I’ve never done an interview quite like this. Usually it’s an hour-long battle at a hotel with whoever it is trying to stick to the script, and whatever it is they are promoting, while you try to coerce them into letting something interesting slip about who they actually are.

But Doug Stanhope has invited me to his house, in Bisbee, Arizona, for three days. To hang out, and to drink. Mainly to drink. Gonzo journalism? There will be a drug run over the border into Mexico, but it’s not as glamorous as it sounds. More like just-gone journalism, to be honest.

After for ever on aeroplanes to Tucson and then a two-hour drive south through the night-time desert with lightning in the hills and coyotes (well, one, unless it was a dog) in the road, I get to Stanhope’s house on Friday evening. More compound than house, there are a couple of bungalows, caravans, the Suicide House (more on that later) stolen signs and iron palm trees, all trippily painted in bright pink, yellow, blue and orange.

Stanhope – I’m going to call him Stanhope, not Doug, as that’s what most people, including his girlfriend Bingo, call him – is in the Fun House. A bar, basically, with stools (fat-person friendly) and five screens to show sports, in his own back yard. It saves him having to go out; his friends come to him. A few of them are here tonight: a young man smoking weed in a pipe, a woman crocheting and a fat lady dog called Henry Phillips snoring on the rug.

So, Stanhope. He’s 48 but looks younger (there you go, kids, drink loads of booze and take loads of drugs for eternal youth), and at school he wasn’t academic, athletic, musical or talented in any way. Except he could talk and he was funny, which took him first into working a dubious boiler-room-type scam in Las Vegas and then into standup comedy.

His style is caustic and rude; he spits out angry rants at his audiences, his subjects are controversial (paedophilia, addiction, suicide, rape), his targets numerous. No one and nothing is sacred. But he is not just a foul-mouthed pisshead douchebag. This is articulate bile, incendiary; an inspired bleak worldview. There is a brutal honesty about his material, and about him.

He seems to loathe himself as much as he loathes everything else – it’s the comedy equivalent of self-harm. And it has won him a following, not just among the damaged and the deranged, but the great and the good too. Sarah Silverman, Johnny Depp, Ricky Gervais and Charlie Brooker are all fans.

Stanhope with his girlfriend, Bingo. Photograph: Puspa Lohmeyer for the Guardian

His phone rings. More friends, more comedians, on their way; they’ll try to arrive while it’s still 9/11, which today is. Which reminds Stanhope to show me something he got on eBay, an old souvenir from the World Trade Center, a framed picture of the towers with “The closest some of us will get to heaven” written above. He likes eBay; he is currently selling off his collection of (American) football helmets to pay for the Fun House. He tried to sell his mother’s ashes on eBay too, until he was told it was illegal. Ashes count as human remains; it would basically be selling his mum’s corpse, for the purpose of comedy. There is very little no-go territory.

Stanhope was close to his mother. She used to review pornography on a TV show he was on called The Man Show. Now he has written a book about her and her death. She was terminally ill and killed herself. Stanhope may or may not have helped. He is an outspoken euthanasia enthusiast and says he would definitely take his own life in her situation.

Saturday

I didn’t make it to the arrival of the friends. They arrived in the night – Andy, Kirsty, Rico and more – and woke up in heaps around the place. We’re having breakfast at a local diner, underneath a mountain of slag from the old copper mine that is the reason for Bisbee’s existence. Suddenly, Stanhope and his friend Andy are snogging, tongues, scrambled egg, morning breath, everything. When they are done kissing, Stanhope explains, quietly, that the couple who just walked in wearing leathers are Christian bikers who were vocally opposed to the new local law allowing gay marriage. The mining is finished in Bisbee; it is now an outpost of artists, hippies, stoners, tweakers (crystal meth users), (relative) liberals, surrounded on all sides by proper gring rednecks. “Me and my husband would like to buy you breakfast,” Andy tells the Christian Bikers, who try to ignore the baiting.

