3 Nasty Comedy Feuds That Were Taken to the Grave
· Vice
The comedy world breeds just as many bitter rivalries as the rest of the entertainment universe. Some are minor and may be resolved in time, while others show no signs of ending in the foreseeable future. Then you have the ones that are flat-out impossible to settle because at least one of the people involved is no longer with us. Here are a few feuds that we can officially file under “unfixable.”
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3. BILL HICKS VS. JAY LENO
Bill Hicks was very vocal about his feelings toward Jay Leno and publicly trashed the former late-night host on several occasions. In one particularly long rant, Hicks told the crowd at one of his stand-up shows, “I’m kind of bummed because I’m missing right now, even as we speak, my favorite cultural train wreck: The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. I’m like a rubbernecker, man. Every night it’s the crash of f—–g metal when that show starts. Me and my friends have a little office pool, wondering exactly which episode and which guest is gonna be on the night Jay finally puts a 9mm in his mouth and blows his Dorito-shilling head off his f—–g body.”
It would appear Hicks’s issue stemmed from Leno being what he called a “corporate shill,” but Leno later said that the falling out had to do with him telling Hicks that he couldn’t do a Jesus routine on his show. Though Leno admitted that he felt bad when Hicks died, the two don’t seem to have ever settled their differences, and Hicks was recorded taking shots at Leno just a few months before his death in 1994.
2. JERRY LEWIS VS. JOAN RIVERS
In a 2014 interview with Maria Menounos, Jerry Lewis randomly brought up Joan Rivers, saying that he wouldn’t feel bad if she were to die, and that she “set the Jews back a thousand years.” He then got into the reason for his comments, telling Menounos, “Joan attacked me in the press. And all she said was, ‘Jerry Lewis has to be thankful that he has the telethon, ‘cause it helps his career.’ And then she went on and was even a little more salty. So I wrote her a note that night. I said, ‘Dear Ms. Rivers, we’ve never met, and I’m looking forward to keeping it that way.’” Lewis closed out the letter by saying, “If you find it necessary to discuss me, my career, or my kids ever again, I promise you I will get somebody from Chicago to beat your goddamn head off.”
The following month, Rivers confirmed that Lewis had, in fact, threatened her years ago. She also explained that she went after Lewis initially because when she’d done his telethon, he’d brought out a dying kid and talked about how the kid was about to die right in front of him. “And I said, ‘I will never do this telethon again,’” Rivers remembered. “You do not say in front of a little boy who’s going to die, ‘This child is gonna die.’ Who are you? You unfunny, lucky, stupid, a—–e.” She’d even hired security out of fear that Lewis meant what he said, and chose to never bring it up again until Lewis all of a sudden decided to.
1. SAM KINISON VS. ANDREW DICE CLAY
There was a time in the late ‘80s-early ‘90s when Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay were two of the biggest stand-up comics on the planet. The pair were friends at first, and according to Clay, he was the one who suggested that Kinison start his shows out calmly before launching into his over-the-top screaming bits. Somewhere along the way, things soured between the two, and they were never able to reconcile. Kinison would attack Clay at any given opportunity and accuse him of stealing his act, and Clay wasn’t shy about defending himself against his former pal.
When a Los Angeles Times reporter asked Clay about the stealing accusations in 1990, he responded by saying, “That’s impossible. Sam has a black heart. I’m a character on-stage. I’m something different off-stage. Sam is just a horrible person. When his career first took off, it was fine. But when I started making it, he couldn’t take it. He actually said he hopes I die of stomach cancer from the inside out, like Bette Davis.”
The feud got so ugly that Kinison supposedly even pulled out a gun in the Comedy Store parking lot in L.A. one time and fired a warning shot to scare off Clay. The bullet hole remained in one of the signs for years until it eventually got repaired.
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