Review of The Carny Kid

Kenny Kahn — from Carny Kid to Attorney,
Comedian Kenny Kahn Overcame Delinquent Parents

By Carol Osmon
Editor, Not Born Yesterday, www.nbynews.com
October 2005

In his book The Carny Kid, successful Los Angeles attorney Kenny Kahn has told his story of being raised by heroin-addicted parents and working alongside his father at carnivals, cheating the customers.

A comedian might say that his childhood was good preparation for becoming a criminal defense lawyer — and that’s what Kenny is — both an attorney and a comedian. He’s the first-ever practicing attorney to perform in the main showroom at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas.

His parents were party-loving night people, living in Ocean Park in Santa Monica, where it was a party every night during the World War II years. By the time Kenny was four years old he became the primary caretaker for his six-month old brother.

“I virtually never saw either of my parents. They gave me strict instructions NEVER to wake them before two in the afternoon, NEVER let them hear my brother cry, and DON’T MAKE ANY NOISE! These were the only rules I was given. Ever,” he wrote.

As a result, Kenny always liked school, “a place where the adults actually talked to you.”

Kenny has many bad memories from his childhood. At age 7, Kenny was awakened one night by loud voices. His dad, crazed with anger over finding his wife in bed with a teenage boy, was threatening to shoot her. Young Kenny was paralyzed with fear but finally decided he might save her if he went out and joined them. He found a bloody scene that “looked like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” His dad had got caught his finger in the gun, ripping it almost in half when he tried to pull the finger out. There was no shooting, but Kenny could hear Dad hitting Mom after he went back to bed.

He and his little brother were placed in a foster care home for a year when his mom was sentenced to six months in jail and his dad went out on the road with carnivals, abandoning them.

Another bad-scene memory came on Christmas morning when Kenny was 12. Although they were Jewish, the Kahns had never gone to synagogue. Since everyone else was celebrating Christmas, the boys expected to also. That morning Kenny awoke before anyone else to find brightly colored packaged under the Christmas tree, but a strong odor of natural gas. Dad was slumped against an open gas jet, trying to commit suicide. They spent the entire Christmas morning trying to bring him back to full consciousness.

The next crisis came when the Sheriff’s eviction squad tossed all the Kahn family belongings into a truck. For an entire year, the rent had not been paid on the home they were renting in the middle-class West Adams neighborhood.

The Kahns became the only Jewish family in the Ramona Gardens project. Kenny had to deal not only with cockroaches but also with the gangs who lived there. “I felt like a rabbit in a jungle filled with predators,” he wrote. “I developed a keen sense of early-warning signals and managed to avoid the most life-threatening confrontations.”

He tried to spend as much time as possible away from his apartment, since it had become a “shooting gallery,” with his parents selling heroin. Kenny spent a lot of time with the Delgado family, which lived in a unit across the lane. Mama Delgado practically adopted him, and the pretty Delgado girls were, well, not quite the same as sisters to him.

Young Kenny’s life had some other bright spots. In the summers, he traveled as an apprentice with his father to carnivals and fairs, learning to cheat and short-change the customers.

School became a sanctuary from his drug house, particularly the school library, where he read to escape his reality. He got good grades, even though he worked afternoons and evenings and lost sleep from the screaming and yelling that went on all night at home.

However, he found that making good grades could invite open hostility from most of his classmates. When Kenny managed to save $100 and buy a 1940 Ford, he took it to the school’s auto repair class for work. The car repairs never seemed to be finished, and finally the teacher told him that the boys in the class were deliberately sabotaging it. “They think you’re stand-offish and act like you’re better than they are,” the teacher explained.

The teacher suggested that Kenny read a book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. He read the book and apparently got something out of it. The next year, he was elected student body president.

The day before his graduation, Kenny’s mother announced she was giving up drugs. A graduation ceremony he was presented a small scholarship and a surprise, the American Legion “Boy of the Year” Award. And to make things even better, there was his mother in the audience, beaming.

Kenny worked his way through L.A. City College and UCLA, and eventually graduated from law school at UC Berkeley. His clients have included Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt and a convicted spy. The spy case was made into a 1985 movie, "The Falcon and the Snowman."

In 1987 he was stabbed in the courtroom by a client with an ice pick. Kenny says that the stabbing “brought the issue of mortality into my consciousness. I decided I’d rather go out and create laughter instead of dealing with cranky judges.” He joined a comedy workshop to sharpen his knack for being funny and began to appear at local comedy clubs.

He’s even occasionally funny in the courtroom. Once he defended a man charged with hitting another man with a frozen chicken. When the prosecution asked, “How do you explain this behavior?” Kenny answered, “Well, obviously his behavior is the answer to the age-old question—how do you make a frozen chicken fly?”

Kenny also teaches former gang members and other teenagers how to stay out of the criminal justice system, at the Save Our Future charter school south of downtown Los Angeles. He’s not paid for this work, and apparently doesn’t mind that it could be cutting into his criminal defense caseload.