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Tag: Jim Carrey

  • 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.

  • 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.