COMEDY REVIEW : Sam Kinison Screams On From the Trenches of Life

In Sam Kinison’s bleary-leery world, everyone just says yes to drugs, drunk-driving laws are for the other guy, the shooting down of that Iranian airbus was a swell pay-back for all the Ayatollah trouble, and women like to emasculate men so you constantly have to put them in their place.

Not a pretty place to be.

At the Pacific Amphitheatre Saturday night, the rotund, red-faced comic opened his beefy arms and welcomed about 4,000 people into that world of his. The embrace was like a stranglehold, taking its strength from Kinison’s splenetic stage persona and sand-in-the-eye misogyny.

He made his entrance with a couple of dolls who had legs up to here and immediately used one of his trademark primal screams to order the crowd--a pretty even mix of men and women--to check the babes out: “WHEN HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A (BLEEP ) LIKE THAT?”

And just in case you missed the curves the first time, he brought one of the women out for a second go-round.

Harmless enough: You can get the same at any mud-wrestling show or bikini contest. But Kinison’s attitude toward women got meaner as the night went on. Kinison’s women (he has a blanket term for them that can’t be printed here) tend to be unfaithful temptresses and ego-busting harridans who, it seems, best realize their potential reclining on a Posturepedic.

At one point, in a rare moment of self-awareness, Kinison acknowledged that the amphitheatre probably wasn’t the most comfortable place for a woman to find herself Saturday. Speaking to all the men, he conceded that their dates must be thinking something like, “Get me out of here, please.”

Still, even many of the women howled when Kinsion brought some hangdog-looking guy on stage and made a telephone call to a girl who had done the guy wrong. She was out, but Kinison, with the audience roaring, left a bleating string of expletives on her telephone answering machine. It is basically the same bit (albeit a lot less tame) that button-down David Letterman’s been doing for years, but here, with the rejected boyfriend flopping joyously on stage and Kinison in hysterics, it achieved a kind of crazed surrealism of its own.

Like everything Kinison comes up with, it was based on rage at things big and small. Other comics support their complaints with irony, but Kinison doesn’t have time for any of that; he would rather rant. And Kinison is a master ranter: Enjoying his show depends on whether you can handle all the noise and accept the notion that none of his diatribe is too serious.

That may be his game, to put so much step-on-the-toes rhetoric into his act that in the end, you aren’t offended but amused. His outrageous shtick may be a come-on to actually look at the foibles and frustrations of relationships. Maybe. But no matter how interpreted, Kinison will never be mistaken for a stand-up Alan Alda.

Next to women, his most frequent targets are gays, whom he seems to blame for all kinds of moral and social ills. His best work Saturday, however, had a topical essence, especially when he tossed televangelists into his acid stew.

A one-time Pentecostal preacher himself (talk about your fallen angels), Kinison took on Jimmy Swaggert and the Bakkers. Describing Swaggert’s hookers as “so ugly” that they look like they “came out of a Diane Arbus pictorial,” Kinison suggested that Swaggert should have talked them down from $20 to $10 and given the savings to the “feed the naked” charity.

Tammy Bakker, he continued, is a cross between “the elephant man and Dinah Shore,” and husband Jim resembles Howdy Doody. Kinison did show a sympathetic side when he bemoaned that the Bakkers have lost just about everything, including “the holy roller coaster.”

Kinison closed out the set with a little night music--just Sam and his lonely piano. He introduced one ballad as reflecting his feelings on breaking up with a loved one. The haunting refrain?

“DIE! I WANT MY RECORDS BACK!”