The Scream

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.