"They say if you give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, then he's gotta get a fishing license, but he doesn't have any money, so he's gotta get a job and he has to get into the Social Security system and pay taxes, and now you're gonna audit the poor cocksucker 'cause he's not really good with math. … you were just worried about eating a fucking fish and you couldn't even cook the fish 'cause you needed a permit for an open flame and then the health department starts asking you a lot of questions, 'Where are you gonna dump the scales and guts? This is not a sanitary environment.' Ladies and gentlemen, if you get sick of it all at the end of the day, it's not even legal to kill yourself in this country. … You were born free, you got fucked out of half of it, and now you wave a flag celebrating. … The only true freedom that you find is when you realize and come to terms with the fact that you are completely and unapologetically fucked." —from the DVD Doug Stanhope: Deadbeat Hero
Doug Stanhope wants to make one thing clear: He's not the next Bill Hicks.
Because Stanhope works in the savage satiric tradition that the late stand-up comic perfected in the late '80s and early '90s — a tradition forged by the likes of Lenny Bruce and George Carlin — Stanhope hears the Hicks comparison a lot.
"It's tiring in that it's inaccurate to Bill Hicks," Stanhope laughs. He is reluctant to buy into his own hype. "It's sad that there's not a bigger selection of comics to choose from in the genre. I mean, there's only one guy you can peg as the next Hicks? Hicks was sober, calm, deliberate. Aside from having subjects with some social relevance, there's not a lot of similarity in style."
But Stanhope isn't linked to Hicks because of his style. It's because he fearlessly broaches topics that so many other comics try to avoid, ruthlessly exploring anything that piques his morbid curiosity, from the dead fetus pictures that pro-lifers use to promote their cause, to Internet prowlers ("Nobody wants to fuck your kid, now or ever"), to his belief that all illegal narcotics are medicinal since boredom is a disease worse than cancer. No topic escapes his notice unscathed. And as Hicks was the loudest voice of his generation of malcontents, so Stanhope is ours.
"I go onstage, and it's like I'm leading you into battle — you're not all gonna be here at the end. Just try not to take it too seriously. Eventually, I'm gonna hit a subject that you're gonna be queer about. Just wait for the next joke, or go take a piss or whatever you have to do. Don't get all upset. I'm probably wrong about half the shit I say. —Deadbeat Hero
Doug Stanhope is a nondescript guy: average height, average weight, average brown hair cut short. But his dark eyes are piercing, and when he's prowling the stage — raging in his scratchy smoker's growl about drugs or freedom or two-headed babies — he exudes a dynamic energy that makes it very hard not to pay attention. His acerbic social commentary can make you laugh out loud, hysterically or uncomfortably. Or you don't laugh at all but are instead mildly (or severely) outraged because he's offended your moral sensibilities. Maybe you scowl, maybe you jeer, maybe you make a hasty exit. But you never really forget what he says.
"There's some people," says Stanhope, "who'll agree with everything until you hit on that one thing that affects them or that they have a strong opinion about — and then they discount everything else you said, when they were with you."
Stanhope does interviews much like he does standup, his answers delivered in rambling run-on sentences punctuated by gritty chuckles. Speaking by phone from a hotel in Vermont, where he's on the New England leg of his fall tour, he is disarmingly candid. Two minutes into our conversation, he's telling me about a run-in he had with a wacky fan and taking mushrooms at a recent show, both in Arlington, Va. "Yeah, someone threw a [psychedelic] chocolate up on stage and I just, I ate it — I didn't think it through."
Not that it's uncommon for a Stanhope performance to be fueled by intoxicants of one kind or another. "Jesus died for your sins," he's been known to declare. "I'm doing it for your mere entertainment."
"A lot of train-wreck comedy is the stuff you remember the most and have the most fun with," he tells me. "Some people like it polished and delivered properly, and some people like it a bit out of control."
