You expect nastiness from Doug Stanhope. Misogyny, misanthropy, despair - I've heard and embraced them all from this viciously funny US stand-up, because they are his points of access to comic insight, and his means of expressing a wounded idealism I find compelling. But tonight, he has got the balance wrong. The insights and moments of tenderness are steamrollered by unpleasantness, and one of the world's most exciting comics is in danger of being reduced to a peddler of (by his own admission) "drunken hate speech".
He's still a brilliant stand-up: a poet of articulate disgust, unleashing fireballs of comedy from the hell of his own imagination. But his spirit is curdling into meanness. There's a tirade against climate change orthodoxy, which castigates women who give birth in poor countries, and argues that the best way to save the world is to stop having children - which rather misses the point that we want to save the world for our children to enjoy. And there is a too-long section in which the jokes against himself or the world in general cede to women-hating material, including a duff gynaecological routine about Sarah Palin and her "retard baby".
This bar-room bullshit is way beneath Stanhope, as the rest of the set often demonstrates. There's bleak, great material about the futility of sex and the self-destructive instincts that seem unique to human beings. There's a show-stopping moment when he phones his sick mum from the stage to check whether she's dead yet. And a routine asking why sporting achievements are valued more highly than his own daredevil experiments with drugs. "My adventures give me nothing except, perhaps, empathy for the human condition. And what's that worth? Jack shit." Like so few comics, Stanhope is asking the big questions, and not blinking at the answers. Drunken hate speech is an unwelcome distraction.
