The Dark Knight

For nearly 25 years now — his entire adulthood, and over half his entire life — US comedian Doug Stanhope has been on a mission to make people laugh. He might make you think about things quite deeply along the way — and god knows he’s pissed off enough people over the years with his no-holds-barred approach and penchant for delving into the realms of the disturbing — but it’s still mainly about the laughs.

Just don’t go to one of his shows if you’re easily offended, because Stanhope is easily offensive. He’s not a shock comic or someone who pushes people’s buttons for the sake of it, but he does have a misanthropic side that tends to manifest itself quite regularly. This is a guy drawn to the contradictions and absurdities of modern life and society, his brazenness sometimes masking an idealism and empathy for the losers and misfits in life which is inherently charming (albeit often couched in disgustingness). Much like how comics like Bill Hicks (another keen observer of the human condition) used to implore people to hang tough during the cerebral bits because “there were dick jokes on the way”, Stanhope manages to bring the highbrow and lowbrow in equal doses, no easy feat.

But ultimately, at the end of the day, he’s just fucking hilarious, and is finally after all these years trekking Down Under for an extensive run of shows to show Aussie audiences just what he’s made of. He assures The Music that he’s looking forward immensely to this Australian visit (“It’s on my bucket list — well, my career bucket list, anyway”), despite a well-publicised aversion to touring the UK and Europe that’s built up over the years.

"I’m sad that I’m not going to Darwin or nowhere inside like Alice Springs or Cooder Pedy — but … they’re small-enough places that if they hate you and think you suck, you don’t want to hang around town very long to sightsee."

“Oh no, the travel is fine — it’s just so depressing there,” he explains. “That old stone and mossy, clammy, awful fucking weather — I live in the middle of nowhere in a desert for a reason. You wouldn’t understand it here; it’s all desert and scrub and heavy drinkers and rednecks and guns — it’s pretty much like Australia.

“I don’t have any expectations — I just know that it’s going to be hot and dry, and that’s all I care about. I went to Sydney for a couple of weeks about twelve or fourteen years ago, but I want to see the rest of Australia. I’m sad that I’m not going to Darwin or nowhere inside like Alice Springs or Cooder Pedy — but that’s something I’d rather do when I’m not doing a gig. If I was to go there I wouldn’t want to be playing — they’re small-enough places that if they hate you and think you suck you don’t want to hang around town very long to sightsee. As a tourist, you can go there and if it’s slightly scary you can just sneak out the back, but if they’re there to see you and you have to do a show, then you have to fucking live with scary.”

One thing that might taint his view of Australian normality is his gig in Brisbane, which is not only being held a couple of days before the G20 political summit kicks off in earnest, but is also at a venue (The Greek Club) which is pretty much slap-bang in the middle of the G20 exclusion zone — fortunately, Stanhope sees this as much an opportunity to riff upon what’s happening as any major inconvenience.

“I knew [about the situation] as soon as I booked that show — my Twitter lit up with people saying, ‘Don’t you know what the fuck you’re getting into?’” he laughs. “I’ll be wearing a suit — that’s the best way to avoid the teargas, dressing like the one percent. I’ll have a shiny new haircut, my teeth will be whitened, I’ll have an attaché case handcuffed to my wrist.

“But anytime you’re overseas you’re looking for material, because you know that at least half the shit you do at home won’t work; they don’t have that brand, that chain, that holiday, that season — just something’s fucking missing. Even the bits where you go, ‘Oh, this’ll work fucking anywhere!’ and you get halfway through and go, ‘Fuck, I forgot the big payoff in the middle here is something where they have no idea what I’m talking about’. But it makes you work.”

Most of his live albums and DVDs were recorded (as you’d expect) in the comfort of the United States, but on 2011’s Oslo: Burning The Bridge To Nowhere DVD you can see how Stanhope hones his material to suit a foreign audience. As he explains, however, he doesn’t see that particular show as a career high point.

“Yeah, I should have never done that DVD,” he admits. “My manager is generally on the ball, but that was some bad advice from that fucking cheap cocksucker. He gave me two days’ notice, and I’d just put out the previous release, From Across The Street (2009) — in fact, we were filming the cover for that album, the one that hadn’t even been put out yet, and the people who were doing the photography for the album cover said that they'd film the Norway show on the cheap, so he gave me two days' notice that we were putting all of this new material out on a DVD. I should have just said no. I know how the material develops — you don’t take stuff you’ve been doing for four months and put it on a DVD. It’s stupid, but it’s out there. Fuck it.”