Stanhope's fans welcome his general fuck-all attitude. And they demonstrate their appreciation of his art in a variety of ways. One fan had "Vote Stanhope '08" tattooed on her shoulder during the comic's short-lived (and earnest) run for the presidency. Another fan — an attorney in Livingston, Montana — was so eager to get Stanhope to perform at his favorite local bar that he offered him a rafting trip and a weekend stay at a house on the Yellowstone River. And the wacky aforementioned fan in Arlington slipped into the green room pre-show, scammed some beers and claimed he was with the band that shared Stanhope's bill that night. When Stanhope and crew finally called bullshit, the fan launched into a tale about the time he snuck backstage at a Tool show and got arrested for throwing chicken at the cops.
"That was his big story," Stanhope laughs. "Then he's in the front row talking through the whole set, and we had to throw him out. And he tried to storm back in at the end of the show, and he was chasing me around the fucking theater, and by then I was tripping my balls off, and I was just walking through swamps, it felt like, trying to get away from this guy, who was screaming at me as they escorted him out about how I treat my fans."
The fan did have a credible defense: He'd apparently e-mailed Stanhope and asked him to make fun of the fan's girlfriend for her birthday, and Stanhope responded, not making any guarantees but agreeing to do it if he remembered. "That's my problem. I drunk e-mail, and I'm nice to people and then they think they're my buddy, and they're gonna talk to me or talk to themselves throughout my whole show, like it's just for them."
Stanhope is grateful to have such dedicated fans, but he's gotta draw the line somewhere.
"I never tried really hard. I'm here because drugs expanded my imagination and made me think outside your reality, and cigarettes gave me the patience to sit and write those thoughts down in a comedy-friendly format, and alcohol gives me the courage to stand up here in front of you judgmental pricks and do it with $40 million worth of cameras in my face." —from No Refunds
The 40-year-old comedian has been performing live for close to two decades. "Now I just don't put any ambition into it. Or work." Of course, this isn't really true. You won't find Stanhope performing the same routine over and over again, year after year or even tour after tour. He's mastered the art of writing on the fly and always seems to be trying out new material, though he claims that his primary motivation is self-disgust.
"I get sick of what I'm saying so quickly that any fun shit that happened last night or ridiculousness that's being pumped into your head by Wolf Blitzer 24 hours a day or that weekly news story, like 'Oh my God, that's the only thing happening in the world' 24-hour coverage for the next three days of the bridge in Minneapolis or whatever the fucking moon landing du jour on CNN is gets worked in."
Stanhope started doing stand-up in 1990, when he was living in Las Vegas, working as a telemarketer and frequenting a seedy little bar that hosted a recurring open mic. "I'd go down every week and fret to go up the next week,= and then show up the next week without jokes." He eventually worked up the courage to jump onstage and tell his four minutes worth of jerk-off jokes.
After that, he was hooked. He continued to hone his craft and got into a groove, landing a gig as the house MC at a comedy club in Phoenix and making enough contacts to take his show on the road. He won the $10,000 grand prize at the prestigious San Francisco Comedy Competition in 1995 and used the cash to settle in Los Angeles, where he got his first taste of television. Stanhope performed in several stand-up comedy specials, including a half-hour slot on Comedy Central that had to be approved by censors and lawyers (they apparently made him remove a bit on suicide, and he wasn't allowed to discuss drugs unless he took a negative stance), and he appeared in Candid Camera rip-offs like Fox's When Hidden Cameras Attack and NBC's SpyTV.
He continued to tour and brought his uninhibited humor to numerous major festivals, among them, Montreal Just for Laughs, the Chicago Comedy Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, where he nabbed the 2002 Strathmore Press Award. That same year, two high-profile publications — Variety and the Hollywood Reporter — recognized Stanhope as one of the Top Ten Comics To Watch.
Then he made it to the big time for a brash, say-anything comic: He became a regular guest on The Howard Stern Show. So regular that he's comfortable enough to bring his bald-headed girlfriend Bingo onto the show, where they reveal all manner of interesting, juicy tidbits about themselves and their twisted but loving relationship (like Stanhope's lack of sex drive and his "Mr. Potato Head" nickname for Bingo, spurred by her baldness and willingness to dress up in a variety of wigs).
