Cpdougstanhope

Back in the ‘70’s I was managing a used book store
at Dupont Circle in Washington DC when Dustin Hoffman
stopped in. He was in town shooting All the
President’s Men.

We began to chat. He enjoyed the city blah, blah,
blah when I asked him why he had played Lenny Bruce as
such a sweet softy. After all stand up is a tough gig.
Doesn’t it require a thick skin? There’s the nightly
confrontation with drunken hecklers in some ‘toilet’
in the boonies. And if you’re really good or really
bad, there’s the constant threat of physical harm.

Hoffman told me that he had spoken with dozens of
people that knew Bruce and they all said he was a very
vulnerable, sweet, generous, insecure guy. He also
said he saw it in the performances, interviews and
news footage that existed. Hoffman told me to look and
listen harder. Even Bruce’s snitching to avoid jail
time could be seen in this light.

Over the years I have come to the conclusion that
Hoffman nailed Bruce in the movie. Bruce wasn’t one of
those snarky, posturing cats I was used to hanging
with who were occasionally funny, but in reality just
mean.

Mugshots: Left: Lenny Bruce Right: Dustin Hoffman in Lenny

Bruce was sensitive. Harrowingly sensitive. He cared
what people thought of him. He even sought approval
from the cops that arrested him and the DAs that
prosecuted him as seen by his defense of the police at
his Berkeley Concert where he balked at demonstrators
calling them ‘Gestapo’. And he was truly bewildered by
the  mainstream public’s hostility toward him.

Over the years I’ve come to recognize that many
stand-up comics, and virtually all of the great ones,
share this vulnerability, this need to be liked, even
loved. Some wear it on their sleeve wallowing in very
funny self-ridicule like Louis C.K. Others walk it off
like Chris Rock striding from one side of the stage to
the other, grinning ear to ear and laughing at his own
stuff casting insecure glances while he mulls the next
segment of his set. Some like Dave Chapelle, sweet by
nature but driven to expose the ignorance and
hypocrisy of the world, just walk away when the
sterility of the payoff comes into view.

And others like the legendary Joe Ancis, dubbed by
the young comics that gathered at Hanson’s Deli in
Brooklyn in the early forties and fifties  ‘The Funniest Man in New
York’, never muster the courage to take the stage at
all. Ancis, who inspired such comics as Lenny Bruce,
Buddy Hackett and Jack Roy aka Rodney Dangerfield,
never took the stage himself, afraid of the bitter
ridicule and potential for physical harm that a boozed
up, unhip audience might inflict.

Lenny Bruce & Joe Ancis		August 1965

Not that this vulnerability is an essential part of
the make-up of a great stand up. Dick Gregory, for
whom the threats were all too real, is and was just
plain courageous. Lewis Black, while not facing the
bigotry that hounded Gregory, Paul Mooney and Richard
Pryor or the constant harassment from the asshole
local police and prosecutors that destroyed Lenny
Bruce, also doesn’t outwardly express that vulnerable
quality. In this regard Black reminds me of an
enervated George Carlin or a less pedantic Mort Sahl
with some hilarious onstage spasms added.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Mort Sahl. He’s the cut
rate Noam Chomsky of stand up.

But the late Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks conveyed
that vulnerability. Pryor on stage often has a look of
sheer terror mixed with doubt as though at any moment
someone from the audience was going to stand up and do
him bodily harm, his stuff was that good. Or perhaps
it was in part Pryor’s penchant for harming himself
that he projected onto the audience, the brilliance in
madness thing that Jonathan Winters shared.

Hicks’ fear, too, was justified given his
uncompromising rage against US foreign policy and the
first Iraq war and his open hostility to organized
religion, especially Christianity. Hicks like any
comic worked the ‘toilets’ of the heartland, the bars
and honky-tonks full of patriotic, Jesus loving drunks
and meth addicts.

In one of Hick’s most famous bits he is confronted
after one of his shows by a group of self-proclaimed
shit-faced Christians who object to some of his act.
“We’re Christians…What you think we ought to do with
you,” one of the alcohol soaked apostles asks. To
which Hicks replied “Forgive me?”

Lenny Bruce has his own
biting parody of being on the road, his bit called
‘Lima Ohio’ which features a well-meaning Mid-Western
Jewish couple, the Scheckners, that have Lenny over to
dinner. Bruce woken early by Mr. Scheckner is asked,
“My wife wants ta know what ya want to eat.” A groggy
Bruce replies, “I’m not picky, man. A Chiclet. A Fig
Newton.”