So obviously, then, the material that he concocts for his routines is honed on the job and (hopefully) gets better with time?

“Yeah, it’s the opposite of music — they get it perfect and then tour with it, but we start with shit and hope it ends up great. And then never do it again once you put it out [on a release],” Stanhope reasons. “Anything you can get off the top of your head is great though — or even stuff that just has a short shelf life, like stuff that’s in the news. Like if a football player beats his wife, that’s not going to be relevant in a year-and-a-half, but if it gives you something new to say tonight then that just keeps it fresh.”

So Aussie crowds won’t be getting a ‘greatest hits’ set?

“No, once I put it out that’s usually the end of it,” he tells. “You might get some ‘greatest hits’ that were never released, but nothing I’ve put on a release do I do again.”

"America’s kind of the opposite of Afghanistan, where ... we’ve been at war for so long that you just don’t care but your life is still fine."

There seems to be a sincerity to Stanhope’s anger — does he agree that he seems to generally rail against things that are actually pissing him off rather than manufacturing rage?

“Yeah, and the stuff that pisses you off the most you’ve probably already done three different bits about on different releases, so you have to get second-string hate off the bench: ‘This hate is too tired, I need new hate!’,” he screams. “But [it’s not like I’m morally outraged] on a daily basis. I’m not at Safeway getting groceries screaming about ISIS, because ISIS doesn’t affect my day. America’s kind of the opposite of Afghanistan, where they’re so used to being at war that they just walk down the street with shells going off next to them and it doesn’t really affect them. We’re the opposite, where we’ve been at war for so long that you just don’t care but your life is still fine. The beheading is outrageous until you watch the news and the next thing is Ebola, and then you turn the TV off and you’re right back to scratching your balls and drinking beer. It doesn’t matter.”

Strangely, Stanhope believes that instead of stand-up comedy getting easier with experience, it can actually get more difficult because you struggle to find new ground to cover.

“Yeah, because you’re burning all your ideas, so if you do stuff like I do then it gets harder to do because your passion gets less and less,” he opines. “That’s why I’m starting to cover all of my career bucket list moments, because at some point I’m going to have to go, ‘Fuck this!’ But we’ve got to get Australia out of the way first.”

Stanhope’s material is flagrantly controversial, but he reckons that these days fewer people get offended because he’s mainly preaching to the converted. Unlike, say, the infamous episode at the Kilkenny Comedy Festival in Ireland back in 2006, where he had a whole festival schedule of stand-up spots cancelled after ten minutes of his first show (His crime? Making light of recent changes to statutory rape laws, including asides insinuating that Irish women weren’t suited for that kind of thing anyway), most people know what to expect from his shows these days before purchasing a ticket.

“Now I have my own audience, so wherever I am we get the nutters out from the crevices of whatever town, no matter how conservative. But I do miss that… a bit,” he concedes. “But yeah, coming up [through the comedy ranks] especially, a lot of people used to get offended. 9/11 was the best time ever, because my act was already leaning in that anti-government with that ‘anarchist’ — for want of a better term — slant. So when 9/11 came and just prompted that outpouring of nationalism, it was like a fist fight every night — not literally, but onstage you just know you were going to provoke outrage. And not on a comment card either; this was people getting up and screaming at you.

“But when you’re right, you can defend it; it’s not like you’re just doing shock humour and making fun of 9/11 — you have a serious point — and when you can back it up, fuck yeah, bring it on! I don’t know that much, but if I’m bringing it to the stage then I have at least enough surface knowledge to argue with you. It’s not like [Christopher] Hitchens or Penn Jillette are in the audience, where it’s going to be a tough argument; any asshole who walks into a comedy club to get hammered at ten thirty on a Friday — I can probably win the argument.”

He’s also been particularly scathing on organised religion over the journey, without playing favourites (ie. he’s an equal-opportunity maligner when it comes to spiritual deities) but again he believes that these days people who see his shows — even in conservative areas like the Bible Belt — come armed knowing what to expect from him.

“Again, back then when people were just walking into a comedy club because they had a coupon, you’d get people who were just there to see ‘comedy’,” he recalls of the days when his routines provoked religious ire. “Which is so weird of itself — no one would ever go to see ‘music’, you’d at least find out the genre of music. But at this point the ticket price is high enough that someone’s going to do some research. Now, the problem is trying to get under the skin of people who already like me. How do I fuck with them and still be right?”

