HBO has just announced they’re producing a big screen biopic of the The Mighty Sam Kinison, which is interesting when you consider the state of things today. Below are five of my favorite Kinison routines, let’s see if you can guess which is the only one the great man would not have been roundly condemned as a hater for in this the year 2010.

It was actually shocking to go back and listen to these bits after so many years, shocking to hear left-wing sacred cows take a scathing beating at the hands of a comedic genius who, among other things, wielded personal responsibility like a weapon. Today, of course, we know personal responsibility by its Orwellian term: blaming the victim. Can you imagine today’s so called “edgy” comedians going after starving Africans? Unless those starving Africans love NASCAR or are named Sarah Palin, no. Would Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, David Letterman, or Jim Carrey even agree to share the same stage with a 2010 Sam Kinison? Would he be allowed on “The View?”

And what if God’s timing were different? What if instead of being a young comic on the rise in the early 1980s, Kinison was a young comic on the rise in 2010? Same man. Same genius. Same sensibility. Same drive. Would he have a chance? Could he do the Rock Hudson or the homeless bit (below) and survive today’s Brave New World where the left calls for the head of Juan Williams over expressing a fear of seeing Muslims on the same airplane, Comedy Central censors “South Park,” and we’re being told if a joke about electric cars being gay isn’t deep-sixed children will die.

That’s a rhetorical question best answered by recalling how the world awkwardly came to a halt when Bill Maher stuck up for Western civilization, watching “comedians” Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg storm off “The View” because Bill O’Reilly said something provocative, or the near annihilation of Don Imus’ career.

Consider today’s so-called King of Satire. This skit personifies what Jon Stewart is about, nothing more than a PC-enforcing prig attempting to shame people like Juan Williams and Bill O’Reilly for daring to speak their minds. There was a time when the job of a satirist was to provoke thought. Consider Stewart’s “Restore Sanity” rally — a national event entirely devoted to scolding two television networks for not telling what Stewart believes to be the truth and in the method, manner and tone in which he approves.

Things sure have changed around here.

For those of you unfamiliar with Kinison, don’t mistake my choices as defining. As you’ll see in the last video, nothing was sacred to the man, including the sacred. Which is as it should be. But that’s what made Kinison a legend. He could not stop telling the truth as he saw it. Just the thought of what he would have to say about TSA screeners groping children and terrorists being acquitted in civilian courts makes me chuckle. Of course, he’d also devastate more than a few of my own personal sacred cows. But at the hands of a genuine comedian it’s easy to laugh at yourself. At the hands of a PC-enforcing partisan disguised as one, not so much.

Need I say NSFW?

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