Now there’s Doug Stanhope, the most brutally
brilliant yet vulnerable comic to come along since
Bruce, Pryor and Hicks. His material can be grotesque.
But not so deep down  you
realize that Stanhope’s bits are not solely a joke.
They’ve got ‘the funny’ but they are not meant to be
just that to either Stanhope or his audience. Stanhope
is dead serious. And couldn’t be funnier.

This allows him some room for when the audience,
especially the female members, don’t find his bits
funny, when you can hear the “pussy like car doors
snapping shut from a distance” as he puts it. But
Stanhope is no Andrew Dice Clay. Listen to his bit
‘Sex and Shame’ all the way to the end to get what I’m
saying:

Stanhope’s ‘funny’ is driven by the generous
application of Stanhope logic. And like all great
comedy and comedians, his material has the ring of
conviction which through inflection, gesture, etc.
makes it sound like the truth, or at least a truth,
but at the same time, exaggerated even grotesque. And
therein lies the bright spanking newly minted Stanhope
truth. Single handedly this gacking, spongy little
unlikely comic has moved the materialist armoire of
your cultural and political assumptions to the window
and shoved the fucker down ten flights.

You want to hear Doug’s unique take on cops and US
troops? Go ahead.

Does Stanhope hate kids a much as he says? Ladies
I’d take him at his word.

What makes Stanhope stand out is that classic comic
ability to create an odd (I want to say ‘fresh’ but
the word attributed to Stanhope doesn’t compute)
perspective that makes the listener reconsider all of
his or her old assumptions, a quality pioneered by
Bruce, Gregory and others in the fifties and possessed
by all the great comics since. Women are going to be
more resistant to Stanhope’s ‘assumptions’ than men. I
won’t reprise the historical background that turned
stand up comics toward serious social commentary
because it is already well-documented. But for the
gender thing, Stanhope’s self-awareness is acute.

I will cite more clips from the net to illustrate my
text. Lenny Bruce hated it when a judge let the cops
do his act in court rather than letting him speak for
himself. I’d rather Stanhope speak for himself.

What would make a person as vulnerable as Stanhope
put himself repeatedly and of [un]sound mind in a
position for potential derision and failure if not
physical harm?

Describing Pryor’s stage fright, Nina Simone said
she simply cradled him like a baby when he gigged with
her in New York in 1963. The combination of seeking an
audience’s approval, fear of failure and openly
risking ridicule often in the form of hecklers much
less bodily harm such as flying bottles is especially
acute for the stand up comic.

“He [Pryor] shook like he had malaria, he was so
nervous. I couldn’t bear to watch him shiver, so I put
my arms around him there in the dark and rocked him
like a baby until he calmed down. The next night was
the same, and the next, and I rocked him each time”
Simone recalled. Pryor was probably feigning nerves to
snuggle with Nina after the first couple of nights. I
woulda.

But if you don’t have a warm beauty like Simone
handy, drugs, cigarettes and booze are a ready
substitute. The performance benefits of scag, fags and
jags is common to Bruce, Pryor, Hicks and Stanhope. As
Stanhope points out what your elders called ‘dirty
habits’ are essential to ‘the funny’ he produces.

For a side splitting illustration check out
Stanhope’s bit called ‘Hard Work?’

Of course, the first and only rule is ‘you’ve got to
be funny’, both in the sense of humorous, and to a
lesser extent, in the sense of having a persona that
stands out and compliments ‘the funny’. Stanhope
certainly is the funniest around in the first sense of
the word as well as the most incisive. In the second
sense he’s brilliantly understated. He looks like the
doughy, aging frat boy next door that pulls out the
binoculars whenever your teenaged daughter strips to
her skivvies. Last time I saw him at the Ottobar in
Baltimore he was dressed like Rodney Dangerfield and
Joe Ancis in the days when they sold aluminum siding in New Jersey.

His grasp of the irony and hypocrisy of the American
Dream is uncanny. But he can also make you laugh at
the most un-mainstream, unpromising, peculiar subject
matter such as his bit about fucking the two headed
baby.

And there’s an aberrant logic that runs through
Stanhope’s bits. Some saw it as libertarian. But
libertarianism isn’t aberrant. It’s doctrinaire.
Stanhope’s aberrant logic means he must reject
everything including libertarianism. I wouldn’t say
it’s impossible but it’s hard to be doctrinaire and
funny at the same time unless ‘the funny’ is
unintentionally, syphilitic like Antonin Scalia’s
legal briefs.

Like Bruce, Pryor and Hicks, Stanhope has what’s
known as native intelligence defined as ‘Common sense;
knowledge not gained through formal education.’ All
four were/are dropouts and autodidacts. Pryor was
raised in a brothel and Bruce spent his formative
years in strip clubs.

