Samuel Burl Kinison ( KIN-iss-ən; December 8, 1953 – April 10, 1992) was an American stand-up comedian and actor. A former Pentecostal preacher, he performed stand-up routines that were characterized by intense sudden tirades, punctuated with his distinctive scream. Initially performing for free, Kinison became a regular fixture at The Comedy Store, where he met and eventually befriended such comics as Robin Williams and Jim Carrey.
Kinison's comedy was observational humor, especially towards women and dating, and his popularity grew quickly, leading to appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Late Night with David Letterman, and Saturday Night Live. At the peak of his career in early 1992, he was killed in a car crash, aged 38.
Kinison received a Grammy nomination in 1988 for the single "Wild Thing" from his Have You Seen Me Lately? album, and a posthumous win in 1994 for Best Spoken Comedy Album, Live from Hell.
Samuel Burl Kinison was born in Yakima, Washington, on December 8, 1953, the son of Marie Florence (née Morrow) and Samuel Earl Kinison, a Pentecostal preacher. The family moved to East Peoria, Illinois, when Kinison was three months old. At the age of three years, Kinison was hit by a truck, which left him with brain damage and epilepsy.
His father pastored several churches around the country, receiving little income. Kinison had two older brothers, Richard and Bill, and a younger brother, Kevin. His parents divorced when Kinison was 11, after which his brother Bill went to live with his father, while Kinison stayed with the rest of the family, despite his protests. Bill described this as the root of much of Sam's anger. Kinison later attended East Peoria Community High School in East Peoria.
Kinison and his brothers emulated their father by becoming Pentecostal preachers. Between 1968 and 1969, Kinison attended Pinecrest Bible Training Center, an interdenominational, unaccredited, three-year Bible school located in Salisbury Center, New York. His mother married another preacher and moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Kinison lived for a while.
He preached from the age of 17 to 24 and recordings of his sermons reveal that he used a "fire and brimstone" style, punctuated with shouts similar to the ones he would later use in his stand-up routines. His brother Bill noted, "ironically, he had no stage presence", and he was not very successful at making money from preaching, as he was more concerned with making the sermons more informative than entertaining. After Kinison and his first wife divorced, he abandoned preaching and took up comedy.
Kinison began his career in Houston, where he performed in small clubs. He became a member of a comedic group at the Comedy Workshop, known as the Texas Outlaw Comics, that included Bill Hicks, Ron Shock, Riley Barber, Steve Epstein, Andy Huggins, John Farneti, and Jimmy Pineapple. Hicks cited Kinison as a major influence on his comedic style, noting, "He was the first guy I ever saw to go on stage and not in any way ask the audience to like him."
In 1980, Kinison moved to Los Angeles, hoping to find work at The Comedy Store. He was first employed as a doorman. He soon developed a cocaine and alcohol addiction, quickly progressing to freebasing cocaine, and struggled to gain a foothold in the business, until his brother Bill moved to Los Angeles to help manage his career.
In August 1985, his big break came on HBO's Rodney Dangerfield's Ninth Annual Young Comedians Special. After noting the performance of Bob Nelson, reviewer Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote, "the most interesting of the other eight comedians is the savagely misogynistic Sam Kinison. Mr. Kinison specializes in a grotesque animalist howl that might be described as the primal scream of the married man."
In 1985, in Kinison's debut television appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, Letterman's introduction of Kinison warned his audience, "Brace yourselves. I'm not kidding. Please welcome Sam Kinison." Kinison played on his former role as a Bible-preaching evangelist, taking satirical and sacrilegious shots at the Bible, Christianity, and famous Christian evangelist scandals of his day. Kinison's daring comedy helped shoot him to stardom. On several videos of his stand-up routines, a shot of the personalized license plate on his 1986 Corvette reveals the words "EX REV". He was associated with the Los Angeles rock music scene and was occasionally accompanied by a touring band.
In 1986, Kinison appeared in Rodney Dangerfield's film Back to School.
Howard Stern purchased the film rights to Kinison's biography, written by Kinison's brother, reporting in 2008 that HBO would make Brother Sam with Kinison being played by Dan Fogler. In an interview with Sam's brother and manager Bill Kinison, Bill mentioned film deals that were in development at the time of his death; one such deal was a film with Arnold Schwarzenegger and another with Rick Moranis.
In May 1988, Kinison's youngest brother Kevin died by suicide at the age of 28; Kevin shot and killed himself after a nervous breakdown at his parents' home in Tulsa. His death devastated Sam.
Kinison acquired much of his material from his first two marriages, to Patricia Adkins (1975–1980) and Terry Marze (1981–1989). He began a relationship with dancer Malika Souiri toward the end of his marriage with Marze.
In 1990, Souiri alleged she was raped by a man Kinison had hired as a bodyguard while Kinison was asleep in the house. The bodyguard stated that the sex was consensual. The jury deadlocked in the subsequent trial, and the charges were later dropped. The incident inspired Kinison to try to go straight with Souiri and join an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter. By March 1990, he was saying to audiences that he was no longer getting high.
Kinison frequented rock shows and often hung out with musicians. In May 1991, Kinison got in a fight with guitarist Slash at a hotel after Slash missed a planned appearance at one of Kinison's shows. Slash stated that Kinison nearly "choked [him] to death" before Slash's bandmate Duff McKagan intervened. Slash and McKagan declined to press charges after the incident.
On April 4, 1992, six days before his death, Kinison married Souiri at the Candlelight Chapel in Las Vegas. They honeymooned in Hawaii for five days before returning home to Los Angeles on April 10 to prepare for a show that night at the Riverside Resort Hotel and Casino in Laughlin, Nevada.