32 Facts About Sam Kinison

Samuel Burl Kinison was an American stand-up comedian and actor.

Sam Kinison's comedy was crass 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.

Samuel Burl Kinison was born in Yakima, Washington, on December 8,1953, the son of Marie Florence and Samuel Earl Kinison, a Pentecostal preacher.

The family moved to East Peoria, Illinois, when Sam Kinison was three months old.

At the age of three years, Sam Kinison was hit by a truck, which left him with brain damage and epilepsy.

Sam Kinison's father pastored several churches around the country, receiving little income.

Sam Kinison had two older brothers, Richard and Bill, and a younger brother, Kevin.

Sam Kinison's 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.

Sam Kinison later attended East Peoria Community High School in East Peoria.

Between 1968 and 1969, Sam Kinison attended Pinecrest Bible Training Center, an interdenominational, unaccredited, three-year bible school located in Salisbury Center, New York.

Sam Kinison's mother married another preacher and moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Kinison lived for a while.

Sam Kinison 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.

Sam Kinison began his career in Houston, Texas, where he performed in small clubs.

Sam Kinison 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.

Sam Kinison 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.

Mr Sam Kinison specializes in a grotesque animalist howl that might be described as the primal scream of the married man.

Sam Kinison was associated with the Los Angeles rock music scene and was occasionally accompanied by a touring band.

Sam Kinison acquired much of his material from his first two marriages, to Patricia Adkins and Terry Marze.

Sam Kinison began a relationship with dancer Malika Souiri toward the end of his marriage with Marze.

The incident inspired Sam 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.

Sam Kinison frequented rock shows and often hung out with musicians.

In May 1991, Sam Kinison got in a fight with guitarist Slash at a hotel after Slash missed a planned appearance at one of Sam Kinison's shows.

In February 2011, the Toronto Sun reported that Sam Kinison had fathered a child with the wife of his best friend and opening act, Carl LaBove, who had been paying child support for the girl for nearly 13 years.

Sam Kinison got out of his vehicle and sat down on the side of the road, where he soon died from internal injuries.

Sam Kinison's head had smashed the windshield, because he was not wearing his seat belt.

Sam Kinison's wife received a concussion in the collision but later recovered after being taken directly to a hospital in Needles for treatment.

An autopsy found that Sam Kinison sustained multiple traumatic injuries, including a dislocation in the cervical spine, a torn aorta, and torn blood vessels in his abdominal cavity, which resulted in his death within a few minutes of the crash.

Sam Kinison's body was buried in a family grave plot at Memorial Park Cemetery in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Sam Kinison's gravestone is inscribed, "In another time and place he would have been called prophet".

Apparently when Sam Kinison had the accident, I heard he got out of the car and looked up to the heavens and said, 'I don't want to die,' and then just said, 'Oh, okay,' and laid down and died.

Sam Kinison's comedy was at times accused of containing misogyny and homophobia, according to a retrospective on Sam Kinison's career in the Los Angeles Times.

Hugar noted that a modern reevaluation was complicated by the possibility that Sam Kinison could be considered as playing an intentionally shocking character rather than speaking as himself.