Drunk For Your Amusement

The Comedy of Doug Stanhope

James Curcio

Freedom.

For years now, I’ve wondered who the next Bill Hicks was going to be. As

things grew more and more grim – I mean seriously, I think we’ve surpassed

the Reagan era now on the cosmic WTF! scale – I wondered if maybe we would

have no more

target="_blank"> ranting, fool messiahs (Eulogy is the track I’m referring to…) because the meter was just

fucking broke and we’ve all become too whitebread and insecure to recognize

the rallying call if it comes. “COMEDY IS DEAD, GO HOME, GAME OVER.”

There are times when being proven wrong is the best thing in the world. The

other night I was stopped dead in my tracks by this man. He made me want to

pick up three of the bad habits I’d managed to kick, and start up about

twenty new ones. Most importantly, he made me laugh. A lot.

Really, we’re all laughing as Doug goes down like a screeching 747, and we

will probably laugh when invariably it crashes and turns into flaming

wreckage. Maybe it’s like the sacrifice that gets slaughtered every year so

the crops can grow- more likely, we’re just laughing at a world that many

times seems too fucked to do anything else with but laugh at it.

Society needs it’s “fool messiahs”, it’s jesters. Comedy allows us

to express thoughts and feelings that might otherwise cause a lot of

trouble. Consider what the Daily Show has done for, or to, news and

journalism in general. Stephen Colbert

href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-869183917758574879"

target="_blank">lampooned the president to his face. Comedy gets written

off because it’s half pretend, but oftentimes we forget that the things that

make us laugh are the things that are true.

Doug takes this process a step further though. With him, I don’t think there is actually any satire here. There is no ‘pretend.’ He gives it like he sees it at that particular moment in time. I imagine it might be somewhat alienating for those who don’t understand what’s going on, (arguably the title of his most recent DVD, No Refunds, has something to do with that.)

So I acknowledge that there’s a fair chance you’re not going to be able to

take this journey with me, and by the end of this article I’ll be

figuratively standing in an empty hall, drunk and naked, ranting while

riding a crack-whore bareback across the stage. (I guess in this fantasy I’m

wearing a wireless mic or something.)

All the same that would at least leave me in the right frame of mind to

enjoy Doug’s erudite body of work. So come with me on this one, or don’t.

Either way- I think we’ve found this generation’s Bill Hicks. Enjoy it

before he finds a nice hole in the ground.

Excess In Moderation.