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Somewhere in Houston, as the city was reshaping itself to fit the Reagan era, two young comic minds were developing. They worked the same rooms and the same crowds, and they eventually became friends and co-conspirators. Their approaches varied, but their attitudes and aggressive styles would help bring a new edge to stand-up. And though their paths crossed in Houston, Bill Hicks and Sam Kinison traveled very different roads.
Kinison was the elder of the two and had been performing in front of people as a preacher since he was eighteen. In 1978, he left the preaching behind him in Tulsa and started taking stand-up classes in Houston. Within two years, the Dallas Morning News named him "The Funniest Man in Texas".
It was in Houston that Kinison found his voice onstage. One night, after a fight with his first wife, Kinison spotted a couple from the stage. Singling them out, he asked if they were going to get married. "Do me a favor," he said, leaning closer. "If you’re thinking of getting married, remember this face." Kinison then bent his features into an impossible wreck of pain and let out that shriek for the first time. It was real pain, and it struck a chord of fear and sympathy with his audience.
 It was tough to top the intensity of Kinison’s early material. He riffed on Jesus coming home and facing his wife after the resurrection and Mary explaining the immaculate conception to Joseph, expanding Bible stories like a strung-out Kierkegaard reading from Fear and Trembling. He yelled at his parents to pick up the check for bringing his soul to earth. In one of his signature routines, he would get a member of the audience to tell the story of how they had their heart broken and then call their ex on the phone, whipping the crowd into a screaming frenzy. It was comedy as a purging experience taken to the extreme.
Though Hicks was eight years younger than Kinison, he actually started his comic life two years earlier than Kinison, in 1977. At 15, Hicks was sneaking out of the house to perform in local clubs such as the Comedy Annex with his buddy, Dwight Slade. The two of them would lie about their age and walk to clubs when they couldn’t find a ride. At school, Hicks became a celebrity with goofy jokes about his family and crude routines he would write with Slade.
Hicks’ friend Kevin Booth had a car back then and used to drive the budding comic to gigs. He remembers the first time he saw Hicks in the raging, ranting form most people are used to seeing him in. "He drank seven margaritas before he went onstage, and went up there and pretty much just yelled at the audience for an entire hour," says Booth. "I thought it was funny. I just couldn’t believe he was going through with it. It was like a bloodletting."
Hicks’ was a rage just as potent as Kinison’s, but it came from a completely different place. Where Kinison was the scorned Everyman, Hicks was Holden Caulfield, exuding a dangerous and subversive cool. He looked at his world with a mix of contempt and hope, respect for beauty and ideas and complete disdain for politics and popular trends. Both men towered above most of their contemporaries, who were still caught up in airplane humor and safe one-liners. It seemed inevitable that they would eventually share a stage.
 The Outlaws of Comedy would band Kinison and Hicks together officially, along with fellow Houston comedians Carl LaBove and Bob Barber. The group would grow and change over the years, serving as a think tank in which each member influenced the other’s thinking and material. But Hicks and Kinison would rise to the top of this group and eventually head off to Los Angeles in search of big-time success.
Kinison found the most fame and fortune in comedy, at least in the U.S. His first appearance on Rodney Dangerfield’s young comedians special in 1984 led to work in movies, HBO specials, albums and network TV appearances. He even found himself on the cover of Rolling Stone. But the attention wasn’t always positive. While many lauded Kinison’s brazen routines as honest and sometimes confessional, he was also frequently criticized as a misogynist, anti-gay hatemonger.
But there was no question what separated Kinison from the Andrew Dice Clays who sprang up after him. "Intelligence," says political satirist and stand-up comedian Barry Crimmins. "That’s why Kinison could be annoying, because you knew he was smarter than some of the views he was advocating. And you also saw the humanity in him a lot."
Which is where the essential rift between Hicks and Kinison develops. As Kinison got bigger, his comedy became broader. He attacked the gay community with the AIDS issue—with little or no insight or even factual content. He had found his choir, and he was happy to preach to them. Hicks, on the other hand, was trying desperately to break from the "purple-veined dick joke" material, as he called it, to develop a more politically and socially aware philosophy. He took on the Gulf War, the Drug War and the hypocrisy of government, sometimes referring to himself as "Noam Chomsky with dick jokes." As Crimmins puts it, "Hicks was much more likely to target the big guy with his humor and Kinison was much more likely to target the little guy. Bill would go after people who, if they got pissed about it, might really be able to cause him some trouble. Sam made fun of starving people."
Hicks remained an underground figure in the States but became a sensation in England, where he regularly played to sold-out rooms and concert halls. His success abroad just made his time at home that much more frustrating. "After he was performing at these sold out halls, we flew to San Francisco to tape these shows, and he could have just been anybody," says Booth. "It was like this strip mall closet that seated like 150 people, and it wasn’t even full half of the time."
Hicks and Kinison didn’t see much of each other in the years before a car crash took Kinison’s life in 1992. They’d had a falling out somewhere along the way, and Sam’s death left it unresolved. And when Hicks died two years later of pancreatic cancer, the tragedy was complete. Two of America’s most cutting comic voices were silenced.
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The real tragedy in each case, of course, is that both comedians died before either could fully realize his vision. Kinison’s razor intensity had drawn back to a finer point, and Hicks’ philosophy was just starting to branch out. And though both comedians have been lionized in the press and by fellow comedians in death, who knows what stand-up comedy would look like now if Bill Hicks and Sam Kinison were still alive? Says Crimmins, "I think this myth that has developed around Bill has made us lose sight of the tragedy. We talk about him as if he was a finished and final perfect product. In fact, he was a guy in his early thirties who was really just starting to come into his own. I mean, we could really use Bill Hicks right now."
Kinison photos courtesy of Rob Stibal at www.kinison.com.
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