Go see Doug Stanhope at the Ottobar on Friday night, and chances are you'll be angered, outraged, maybe even ticked off beyond all sense of reason.
With luck, you'll laugh, too.
He is, after all, the comic whose profile in a 2006 issue of British GQ was headlined, "Is This America's Most Depraved Man?" As a comic, he's following in the footsteps of such angry young men as Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks and Lewis Black, ignoring conventions of good taste, cracking jokes about things both hallowed and profane, never meeting a sacred cow he didn't want to gore.
He's made jokes about suicide, arguing that people should have the option of leaving behind a life they don't like, just like they can leave a movie if they don't like where it's headed. (According to Stanhope, lawyers for Comedy Central wouldn't allow that one, fearing it might actually encourage someone to kill himself and leave the network liable.) He's invoked the wrath of Brits for mocking the royal family, and of conservatives for ridiculing Sarah and Bristol Palin (and, unlike David Letterman, not apologizing). His take on drugs: "All illegal narcotics are 'medicinal.' Boredom is a disease worse than cancer. Drugs cure it."
He is as politically incorrect as is humanly possible, and proud of it. People, he insists, have become too wimpy, too unwilling to rock society's boat. If he's the only one making waves - well, it's hard to imagine anyone enjoying the task more.
"Sometimes, I feel like I'm the last of the drunken comics," Stanhope, 42, says over the phone from his home in Arizona. "I don't feel that I'm depraved. I think it's that this country is soft."
Don't get him started about drinking. Stanhope wears getting drunk like a badge of honor. It's a frequent topic of his stand-up act, and to hear him tell it, he spends more time drinking than not. "I've really figured out how to work alcohol as a tool in this business," he says. "I've pretty much figured out the exact measurements for a good show."
Growing up in the New York suburb of Greenwich, Conn., Stanhope says he was always the class clown, though not in the way you might expect. "I was kind of a school-shooter class clown," he says. "I was the morbid, dark class clown that gave the girls the creeps. Gave most people the creeps, I guess."
