniversary, pumpkin face!
I don't believe it, you remembered!
Even after 3 months of rehab!
Rehab? Hey!
How about a drink! A-ha-ha!
I think that was the most thrilling premise of
having two Sams- a Sam and a Samantha-
these identical screaming people.
Ah! Happy anniversary.
I was very aware that he publicly had issues with
drugs and alcohol, had been to rehab.
[Laughing]
Here's to five years of living! Agh!
It was incredibly brave of him to,
not only show up 100%,
but also to be very vocal about
what his struggles were, and not to be like,
"poor me," in any way.
I definitely felt like he was in a very happy place...
and excited about what he was doing.
But for Sam, fate will step in and rob him of
a chance to fully turn his life around.
Comedian Sam Kinison is dead,
killed in a car crash late last night.
But who will ever forget the man who made his audiences
laugh by screaming at them?
The sudden death of Sam Kinison sends shockwaves
through the comedy community as it tries to
process the magnitude of the tragedy.
Saget called me, and he said, "Did you hear, Sam's gone?"
First thought is, was he drunk, was he doing coke?
Bob said he got in a car accident.
It took the wind out of me.
I sat down on my bed, and I just started to cry.
He always thought that he was gonna die,
because I think he knew down deep inside,
you can't light the fuse that hard...
and survive, yeah.
It's all fun and games, man.
It affected me. It affected me pretty bad.
He was, you know, not only my friend,
he was my mentor.
A part of me died that day.
It's something that you never get over,
but you make adjustments for it.
I've had preachers and other kind of people laugh at that,
you know, Sam's in hell.
No, he's not in hell.
I know exactly where he's at,
and that's the only peace that I get out of it.
Over 30 years later, Sam Kinison
has left a complex legacy in comedy.
He was quite wonderful, and that he did- you know,
he's one of those people like out there, you know,
he offended people sometimes and other people loved it,
but there's people that have to be out there to
kind of mess with the envelope.
I read the darkest, sickest thing
I've ever read in my life this summer.
I read in the paper, they said...
that a group of homosexual necrophiliacs-
-Woo! -[Laughing]
...have been going around to mortuaries,
offering them money...
to let them come in at night, spend a couple hours
undisturbed with the freshest male corpse.
Boo! [Laughing & shrieking]
It was really just, you know, it's a simple joke.
Ha, I felt the same way.
I read this thing, and I went, "Oh! Oh!"
The joke is like, imagine if you're that dead guy.
I mean, that's the joke.
It's simple, but it was just, you know...
just when he lies down.
And these corpses, 'cause I know these guys
were laying out on slabs...
They're in there, going-
"Well, well, life was tough and, ah...
It was pretty hard to live up to, and...
I have faced death, and I'm glad I went through it,
and ah...
well, now I'm ready to spend eternity in heaven,
be with Jesus and...
rock of ages. Hey..."
[Laughing]
"Hey, what's this shit?!"
-"Oh, I don't believe this!" -[Laughing]
"There's a guy's dick in my ass!"
[Laughing & cheering]
"Oh, you mean life keeps ----ing you in the ass
even after you're dead?
Ah, it never ends, it never ends, oh!
Oh! Oh!"
[Cheering & applauding]
And just to see him laying down and start rocking
like that, I get chills about it now.
The zone he created, it was outer space.
No one had ever gone there before.
No one ever seen anything like it.
I've never seen anything like it.
I think the biggest misconception about
Sam Kinison is that he enjoyed insulting people.
That was not where his kicks came from.
I think he enjoyed making people laugh.
And, that was Sam's number one goal,
was to just make a room pee their pants.
I've been in love about 9 times now.
[Laughing]
And it's been real every time, folks.
Every time it was gonna last forever!
Remember, you ----ing bitches, huh?!
-[Laughing] -Forever!