"I never regret anything, mostly because I don’t remember shit."

Stanhope was raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, but these days calls the small town of Bisbee, Arizona, home. He had several ‘normal’ jobs before hitting the stand-up circuit — was comedy always something that he was drawn to and wanted to do?

“From what I remember,” he reflects. “It was something that I always enjoyed and I always thought about doing — in the same way that you think about being an astronaut when you’re a kid; you don’t really expect to do it. But somewhere along the line at this open mic night that I used to go to just to watch… I don’t know whether I got dared into doing it, but I did it. I never went onstage thinking about doing it as a career, I did it the same way that you go up and do karaoke — ‘Can I get away with this? Can I pull this off for three minutes?’ But I wouldn’t change it — I never regret anything, mostly because I don’t remember shit. Every now and then I walk into a bar and see a familiar face and think, ‘Ooh, I do have regrets! I’m getting out of this bar!’”

Was he funny at school?

“I was the same type of funny — which means off-putting to most,” he chuckles. “I might have been able to get five percent of the class to laugh, but the others were horrified. I had the sense of humour that got me sent to the school psychologist, and not elected class clown.”

Stanhope has espoused before that it was people on the way up in the comedy game that he came across personally who inspired him rather than the similarly scathing comics you’d assume like Bill Hicks or Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor, but he does admit that there was a comedian from left-field who proved an unlikely inspiration early on.

“Andrew Dice Clay was the catalyst if not the influence, because I was at the perfect age — like twenty-two or somethin’ — when he made it big,” he tells. “It was just dumb, and hearing him say stuff like (adopts accent), ‘Fuck, pussy, cunt, fuck’ just killed me! I wouldn’t say he was an influence, but it was around that time I was getting into comedy. I used to quote him around the office where I worked, and the owner of the office had a cover band and said that I could open for him, and I said, ‘Well, that’s not my material’, and he said, ‘I don’t care!’ We were doing fraud telemarketing [at that job] — there’s not a lot of ethics. But just knowing that if I had my own material then I could probably get a job that easily was probably what made me start writing comedy, if you could call it that — the shit I wrote when I was young was not very good at all.”

"You don’t want to be fifty and living out of your car for comedy. People don’t have your back as much."

You never imagine that stand-up comedy is a road paved with riches for anybody — especially early on — but Stanhope purportedly did it pretty hard whilst starting out, including stints where he was living in his car for extended periods.

“Yeah, but that was for fun,” he laughs. “I had no choice — being a stand-up didn’t pay that well — but when you’re twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five you can live out of your car and people think you’re an adventurer. They say, ‘What an adventurous spirit!’ and give you a packed lunch and a place to stay. But you don’t want to be fifty and living out of your car for comedy! People don’t have your back as much.”

Stanhope is no stranger to television, having enjoyed numerous successful (and quite a few not-so-successful) stints on the small box, including a hilarious turn on Louie. In recent times, however, he’s teamed up with UK satirist Charlie Brooker and given pretty much free rein to run rampant on a couple of Brooker’s news review programs. The two seem to have pretty similar worldviews; did they hit it off?

“You know what, I’ve only met him a couple of times,” Stanhope tells. “He was doing something called Screen Wipe and they set up a segment for me to just rant on — I had no idea what I was actually doing. So I did that, and when I was there the next time I did it again, and then they started coming over [to the States] to film segments. So I’ve only met him a couple of times over there when he’d come to shows and I’d meet him in the green room. I haven’t seen much of his stuff either — I’ve only seen clips on YouTube, which are great, but when it comes to me I shut it off because I can’t stand watching myself. But from what I’ve seen he’s done some brilliant stuff. The Daily Show would be that good, too, if they only did that six times a year.”

And, excitingly, Stanhope has his own potential TV project in the pipeline which is the brainchild of none other than Johnny Depp (whom he met and subsequently befriended while on tour in Europe) — is he allowed to spill any beans about that impending pairing?

"[My manager] texted me saying, ‘Johnny Depp will be contacting you. I have no further information.’ And I’m like, ‘What the fuck?'"