This is highly important because with the
autodidact, knowledge remains free and malleable, a
requisite for the broad brush of the stand-up for
which close analysis or scrutiny can scuttle ‘the
funny’. And ‘the funny’ must always retain its own
scrutiny within its own logic. Also, an upbringing
like Pryor’s or Bruce’s is going to make you ’worldly’
especially if you posses acute powers of observation
as they did. It’s also going to make you more humane,
yes, and vulnerable even as you become more savvy and
street smart about the world.

The stand-up doesn’t so much say the outrageous
thing as assay it. The comic tests his material, not
for its efficacy, but for its ‘funny’. If it also
retains the ring of truth as it develops into a bit,
all the better. That makes for great standup.

In comedy a little knowledge is NOT a dangerous
thing. As Stanhope warns he’s probably wrong a good
deal of the time because he only has a surface
knowledge of the subjects he incorporates into his
act. He does allow that he has ‘13’ or so ideas which
have held up these last 26 years he’s been performing.
He also has an acute and raw understanding of human
nature.

His material sheds epiphanies the way an old memory
about a brush with a ‘madeleine’ once gave Proust a
boner. And a Stanhope infused insight sticks to you
like pussy stink in your moustache. After many
listenings some of his bits just get funnier revealing
some different nuance at each play.

No wonder for much of his set Stanhope has that
don’t fucking Freddie Kruger me look on his face as he
jumps out at the audience, his voice rising,
brandishing, along with his Dos Equis, a whole new way
of looking at the world. After all, they do kill the
messenger, Bruce being a prime example. And Freddy
Krueger is a metaphor for America. With Stanhope
umbrage by some of the audience amounts to
self-defense seasoned. “You’re not stealing my soul,
Stanhope, you fuckin’ degenerate”’ some of the
audience seems to be saying. “We’ll kill you before
we’ll admit you’re right.”

Stanhope appears to perform only when he’s totally
shit faced. And when he gets rolling on stage, jabbing
his bottle of beer at the audience and shouting his
bits with that flushed, impish grin on his face like
he’s finished off your last dram of jager, fucked your
sister and set your house on fire and just doesn’t
give a fuck except for the beat down he’s gonna get.

Then he talks about dying. And things really get
funny.

Stanhope is a master of stand-up technique. His
timing is impeccable. And his language

as fresh and original as his ideas are harmonious with
the outrageous edge his bits walk.

In Father Flotsky’s Triumph Lenny Bruce has a line
delivered by the prison warden: “The bullets? Look in
backa’ my brown slacks.” The music of this line like
most of Bruce’s work has always floored me. Aside from
Bruce’s biting parody of the American prison system
through a satiric take on Hollywood and the B movies,
it’s the poetry, yes the poetry, of the ‘brown slacks’
line like the music of the language in so much of
Bruce’s bits that raises it to a new level.

The stop after “bullets” punctuated by a question
mark. Then the cascading rhythm of “Look in backa’ my brown slacks,” with the line’s
concision enhanced by the colloquial elision of the
“the” before “back” followed by what Ezra Pound called
the ‘luminous detail’,  in this case “brown
slacks”. Then there’s the internal rhyme, “back” and
“slacks” which maintains the headlong downward rhythm
by using the colloquial expression “Look in back”
instead of say ‘look in the back pocket.’

Or Pryor’s killer bit called the ‘Mafia Club’ when
as young comic he gigged in a mobbed up club in
Youngstown, Ohio with its gravelly voiced wise guys
speaking a garbled faux Italian. Does it really get
any funnier than this bit?

A comic like Bruce, Pryor or Stanhope, a talented
cat that’s been doing stand up for years, hears ‘the
funny’ in his head. Stanhope finds just the right word
to jar the audience with its verbally nuanced
eccentricity, its ‘funny’, dropped perfectly into a
bits structure. And Stanhope’s timing is impeccable.
He maximizes the effect of every bit he does by the
silences, the now historic on stage cigarette breaks,
a sloppy cocksuck on his beer or just a plain
ass-to-earth beet red grin. He even has informative,
public service asides he uses as pauses in his
routines like at the beginning of the bit called “This
Generation Sucks”:

And it serves as an excellent segue into the bit
itself. Luminous vocabulary? Consider, the little
island of pause that is “last call” in the bit.

If you’re curious about what Stanhope is talking
about in general in the “this generation sucks” bit
look at an image of me online. Then look at the images
of your MFA instructors.