After breakfast, Stanhope drives me to the supermarket. He buys vodka, five 1.75l bottles at $9 each, snacks and cut-price meat. At the checkout he covers up all the celebrity magazines with domestic titles, “so kids might one day grow up without knowing what a Kardashian or a Caitlin Jenner is, it’s brain rape”. He’s nice to the girls at the checkout, and chats to people he bumps into.

A little light relief … Stanhope has a break from drinking. Photograph: Puspa Lohmeyer for the Guardian

How does this friendly, neighbourly guy-about-town tally with the foul-mouthed misanthrope on stage? “I feel like I’m secretly a porn star, in that I have to kind of hide what I do on some level. I know that if they saw the sort of comedy I do, they wouldn’t think it hilarious. If they didn’t know me, and they saw it, they’d go: ‘That’s repulsive, how is that even called comedy?’ But now they’d just go: ‘That’s that nice guy from Safeway.’”

Which is the real him, Safeway Guy or Nasty Nihilist? “I’d rather it was the guy in Safeway, but that’s not good for business.” Even Mr Safeway is full of loathing, though. So far he has told me he hates Tabasco, children, Russell Brand, interviews, Caitlin Jenner, photoshoots, cops, listening to himself, LA, magicians and more. Is there anything he doesn’t hate? “I don’t have an answer for you,” he says, though later he will describe his friend Kristine as “a beautiful, soft-hearted woman,” which doesn’t sound like hatred to me. Does he think about death a lot? “Every morning when I wake up. Death, time left, stuff like that.” Will he die young? “I can’t imagine me at 80.”

There is a lot of death in his work and his life: his mum; a favourite cat named Trousers that died the other day; his and girlfriend Bingo’s musician friends Derek and Amy, aka Whiskey Man and Nowhere Girl, a couple who lived in the compound, in what is now called the Suicide House. She got lupus and died. He came home from hospital, said he was OK, then shot himself; Bingo found him with his head blown off. “Not good for someone who’s mentally ill,” says Stanhope (Bingo has been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder).

Stanhope did a couple of podcasts about the deaths of their friends (episodes 10 and 13 on his podcast). It’s some of his best material – dark and shocking, but also touching and very human at the same time. Bingo wears the bullethole – the bit of the wall the bullet went through after going through her friend’s head – around her neck in a pendant. “I wanted to put my spin on what I saw,” she tells me. “Like make it into the beautiful love story it was. He killed himself because he just didn’t want to be around without Amy.”

I’m talking to Bingo back at the house, while Stanhope makes smoothies. She wears colourful clothes, has blue hair, goes very well with their home. She is very open about anything. Is her boyfriend a misogynist? “I think that’s not understanding the joke, or seeing what he says and not getting to the end of the joke, the point of it all.”

What about her mental condition, what’s it like having it broadcast to all the world, which is what he does? “Once I got together with Stanhope, I had to learn that everything is now going to be public, and if I could not have handled that then this would not work. It was weird in the beginning and then it was incredible; I had to own up to who I am, it’s out there. It’s useful because now I can talk about it, it’s not a big deal.”

And what’s he like to live with? “It’s way more incredible than anyone would realise. He’s so fun and easy to live with. He’s hilarious, he wants to cook me breakfast all the time, he’s wonderful, wonderful.” As if to prove her right, Stanhope returns with the smoothies, which have rum in them – “just enough to kill the vitamins”. I thought smoothies sounded unlikely.

Stanhope has a drink and watches the football with friends in the Fun House. Photograph: Puspa Lohmeyer for the Guardian

The drinking starts around lunchtime, the weekend I’m there. And it carries on for the rest of the day. Steadily rather than spectacularly, Stanhope never loses control, though some of his friends are less able to stay together. Beside them, he actually looks pretty sorted. He doesn’t smoke marijuana, though almost everyone else does. And he trips only a few times a year. There are magic mushrooms in the freezer; his favourite method of intake is a Xanadu – crushed up mushrooms, Xanax ground to a powder, all mixed up in Jagermeister. I’m really hoping that smoothie wasn’t a Xanadu in disguise.

