Published in the November 2013 issue

Late afternoon, the balcony of the penthouse suite at the Thompson LES hotel on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

SCOTT RAAB: I thought you'd look haggard. You're not haggard.

DOUG STANHOPE: I timed my meds right.

SR: You want a bottle of something?

DS: I got nine shots in my travel bag. You know that quart bag for your liquids? That holds ten shots of vodka.

SR: Will that sustain you?

DS: Yeah.

SR: How old are you?

DS: Forty-six. The first thing I think of when I wake up is how close I am to death. But then it gets better during the day.

SR: How much of your reputation is exaggerated?

DS: I drink every night. But I don't hang out and party. Not that I'm selling out Madison Square Garden, but in the old days after a show you could hang out with a few people. But now you're hanging around with 20 people, all of whom don't know each other, and they're all, "Leave my outgoing greeting on my voice mail, man, come on!"

SR: You're the hot chick in that setting.

DS: I'm last-call hot.

SR: Remember your first time doing stand-up?

DS: My first open mic, I drank a full pitcher of beer by myself. I wasn't afraid of being in front of people as much as, Is this funny?

Mark Peterman

SR: It takes courage to do stand-up.

DS: Actors say, "Oh, man, that's ballsy." Yeah, it might be ballsy, but I'd rather not be an actor. Actors are tools.

SR: You're really good, though, the times I've seen you. Like on the Louie episode.

DS: That's the only time.

SR: That season of Louie was a great season of television.

DS: I love Louie's stand-up. But I saw a couple of episodes that were like, I don't even get this. So I'm in the UK and I said, "I love playing in the UK because there are some topics that you just can't talk about in the States without getting run out of town. So let me just say this: Louis C. K.'s new show sucks."

SR: Everyone else was reverent.

DS: It grew on me. Especially after I was on it.

SR: How was your childhood in Worcester, Mass.?

DS: I was a fuckup. I quit school and hung around. My dad and I just stared at each other until I was 18 and could legally leave. "Um, be 18 soon, Dad!" "Uh, okay…" He was like Tom Bosley, only a soft-touch version.

SR: Not much of an authority?

DS: He was a sweetheart. My mom was the rough one. Filthy mouth. They divorced when I was six.

SR: There are no boundaries to the places you go onstage, and apparently there were no boundaries at home.

DS: Not many.

SR: Was she a disciplinarian?

DS: "Close your mouth when you chew." That was my mother's big one. To this day, mouth noises, someone slopping food… Why do people eat lunch together? I want to eat by myself. Chewing is one of the most revolting things to me. Wind makes me unnerved, too.

SR: Wind?

DS: Wind.

SR: Wind.

DS: Not a cool breeze but wind. It always feels like it's fucking something up. Like when you're trying to light a cigarette or read your newspaper. But mouth sounds are my biggest. Fucking NPR. They always have the mics so close. "This is Lakshmi Singh." It's like a tadpole dying in muck. Take a drink. Wet your mouth.

SR: You look tanned.

DS: I live in the desert, and I have to walk my dogs.

SR: How did you decide to live in Bisbee, Arizona?

DS: When I used to drive on the road from L. A., one time in Arizona we went off-road to see what weird little towns are around. Loved Bisbee.

SR: The climate's gotta be brutal.

DS: Not really.

SR: Scorpions?

DS: Scorpions suck. My girlfriend got bitten once. Stung six times on her inner thigh by a scorpion.

SR: I would need the Orkin man on retainer.

DS: I hate bugs. Fuck 'em, kill 'em. Flies. I'll shut the door and get out the fly swatter and spend 20 minutes killing flies. I'll say it out loud. Kenny Rogers: "You could've heard a pin drop when Tommy stopped and locked the door." Pol Pot killing fields. You intellectuals!

SR: You're in town to do something with Chris Rock?

DS: I'm just doing two lines in a movie. It's the same guy I played on the Louie show. I play the same asshole all the time. They're putting me up at the Trump and flying me last-minute first class — they probably spent six times as much as they're paying me.

SR: What are they paying you?

DS: $889 or something.

SR: Wow!

DS: They were going to send a limo to me in Bisbee. "Okay, where does he need a car from?" And my manager says, "Well, he's coming from Arizona." It would have been really funny to have a limo come to Bisbee, where they've never seen a fucking limo.

SR: So you drove to the airport.

DS: I want my car there when I get off the plane.

SR: What do you drive?

DS: A Kia Sportage.

SR: You don't have a pickup?

DS: We just sold the pickup. But I have a Tahoe I got from a police auction. A police car. It was $2,500. The roads where we live are shit, so it's great to drive that piece of shit just for that. I got a Mazda3, and we have a 15-passenger van I just bought off Craigslist. It says BE DRUG FREE on the side.

SR: Really?

DS: There's a lot of meth [in Bisbee]. So now there's an ex-cop-car Tahoe and a BE DRUG FREE van parked right in front of my house.

