Sam Kinison: Religious Sacrilege
An exploration of Sam Kinison’s life in comedy used as a weapon in the expansion of the Kingdom of God.
“I guess that’s why he never got married. No wife would ever buy the fucking resurrection, alright? Like sure, she sees him on friday afternoon, he takes off with twelve fucking guys. She doesn’t hear from him again ’til Monday. He comes in the house, she’s going, ‘and where have you been for three days Mister Winemaker?’ Jesus is going, “No, no, I’ll tell ya. I’ll tell ya where i’ve been. First of all, not that it’s important, but I was DEAD! I”m in a fucking grave outside of town, I’m fighting death, Hell, decomposure. I’m changing spiritual form about to come into the Kingdom of God and I go, ‘wait a second, I better go back because she doesn’t know where i’ve been!’”.
Sam Kinison (born December 8, 1953, died April 10, 1992) was a stand-up comedian popular in the 80s for his intense, loud, and politically incorrect humor typically centered around the most sensitive subjects of the time. Sam was born into a church family — his father was a well-off preacher — though his parents later divorced, creating an emotional deficit from which Sam found it hard to recover. Two of Sam’s brothers went to live with his father while Sam and his third brother stayed behind with his mother despite all his protestations. Sam’s mother was later remarried to another preacher. His brother Bill (also his manager later in his career) attributes most of his anger to this string of traumatic events in his life. Both Sam and his brothers followed in the footsteps of their father to eventually become Pentecostal preachers.
Sam began preaching at the young age of 17, but ironically lacked the ‘stage presence’, according to his brother Bill, to maintain the attention of an audience and make an impact upon the crowd, and he couldn’t accumulate nearly enough money to live off of. Sam’s background in preaching fully equipped him with the fervent passion that he brought to his comedic routines, often incorporating spurts of enthusiastic, verging-on-angry, and passionate charisma.
Sam received his ‘big break’ as a comic in 1985 when he performed a stand-up routine on the topics of marriage and world hunger on Rodney Dangerfield’s HBO comedy showcase. This breakthrough literally set the stage for the rest of his comedic career.
According to fellow comedian Richard Belzer in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, “Sam was a forerunner of Howard Stern’s kind of raunch humor.” Kinison’s radical and outlandish take on the life that he grew up in was the starting point of his rocket to stardom. Kinison was soon donned “savagely misogynistic” by Stephen Holder of the New York Times and was introduced with the warning of “brace yourselves. I’m not kidding,” by David Letterman for Sam’s network television debut in 1985. He quickly developed a reputation as somewhat of a firecracker with a lit fuse.
Kinison experienced much hardship in his life, from being hit by a truck at the age of three that left him with some brain damage, to being unhappily married and divorced more times than most in his short life. Because of this, Kinison had many personal experiences with which to construct his comedic material. For Kinison, loudly creating humor out of sobering situations may have been just as good a therapy as a couch session with a clipboard wielding professional.
The more pain Sam experienced in his life, it seems, the more he turned his misfortune into humor. Interestingly enough, Sam’s humor could hardly be considered anything resembling lighthearted. He spoke truth about his life, his pain, and the things he no longer believed in because of his experiences. So why did people find Sam to be one of the funniest up-and-coming comics of his time? Because the truth, when spoken in a self-deprecating way, can appeal to human nature’s desire to commiserate. Misery loves company.
Much of Kinison’s career consisted of picking fights in the name of humor with other famous comedians and celebrities — pushing the envelope in terms of what could be deemed humor or cruelty. Kinison brought intense passion to each of his routines.
His ability to be inexplicably enthused with whatever his topic of discussion was can only stem from his background in the Christian Church. The Church is a place to believe the unbelievable and to fully, in faith, place your trust in the hands of a God that you cannot see with your own human eyes. Kinison translates his steadfast faith in the Lord into a steadfast faith in whatever he should choose to believe. Through his absurd and theatrical comedy routines, Kinison made it clear to the world that he could not be swayed.
“Every generation has someone who steps outside the norm and offers a voice for the unspeakable attitudes of that time. I represent everything that’s supposed to be wrong, everything that’s forbidden.” — Sam Kinison
Nearing the peak of his career, Mr. Kinison takes the stage in the Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles to begin his arguably most well-known diatribe against all that he should not speak of. During this fifty minute train to fame, Sam touched on the topics of women, marriage, Hell, homosexuality, and Jesus. In his small segment on Jesus, Sam elects to explore the potential humor he could create out of the implausibility of the resurrection story.
“I guess that’s why he never got married. No wife would ever buy the fucking resurrection, alright? Like sure, she sees him on friday afternoon, he takes off with twelve fucking guys. She doesn’t hear from him again ’til Monday. He comes in the house, she’s going, ‘and where have you been for three days Mister Winemaker?’ Jesus is going, “No, no, I’ll tell ya. I’ll tell ya where i’ve been. First of all, not that it’s important, but I was DEAD! I”m in a fucking grave outside of town, I’m fighting death, Hell, decomposure. I’m changing spiritual form about to come into the Kingdom of God and I go, ‘wait a second, I better go back because she doesn’t know where i’ve been!’”.
