At one point in his new touring set, the Arizona standup Doug Stanhope – routinely described as one of the world’s best, if blackest, comics – complains that tabloid outrage, and the increased fame that might come with it, eludes him. That’s not for want of trying, to judge by a show that baits transgender people, liberally bandies about the word “retard”, and drops a (very funny) joke describing the Holocaust as “collateral damage”. Happily, none of this (well, not much) is for shock’s sake, and a large portion displays some of the most nonconformist thinking and scabrously funny invective you’ll find anywhere in comedy.
Stanhope’s routines typically delight in goading PC sensitivities, but only as a means to a more interesting end. There’s an eye-opening riff about inadequate mental health provision in his home state, which imagines a paranoid schizophrenic visiting an office marked CIA (Community Intervention Associates) to receive medical advice via Skype. There’s also a horrible, horribly funny skit about Arizona’s ex-congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was brain-damaged in 2011 in a shooting by a gunman diagnosed with schizophrenia – a routine justified by Stanhope (“I know a lot of you need a reason for this to be OK”) with reference to her own state’s inadequate provision for mentally ill people.
It’s strong stuff, then. One routine late in the set, introduced with the line “Fuck you, kid with cancer!”, finds the balding Stanhope feigning offence at terminally ill infants who wear wigs. It’s not only the fainthearted who will be antagonised. I could live without Stanhope’s closing riff, which makes hay with the unsurprising assertion that first-world poverty isn’t as bad as poverty elsewhere. Others may struggle with the section in which he announces that he’s transgender, which drives a wedge into the faultlines in identity-politics thinking, but also playfully challenges the conventional images of femininity to which the media narratives around, say, Caitlyn Jenner often defer.
But having one’s moral certainties manhandled is a price worth paying for comedy that elsewhere is brutally unsentimental and inimical to anything Stanhope considers conventional wisdom. Such as the supposed authority of doctors (cue a felicidal scene summoning a time when polio was blamed on stray cats), or the suggestion that we have anything to thank our mums and dads for. In memorable response to the latter, Stanhope posits life as little more than an ill thought through prank played by wannabe parents on someone who doesn’t exist yet.
None of this, alas for Stanhope, will register on the mainstream’s outrage dial. He’s too niche – and getting more so, if we’re to believe his gag about losing his demographic (disenfranchised angry young men) to Isis. (“They’re my competition now!”) But when Stanhope is on form, which for the most part he is in this bonfire-of-the-pieties 90 minutes, he’s leagues ahead of comedy’s glib shock-jockeys. Yes it’s savage, but only insofar as Stanhope refuses to softsoap what is often a savage world.
- At Bath Pavilion, 14 October. Box office: 01225 486976. Then touring until 17 October.
