It blows me away that it's been 15 years since Kinison's death. Children born the day he died are teenagers now. That's a scary thought.
An even scarier thought is the legions of people out there who have never heard of Sam Kinison - whether they were too young when he was around, or born after the fact. I'm not going to waste a lot of words here rehashing Kinison's career; you have the internet, start searching. Check YouTube, go down to your public library and check out Brother Sam by Bill Kinison, search Amazon for a copy of Why Did We Laugh?
Then you will understand.
As an aside, I came across a 2004 list of the Top 100 Stand-Up Comedians of All-Time as decided by Comedy Central. Most of the comics on my personal top ten are on it - with the glaring exception of Mitch Hedberg....bastards!
Also, the new season of Last Comic Standing debuts sometime next week on NBC.
And, finally, here's a small sampling of my runners up...
Runners Up: Paula Poundstone, Jake Johannsen, Ann Coulter, Richard Lewis, Bill Maher, Andy Kaufman (Who would have came in second overall, but he always claimed to be a song and dance man rather than a comic, so I figure I'll honor that), Steve Martin (First comedy album I owned was Wild & Crazy Guy - still have it.), Bobcat Goldthwaite...this list could theoretically go on forever.
Anyway what I thought would be a fun little list I would blast out in ten days has taken be forever to complete...I now return you to your unoriginal programming.