But the language. Oh the beautiful, evocative
language and ideas of “Fuck Your God”:

Or: Religion in a Nutshell:

But for the beer and cigarette pause/prop effect
listen to his DVD “No Refunds”. You can start at 14:30
if you’re pressed for time or just an asshole. But
stick with it for a few more minutes because of
Stanhope’s take on creativity, drugs, alcohol and
cigarettes, which

echo the sentiments of Bill Hicks.

“No Refunds”:

Doug plays a lot of ‘toilets.’ It’s no small measure
of his talent that he can find the least common
denominator, a subject that an appreciable number of
the audience can understand and raise the bar
sometimes a little bit and occasionally a lot.

Such a bit that accomplishes the latter is called
“Nationalism” or “Saving the French ” which also
includes Stanhope’s take on immigration. Talk about a
complex idea presented in the language of the common
man. “Verdun” juxtaposed to “sports bloopers.”
Luminous detail!

“[N]o mud stains on the knees garroting Krauts in
the trenches at Verdun.” Not to mention the
incomparable incarnation through words, ‘word made
flesh’, of Doug’s imaginary buddy for the bit,
‘Tommy’.

Or check out Jesus Never Made You Laugh:

Once again the language is brilliantly evocative
“Tell that story about the one time you kick fucked a
girl with cerebral palsy and see who draws a crowd.”
Once again the idiomatic expression “draws a crowd”
seasons ‘the funny’ just right as does “even your make believe slap-stick Jesus”
which follows along with a thousand other rhythms,
gestures, pauses, voice modulations, brilliant vocab
choices and verbal nuances.

Stanhope’s a rare talent. There’s no doubt he feels
he’s been short-changed by the entertainment industry.
But he has also made it perfectly clear that he finds
that industry as it exists today intolerable. (For a
masterful bit about the fatuous flatulence of show biz
culture and its audiences catch Lenny Bruce’s ‘The
Palladium’ with his ‘Dean of Satire’, Frank Dell, on
the album simply called ‘Lenny Bruce’ or ‘Lenny Bruce
Togetherness’; Fantasy 7007.)

Stanhope has tried a number of dead ends, the Man Show, Girls Gone Wild,
Fox’s ‘Invasion of the Hidden Cameras’, and Alex Jones
and to one degree or another has disavowed all of
them. He knows puerile when he sees it. At least up
close.

The numerous shock jock radio shows he appears
function as advance PR and little more. Adolescent
boys don’t know what ‘Verdun’ is and only the ones
willing to learn will stick with Stanhope. His
association with Howard Stern is reminiscent of
Bruce’s association with Playboy founder, Hugh Hefner,
or even Steve Allen or the short lived Lenny Bruce
Show. How else are people going to get to know you
when your venues barely top 200 or 300 hundred seats
and there’s virtually no TV exposure. You don’t do it
for their health. And Hefner and Allen were genuinely
concerned about the First Amendment, in Hefner’s case
out of self-interest, the capitalist’s mantra.

Stanhope’s not always successful with his material
such as his ‘bridge to nowhere’ knock on art. That and
a bunch of rough, new material left the audience
lukewarm at a recent show at Baltimore’s Ottobar. To
his credit it appears he’s dropped most of those bits.

Stanhope’s portrayal of his fictional doppelganger,
Eddie Mack, on Louie C.K.’s TV show is nothing but
poignant even if Stanhope would hate the
characterization. The character might contain more
than a grain of Stanhope. Stanhope sure as shit plays
it that way.

Richard Pryor had a stormy but successful career in
mainstream entertainment especially Hollywood. But
it’s hard to imagine Stanhope having such ‘success’.
Like his character Eddie Mack says, he’s “burned all
his bridges.” And he did it for the purity — if you
will permit me Doug — for the purity of his art. Or
at least that’s what Eddie/Doug needs to hear come out
of his mouth as he goes off to play a sports bar in
Maine for $200.00.

It might be pointed out that at the height of his
popular ‘success’ Pryor, according to his daughter
Rain, “poured high-proof rum over his body and set
himself on fire in a bout of drug-induced psychosis”
while free-basing cocaine.

If you’ve listened to Stanhope’s “burnt
bridges/I don’t want to live past ‘the funny’” bits, it all sounds familiar. But
I would not presume to know how much of Stanhope’s
struggles are mimicked in his portrayal of Eddie Mack
on Louie, or in my own experience of just an old man,
myself again, watching a rare comic genius like
Stanhope do his thing while giving off sparks of
self-destruction while claiming to engorge silos of
contraband and near contraband like Bruce, Hicks and
Pryor. After all, heroin was Bruce’s dénouement.
Stanhope jokes he’s saving smack for his curtain call.*