In 2003, Stanhope gained wider exposure when he and Joe Rogan hosted The Man Show on Comedy Central after the departure of Adam Corolla and Jimmy Kimmel. The material was watered-down Stanhope, not really an honest representation of him as a comedian or even as an entertainer, and the show was cancelled after 22 episodes. Shortly after, Stanhope hosted an installment of the Girls Gone Wild DVD series. He says that neither project really did anything for his career.
"The Man Show was awful and the Girls Gone Wild was a goof — it's not like someone's gonna come see you because you were on an infomercial." But he doesn't think either endeavor hurt his career, either. "The life experience alone of doing those things is just more that I can bring to the stage."
In the summer of '06, Stanhope announced that he was seeking the Libertarian nomination for president in '08. Unfortunately, the endeavor didn't quite work out as he'd planned. "No, that failed miserably."
He was certainly an appealing candidate: his "Drunk with Power" campaign focused on individual freedom, self-government and "making America fun again," and he was backed by a strong support system of friends and fans. The idea was that he could run an effective campaign by touring constantly and taking advantage of the built-in audience and media in the cities he visited. In the end, he simply couldn't scale the mountain of bureaucracy. "Everything was wrong with it. I mean, it was becoming so much work and nonsense that it wasn't even funny anymore, and if it's not gonna be funny, then it's counterintuitive to even bother."
He officially declared the end of his attempted candidacy in May, blaming his failure on the FEC's campaign rules.
"That was the final straw, the finance stuff. If I mentioned my campaign in my show, then all the money I made on the show was considered campaign contributions instead of personal income, and you can't pay your rent with campaign contributions. If I'm not talking about it on stage, then it's not gonna be heard anywhere. I'm not gonna stand on a milk crate at the mall and get someone's attention."
"I've done Mormon-bashing, I've done Muslim-bashing. I'll do more Scientology-bashing once I have a stronger legal team." —No Refunds
Despite his success as a stand-up, Stanhope has a love/hate relationship — well, more hate than love — with comedy clubs. He's nurtured a long, drawn-out personal beef with Improvs and Funny Bones across the country.
"With a few rare exceptions, I'm out of comedy clubs all together, just 'cause they suck your soul out. You're playing for bachelorette parties and balloon hats that have no idea who they're going to see. I book a rock 'n' roll club, I'll get the same people that would have been spread out through seven shows at the Improv, all at one show and with no shitheads." In sum, he avoids the "pedestrian All-Comedy-Is-Jay-Leno" people.
A live performance at the Tampa Improv in '05 showed something of his discomfort with the comedy-club milieu. That night he headlined a bill that featured several emerging comics, including Lynn Shawcroft, the recent widow of Mitch Hedberg. Her extremely dry, acquired-taste sort of humor did not receive a kind reception and merciless heckling forced her to wrap the set early. When Stanhope came barreling onto the stage, he immediately had the hecklers removed from the club. The rest of the show was incident-free, but there was definitely some tension in the air, and the comic hasn't returned since. (He's also stopped performing at Side Splitters Comedy Club in Carrollwood. Neither club responded to requests for comment about Stanhope's gigs.)
But if he hates the comedy-club scene, he's not about to abandon stand-up — and he certainly won't abandon the stage for a cushy television gig. In fact, Stanhope favors live performance because "it disappears into the air as soon as you've done it. Save for the occasional douche-bag with a cell-phone camera shooting from the hip at you and putting poorly edited footage of his thumb and half a beer and the part of your act without the set-up or the punch line on YouTube." But his dedication to live stand-up is not just about the transient nature of the artform. It's about freedom.
"The last stronghold of free speech is live performance, completely uncensored and unedited. You're the actor and producer and director and the choreographer, and no one can fuck that up. And the threat of shit going horribly wrong is where the adrenaline comes in. And as soon as it's over, it's over. It's not in reruns, there's no one there to judge it and point out flaws — it's all open to the hazy interpretation of people to talk about it however they saw it. And you know, eyewitness accounts are never accurate."
Doug Stanhope performs a 7 p.m. show at Crowbar Saturday, Nov. 10; tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door.
Read about the night Doug Stanhope revealed too much of himself on St. Pete Beach
The greatest outlaw comics of the last 50 years
This article appears in Nov 7-13, 2007.