Stanhope podcasts with his comedian friends while I’m there. Andy talks about jerking off in abandoned buildings, his wife having Erdheim-Chester disease, and the DUI (driving under the influence) he got. Kristine talks about working in a porn shop, and her rheumatoid arthritis. Stanhopes friends are monumental screw-ups and deadbeats – also hilarious, potentially as successful as their host if they were a little more together. They’re also very welcoming and immensely good company. And they only have nice things to say about their host, disappointingly. There was the time Andy went to Florida to confront the man who abused him as a child, and Stanhope went along too – because it was an adventure and he might get something out of it, sure (podcast number ?? ). But also because he is, they keep saying, a good friend.

Sunday

It’s a big NFL day today and lots of people are coming over to watch the first big games of the season. I grab a bit more time with Stanhope before it all starts. Politics: he has been called a libertarian, right? “I was told I was a libertarian based on shit I said on stage, and I was like: ‘That’s fucking great, I’m one of those.’ For a minute I had some political beliefs and I loved the Libertarian party, but then I would get shit from the Libertarian party, for not being very libertarian.” Does he care who the next president is? “No, I don’t care about that at all. Hopefully not Trump. I’ll vote for the guy I want to watch.”

He does engage with the news though, wants to know what’s going on and will do topical stuff, but he’ll just do it in his own way. Isis, for example: it’s not about what they believe or what they’re doing, chopping heads off, he says; it’s about how he sees them as a threat in that they most probably attract the same kind of followers as he does. “We’re competing for the same demographic, through social media.”

He tells me about feeling a fraud. “I think it’s a general thing with comedians, the fact that you repeat yourself all the time. It’s meant to sound spontaneous, so people think: ‘Oh, this guy just says all this shit off the top of his head. And every time it’s either recreating it or reanimating that bit, trying to get that hate back. I know I hated it when I wrote it; right now it feels like fucking words coming out of my mouth.”

Will he go on and on? “If I have to. I’m not a guy that gets off on it. I don’t like going on stage, it terrifies me. Not like stagefright, but eventually everyone’s washed up. You can’t name many comics over 50 that are relevant. But, at the same time, if you get to a point where you’re Blue Öyster Cult and you have a fanbase, then maybe you’re happy.” Will he be the Blue Öyster Cult of comedy? “I might already be that guy.”

Nice guy … Stanhope with a friend. Photograph: Puspa Lohmeyer for the Guardian

Football time. Loads of people are here, the ones who were already here, and many more locals. Neighbour Dave, Uphill Dave, Reverend Derek , Castle Rock Kenny (he threatened to jump off Castle Rock, obviously), Ass Cancer Floyd with his ass cancer cushion, The Stalker …

Oh yeah, Stanhope has a stalker called Debora. Not a very adept one as it happens. She was a fan, went to see him a couple of times, listened to his podcast. “It made sense,” she tells me, he was saying things that she had been thinking. “He seemed so smart, and it made me think I’m not crazy.” When she split from her husband and was looking for a place to live, she decided on Bisbee. Because of what Stanhope said about it, admittedly, but not specifically to meet him, though she did move in right opposite … Anyway, it’s fine now. It was awkward with Bingo to begin with, now they’re all friends.

Bored with the football, I go with Kristine the seven miles to the border with Mexico to get cheap Prednisone for her arthritis (I did say it wasn’t glamorous). She is a little nervous so we stop at the gay 90s bar for a screwdriver before crossing. Another comedian, another screw-up, she is also hilarious. She tells me about marrying a man from Saudi Arabia who disappeared, leaving her with a daughter. She also tells me what an excellent friend Stanhope is. Everyone does. He’s generous and kind, hospitable, and likes to take care of people. I better stop, before his reputation is totally ruined.

Doug Stanhope’s UK tour starts in Glasgow on 2 October. For info go to www.dougstanhope.com