SR: I thought your campaign to raise money for the atheist tornado survivor whom Wolf Blitzer interviewed after the Oklahoma tornado was inspiring.

DS: I didn't look at that and say, "Oh, this poor woman lost her house in a tornado." Yeah, shit happens. It was when she said "I'm actually an atheist." It was one of those drunken things you'd say at a bar, but we actually did it: "I'm going to figure out how to do this on Kickstarter." Someone led me to Indie gogo, because it works better for what I was trying to do. And people responded. When I talked to Rebecca Vitsmun on the phone finally, she goes, "I'm just going to be honest. I don't really feel a kinship with other atheists. I'm just an atheist." I said, "Oh, don't worry. I did this as a big finger to CNN. Just go enjoy your money."

SR: How much?

DS: About 125 grand. My idea is to do that once a year to offset CNN Heroes, where they take ten people who did nice things, put them into a competition that they didn't want to be a part of, and make nine of them feel like they lost.

SR: You hold a similar level of contempt for Dr. Drew. I loathe what the guy does. To me, it's pure exploitation.

DS: You gotta hear when I did his podcast. Part of the time, he's almost arguing harder against himself than I am. I said, "You put Tom Sizemore and Heidi Fleiss in the same 'recovery center.' She had a restraining order against him for beating the fuck out of her, and you think that's good therapy to have them come back and reunite?" Yes, yes, he said, and I'd do it again. He's in complete denial about the exploitation. He just kept passing the buck.

SR: Did you grow up around AA?

DS: My mom got sober when I was nine or ten. She was an immediate zealot. She got fired from bartending jobs because somebody would ask for a third drink and she'd start talking AA to them. And then she trailed off, as a lot of people do. She'd still preach it, but she'd just not go to meetings. And then she started drinking at some point later in life. Four years before she killed herself.

SR: I thought the ten-minute bit about your mom on Beer Hall Putsch [Stanhope's latest album] was beyond compare.

DS: It's been five years in the making, five years since she died.

SR: She was sober and then started drinking again?

DS: I found out through my mother's neighbor. My mom would break into English accents when I'd call after six or seven at night. "Hellooo?" "Oh, Mom, you found your old sense of humor. Where was it?" Oh, in one of those cough-medicine bottles.

SR: You're often compared to the late comedian Bill Hicks. You see a similarity?

DS: I get that in England. He was huge over there. Still huge over there. So every writer likens me to Bill Hicks. If I'm like anyone, it's Chris Rock. But no one gives a fuck about comedy enough to care about the differences. How often do people actually go see stand-up comedy? Comedy's really just a step above karaoke and Renaissance festivals. So when you get a bunch of comics bitching about integrity, hey, keep in mind where we really stand.

SR: But stand-up seems to have been elevated to a higher plane lately. The Seinfeld Era is over.

DS: "Did you ever notice?" he says. Yeah, I just Googled it, Jerry. You're irrelevant. "What happened to the other sock in the dryer?" I Googled it, Jerry. You lost it, you dropped it on the way from the dryer on the way to the thing more likely than not. According to Google, 74.6 percent of the time it's actually behind the dryer. Now you don't have to wonder anymore.

SR: I do love a good one-liner, though.

DS: What's your favorite one-liner?

SR: "My wife's cooking is so bad, the flies pitched in to patch the hole in the screen door."

DS: I always say Mitch Hedberg's "I don't have a girlfriend, but I do have a girl that would be very upset if she heard me say that." You almost never hear jokes anymore. The "two guys walk into a bar" kind of jokes.

SR: What's your favorite joke?

DS: It's a joke my mother told me: There's a farmer in his field. He's feeding his pigs in the apple orchard. A guy's driving down and sees him. The farmer picks up a pig and lets the pig eat an apple out of the tree, sets him down, picks up another pig, lets him eat an apple out of the tree. And the guy stops his car and walks up to the farmer and says, "Wouldn't it save time to just knock all the apples down and let the pigs eat all at once?" And the farmer says, "What's time to a pig?"

SR: No one would ever tell that joke onstage now. It's all about the stories.

DS: Yes, but I've seen comics who had great stories, and then they go up and do jokes about it and it's like, "Yeah, someone stole my identity. I'm in a lot of debt." Tell the story! You need the unnecessary detail in the story so people know it's true.

SR: Verisimilitude.

DS: It's the key to a good lie, too. If your girlfriend asks you, "Where have you been?" don't just say "I got a flat tire." Add in "And these weird kids, they were, like, these Goth kids — they kept coming up to me and saying, 'Oh, we're going to call a cab for you.' And I was like, 'Are you being sarcastic?' "

SR: But all your stories are true?

DS: That was the turning point in my career. I don't want to tell bullshit stories just because they get a laugh, stuff I don't believe in. There were still dick jokes after that. They just weren't lies.

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