# The Scream *A Biography of Sam Kinison* — Legendary Biographies No. 020 - **Subject:** Samuel Burl Kinison - **Written by:** Donovan Hadley - **Shelf:** Screen & Stage / Performing Arts - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 194 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-484-1) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Desmond Vale (ISBN 979-8-90623-481-0) - **Content notes:** fatal car accident; addiction Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/020-the-scream.html ## About this book April 10, 1992, a stretch of U.S. Highway 95 north of Needles, California. Sam Kinison, thirty-eight, the comedian whose scream had redefined the late-1980s alt-comedy stage, is killed in a head-on collision with a pickup driven by a seventeen-year-old. He is on his way to a sold-out show at the Laughlin riverfront. He had married his fiancée Malika Souiri five days earlier in Las Vegas. Donovan Hadley's biography opens earlier — in Yakima, Washington, where Samuel Burl Kinison was born in 1953, the son of a Pentecostal evangelist — and follows the arc through the Bible Church of God circuit-preaching years, the Tulsa marriage of 1975, the Houston Comedy Workshop years, the 1985 Dangerfield's Young Comedians Special that broke him nationally, the SNL hosting of October 18, 1986, the MTV music-video years, the cocaine years and the long sober run after the August 1990 Beverly Hills overdose, the marriage to Malika five days before the crash, the 1988 death of his brother Kevin that the biography reads as the wound under everything, and the funeral at Tulsa's Memorial Park with Carl LaBove eulogising. What emerges is a portrait of a Pentecostal preacher's son whose pulpit training built the most singular scream in American stand-up — and whose body the wreck on Highway 95 finally caught up with. ## Contents 1. Yakima 2. The Ministry 3. Houston 4. The Comedy Store 5. Dangerfield 6. Breaking the Rules 7. Back to School 8. The Scream 9. Wild Thing 10. Married with Children 11. The Cocaine 12. The Material 13. The Critics 14. The Reckoning 15. The Decline 16. Sobriety 17. Needles 18. The Gospel ## Questions **Who is The Scream about?** Samuel Burl Kinison. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Scream — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 6,295 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 59,500 words, 18 chapters, 194 pages in the paperback. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: fatal car accident; addiction. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Donovan Hadley is a Manchester-based culture writer for The Guardian and Sight & Sound. His biographies cover the film, theatre, and television figures whose work shaped the British and American midcentury. He spends his time researching archives to reconstruct the quiet moments behind major cultural milestones. His published work includes titles like The Nightmare Man, Frequency, and The Gap Year. He has also explored midcentury creative communities in books such as The Fifty Million Dollar Man, The USC Film School, Apartment Five C, Room 607, and The First Cast. He lives in Manchester, England, where he spends his weekends browsing local independent cinemas and collecting vintage film reels.