A bleary eyed Stanhope, sporting a fledgling mullet, field cap and battered pilot's jacket, edges his way through the throng at the bar of this tiny, crowded basement venue, politely acknowledging pats on the back and hands thrust out for shaking, and takes the stage to whooping and clapping which treads close to sycophancy. He's virtually unknown on these shores, yet he boasts a tiny and fiercely loyal fanbase (“My fans are like excessive-pubic-hair fetishists,” he later quips “there's not many of ya, but you're a loyal bunch”). It's not difficult to explain his lack of mainstream success, Stanhope is a man utterly unafraid of his mouth, there's not a topic he won't tackle. That said, he's not a shallow merchant of offence, there's a profoundly human message in there if you're willing to look for it. As he asserted in an
interview with The Guardian in the wake of his being banned from the Kilkenny comedy festival (the, somewhat unfair, allegation was that he'd said Irish women were too ugly to rape) “If you're offended, you're not listening.”
Tonight, however, he's not feeling his best. Fresh from a pharmaceutical slumber on a flight from Las Vegas, where he'd been indulging in some fairly heroic substance abuse, he predicts a terrible performance and apologises in advance.
Fortunately, his style is such that it suffers little from the morning after malady. Where most anecdotal comics lead their audience on a “scenic route” through their material, dipping in and out of interesting side-stories but with the destination firmly in mind, Doug prefers the drunken meander back from the pub to a yet-to-be-determined crashing space approach. He starts jokes and doesn't finish them, fuck, he starts
words and doesn't finish them. He provides commentary on his thought process by way of half mumbled, often self-deprecating, asides in the middle of a routine, and he often forgets what he was talking about completely. It sounds like a recipe for embarrassing comedy failure, but he carries it off with such charm and natural honesty that it becomes a strength. It feels like he's having a conversation with you, rather than just parroting a well rehearsed script.
He's also a very funny fucker.
After his opening, ad-lib, rant about his very recent experiences in air-travel he tugs on a beer and sets about putting the world to rights. Like Bill Hicks's drunken, tougher big brother he unflinchingly tackles the ridiculousness of the human condition. He rails against the medicalisation of society, people demanding a name and treatment for any and every little twinge of discomfort their bodies might make them suffer and then suing when they get inappropriate prescriptions. He opines, er, “uniquely” on the situation in Darfur. He tackles things we're collectively precious about. The reverence of the sexual act, he says, is wholly undeserved. It's a physiological need, like eating and sleeping, and should be given no higher regard (“If anything, treat it like a handshake”). This leads him to a tale of a woman who approached him after a show and berated him for his unashamed use of prostitutes. It was sad and pathetic, she said, that he felt he had to pay for sex. “Yeah,” he mutters “coming from someone who just paid me $20 to make her
laugh.” He muses on his morbid curiosity about a fans recent suicide, his contempt for agnosticism and religious dishonesty, child pornography (“You ever notice it has no credits? See, it's all about the art.”) and his apathy towards the current US leadership contest (“Rats don't see hawks as leaders, they see them as predators, they just learn to stay out of their sight.”)
The crowd of devotees are loving it, they were always going to. Laughs are coming thick and fast but it's clear Doug isn't happy with his form, he pauses frequently to ask for more drinks from the bar or to incite the audience to heckle him to keep his adrenaline up, and, in the end, he, impressively unabashedly, pulls a bunch of prompt notes from his pocket while the audience shout for routines from his DVDs and CDs. “TWO HEADED BABY!” screams one punter. “No.” is the amusingly curt response.
Stanhope is a world-class comedian. He's the natural inheritor of Bill Hicks's throne. Uncompromised integrity, a battered, ruddy intelligence, no pretensions, and embarrassing honesty. He'll be a cult hero yet, I'm positive of that. I just hope he doesn't have to die first.
Doug Stanhope is currently on tour in the UK and Europe. Details here.