When it all boils down to reason, why does Sam choose the words he does? What is his purpose in such grotesque and, frankly morally questionable, topics? Sam has said he believes in God, but questions religion. Is Kinison trying to send his audience home questioning their beliefs? Their religion? Their God? Does attending a stand-up comedy routine such as Sam’s make an audience member leave feeling guilty, and thus pondering where they stand in their beliefs as well? According to Rolling Stone article author David Handelman, “The world of touring preachers is not unlike that of comedians — you perfect a shtick and take it on the road, and if you make a church some money, you’re asked back.” Kinison took the life of preaching he had learned and transformed it into a comedy routine. Was his purpose to mock the faith he grew up in, or to bring it to the people in such an absurd way that it actually, somehow, made sense?
Sam tells the basic story of the Gospel — Jesus Christ from death to life. He makes brilliant points in his analysis of the Bible that clearly reflects his history of spending time learning the Word in order to peach it to the people. He took his beliefs seriously, saying he was never, “trying to make jokes about Jesus though, [he] saw the movies, [he] read the Bible.”
Though he makes jokes from the perspective of Jesus or of those from his time, Sam doesn’t explicitly say that he doesn’t believe in God, Jesus, or the things of the Bible. It seems that Kinison still holds onto the truths of the Bible even though he uses them to create laughter. In fact, throughout his career, Sam seemed to suggest the opposite while talking about his faith. Sam once admitted, when prodded about his career change, that the thing he missed most about being a preacher was, “how good preaching used to make people feel. I mean, comedy’s fun, people laugh, but I don’t know if that makes them feel good about themselves. No. Let me put it this way. You can make ’em laugh, but you can’t make ’em happy. It takes God to do that.”
To place a frame of reference around the time in which Sam Kinison was making his mark on “Jesus jokes”, the peak of his comedic career took place during the 1980s, a decade during which the United States was coming off of a religious movement called the “Jesus Movement” that swept the country hard and fast during the 70s. Kinison was attempting to make a name for himself as a preacher during this time as well, and perhaps being overshadowed by other, more powerful and popular preachers during the Jesus Movement played a role in his decision to exit the career.
Nothing is more relatable than humor. Even today, pastors at churches use the incorporation of humor as an antidote to both entertain the crowd and to create real application through relatability. Many pastors use humor to tie their message together in a way that the people can understand. Kinison, however, flips the script, incorporating some evangelism in his comedy, perhaps to quietly relay his message in a way that is neither threatening nor pushy.
Sam entertained the thought that the best way to reach people was to reach them without them even knowing. Did he take an approach that some would call (and have called) sacreligious? Yes. Did he say things that a ‘true’ pastor for the case of Christ shouldn’t say? Yes. Did Sam tell people about Jesus Christ more throughout his humorous tirades than all of his time as a preacher? Arguably so. So where do we draw the line between evangelism and mockery? Though the line is blurry, according to Kinison, “real comedy doesn’t just make people laugh and think, but makes them laugh and change”.
It seems in comedy that many comics use the stage as a place of relief for their souls, and Sam Kinison was no exception. His stage presence may have reflected his inner turmoil with all that transpired in his life. In an article written for Rolling Stone in 1989, David Handelman writes, “Kinison strolls up the wooden gangplank to his own massive front door. ‘I love this place,’ he says. ‘The door’s very cathedral, and my folks lived in a church till I was fifteen. It reminds me of that.’ The light fixture over the door shines bordello red. ‘That light was there when I moved in,’ he says. ‘It’s not really red. It’s a white light in a red frame.’ The offhand remark could be taken as Kinsion’s self-justification: the exterior seems sinful, but the core is pure, God loving.” Maybe comedians don’t always create humor out of their painful situations to feel as if others can relate, maybe they create humor so as to help others deal with the pain with which they, too, once dealt. To quote Joseph Webb in his novel Comedy and Preaching, “Good comedians often get a lot of preaching done. In the midst of the laughter, something comes through a comedian’s work, something that one really does believe, something that one passionately wants to be heard.”
“This is shit I should be telling a priest!”, seems to be the overarching statement all comedians must believe yet few but Kinison will verbally admit. Maybe Kinison hits the mark by bringing his life in such a vulnerable form to people he believes need to hear it too.
Kinison, Bill. Brother Sam: the Short, Spectacular Life of Sam Kinison. Morrow, 1994.
Handelman, David. “The Devil and Sam Kinison.” Rolling Stone, 23 Feb. 1989, www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/the-devil-and-sam-kinison-19890223.
“Sam Kinison.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 28 Apr. 2017, www.biography.com/people/sam-kinison-424006.
Jones, Dylan. “Icon: Sam Kinison.” GQ, British GQ, 4 Oct. 2017, www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/sam-kinison-tribute-death-wild-thing-quotes-video.