Sam Kinison Banned

Typical Sam Kinison. Sam was loud, foul and obnoxious, but had a very religious, sweet side as well. That is why so many people loved him. Not one to watch with the kids, but a must see. The day we lost Sam was a terrible tragedy. Comedy will never be the same again. He was truly one of a kind. Also see Sam Kinison: Why Did We Laugh, An excellent look at his life and career by the people who knew him best.

the first half of the tape is devoted to a guest comic, Carl Del Bova who mercilessly and witlessly trashes gays, women, and fat people. He doesn't get many laughs either. after that is the first of a series of kinison music videos featuring glam rock celebrities such as Jon Bon Jovi, Slash, Ozzy Osbourne, Bily Idol and a host of others, in addition to bikini clad babes shaking their groove thing for the camera. kinison pretends to play the guitar and postures as if this was the his crowd and he there leader, but the energy falls off first the first vid ("wild Thing")is even completed and the subsequent ones (Mountain's "Mississippi Queen" and the Stones' "Under My Thumb") only produce cringes. When we finally get to kinison two thirds of his actual show is not even comedy routines at all but set pieces substituting spectacle for inventiveness: a drunkern kinison-clad MS victim trashes Jerry Lewis, Kinison calls an audience member's ex-girlfriend and screams obscenities at the girl's roommate, and a herd of comic has-beens are trotted out to extoll Kinison's "genius." The two actual routines (one on trying to buy booze at 5am and one on sex with amyl nitrate) aren't that bad (hence my vote of 3 instead of 1)but the overall feeling on the tape is that kinison didn't have an actual hour's worth of material and stuffs the show with filler, slightly lames filler at that. they say that kinison's quality went down the longer he was on drugs and the more famous he got. i would like to see a vid of his earlier material because by the time of "Banned" he is obviously totally wasted here, as is the crowd of adoring fans. Which, by the way, is how i felt about my rental money: totally wasted.

Sammy was Sammy, plain and simple. Just like Lenny Bruce was Lenny and Tony Clifton was well... you know.

The other reviewer must be gay or otherwise married his high school sweetheart when they were sophomores because the crown in video is the call to the ex-girlfriend. ANY man who was ever been in a relationship with any woman has understands what it was about. Sammy said and did what we all wanted to say and do but couldn't because real life doesn't work that way. "No man ever made me want to crash my car into a brick wall," Sammy said.

Sammy was not the man in the video any more than Drew Carey was the character in the TV show, or Rodney was ever disrespected. It was all an act, an abstraction taken to extremes for entertainment.

Sammy was a traveling Evangelical preacher before Jim Bakker gave Christians a bad name. Comedy was Sammy's second career.

The part about the MS victim is serious. Millions of dollars are raised, but people still suffer. Celebrities raising money for charities is just plain wrong, since the money NEVER helps the people it's supposed to be raised for. Even Oprah exposed the (then) head of the Girls and Boy's club as living in wealth while the charity he led suffered. Hypocrisy ran thick in the 1980's and Sammy was just one person among many helping to expose it.