“Not really,” he smiles. “I’d tell you more if I knew more. He has a pretty similar work ethic and road schedule that I do, so we get together every few months and beat out some more ideas. But after November I’m going to take some decent time off so I can really focus on it. I guess he’s just been a big fan, and he had an idea — I think he saw an old Lenny Bruce pilot and said that he wanted to something like that for me. He said, ‘You can make it whatever you want!’, which is actually a lot more difficult than someone saying, ‘Hey, I have a specific idea that you can mold in your own fashion’. ‘Do whatever you want! I want to make TV that will get us arrested!’ was his quote. And I said, ‘Alright, that’s kind of a wide open world there, let’s start to narrow that down into a show’, so we’ve been doing that in our off time.

“He called last year — just called out of the blue. I got an email from his agent, that went to me and my manager, saying, ‘One of my clients would like to reach out to Doug Stanhope — how do we go about doing this?’ So I let my manager field it, and right before we went onstage that night, he texted me saying, ‘Johnny Depp will be contacting you. I have no further information.’ And I’m like, ‘What the fuck?' Why would Johnny Depp want me personally? That’s now how it works — if it’s for a movie or something then he’d get his people or some casting people to contact my people, he wouldn’t be contacting me directly. Then he didn’t call for like ten days, so I’m on this road trip in Canada just thinking, ‘What the fuck?’ — like every second you’re thinking about Johnny Depp, and a man in his forties just should not be spending every day consumed with Johnny Depp. I’m trying to do bits about it, and telling people, ‘You’ve got to understand — Johnny Depp has as much reason to contact me as he does you, so let’s say you’re selling shoes or cutting hair or whatever your day job is, and you go out for lunch and you come back, and they say, ‘Oh yeah, Tom Cruise stopped by to see you — he had a question and said he’d come back’, and then he never comes back? How quick could you go back to a crossword puzzle without constantly being, ‘What the fuck does Johnny Depp want from me?’ So when the call came, I didn’t really care what it was about — I just needed to know. I didn’t want to be an old man walking by payphones and picking them up, going, ‘Johnny Depp? Johnny Depp?’ So he finally called and made me this offer; it’s kind of fun.”

 "I hate to say that part of my Australian tour is pseudo-rehab, but that seems to be the plan.”

Stanhope recently appeared on an episode of the cable TV show Getting Doug With High — in which notorious stoner comic Doug Benson gets high with a guest and they discuss weed for an hour — which is one of the first places he revealed his Australian tour plans. Stanhope isn’t much of a pothead (he chose to drink rather than partake in green during this particular episode) but he’s been known in the past to be fond of hallucinogens and certainly knows his way around the drug culture — what’s actually happening with weed in the States? How come people can now brazenly smoking weed on TV without any fear of recrimination?

“It depends on where you go — there’s still states where it’s as hardcore as the ‘60s,” he explains. “Then there’s two states now where it’s completely legal — it’s not even medicinal; in Colorado and Washington you can just smoke weed. In other states, it just depends — here in Arizona we live in a tiny little liberal enclave so no one really worries about it here. We have a pharmacy for medicinal marijuana and anyone can get a card, but there are other places where they’ll still fuck ya. But for the most part, it’s overlooked — which can make some people a little too cocky. I’m more worried about cigarettes over there — I heard you charge twenty bucks a pack, and you can only bring two packets in through customs? My season ends after Australia and I was planning on quitting anyway, that should give me a good head start in cutting down. I hate to say that part of my Australian tour is pseudo-rehab, but that seems to be the plan.”

THE WISDOM OF STANHOPE:

“If you're offended by any word, in any language, it's probably because your parents were unfit to raise a child.” Before Turning A Gun On Himself (2012)

“Babies are like poems. They're beautiful to their creator, but to other people they're silly and fucking irritating.” Something To Take The Edge Off (2000)

“Don't learn from other people's mistakes. That's the worst advice you could ever get. Other people are fucking morons. Wrestling's the number one show on cable television. You're gonna learn from their mistakes? They're fuckin' tools! You might be the first guy who could to do it right and be a hero for all of us. Take a chance and learn to fly there, Orville Wright!” Word Of Mouth (2002)

“You were born free, you got fucked out of half of it and you wave a flag celebrating it.” Deadbeat Hero (2004)

“There's only two types of people who are against drugs: the people who have never done drugs and the people who really sucked at doing drugs.” Deadbeat Hero (2004)

“Why would you die for someone's sins? Your sins are the only thing interesting about you, you dreary, bleak motherfuckers.” No Refunds (2007)

“Tradition and heritage are all dead people's baggage, stop carrying it. Move forward.” Oslo: Burning The Bridge To Nowhere (2011)