Fans of Stanhope, the caustic comedian considered by Louis C.K. and Ricky Gervais (among others) as one of the best in the business, know that it wasn’t any single event that made him a boozer. In his garish thrift-shop suits, he stalks the stage with his ubiquitous cocktail in hand, flaunting taboos and grousing about the things that irk him, which is nearly everything.

The first time Doug Stanhope returned to do his audacious brand of stand-up comedy in Worcester, where he grew up, his father came to the early show. With the pastor of his church.


As a comedian, he’s had some pretty good fortune, beating out fellow Massachusetts native Dane Cook to win the prestigious San Francisco Comedy Competition in 1995. Since then he’s released a steady stream of albums and TV specials and had his share of TV gigs, cohosting a couple seasons of “The Man Show” and making a memorably bleak guest appearance as a suicidal comedian in a classic episode of “Louie.”

Now Stanhope, 49, has written a memoir rooted in his Worcester childhood and his unique relationship with his late mother, Bonnie, a free spirit who encouraged her incorrigible son’s every wayward move. The book is just as candid, wickedly funny and bound to offend as his stage act. It’s called “Digging Up Mother: A Love Story.”

Bonnie, who died in 2008, gave Stanhope all the support he needed to launch his career as a cynical, unrepentant comedian. She also gave him some killer material, in the form of her own death.

Terminally ill with emphysema, Bonnie set up camp in Stanhope’s living room in Bisbee, Ariz., where he now lives. She’d always encouraged the younger of her two boys to live as he saw fit. Now she was ready to take her own advice — by pulling the plug on her own life.


“The great part about being a comedian is, everything in your life that’s crappy” — actually, he used a different word — “is good material,” he says on the phone from his home. You make the best of the hand you’re dealt. In Stanhope’s case, you make dark comedy.

That sort of fearlessness has drawn some notable admirers. In a foreword to the book, Johnny Depp calls Stanhope “the one man who dares to plunge the cold dagger of truth” into our collective psyche. Depp, who is developing a project that will showcase the comedian, compares him to the late journalist Hunter S. Thompson, with whom he shares “a profoundly strong sense of moral justice.”

A high school dropout, Stanhope sometimes resorted to living out of cars before he found the stage. Since settling in the small border town of Bisbee, a couple of hours from Tucson, he’s come into his own, setting up a colorful, off-kilter home like a very adult version of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, with a fully stocked bar as its centerpiece. On the heels of the book, he’ll roll out his latest stand-up special, “No Place Like Home,” taped last fall before a theater audience in Bisbee. (At press time, Stanhope was waiting to get word from one of the premiere streaming services.)

As he writes in the book, he owes it all to his mother. At one point she got a letter from the Worcester Youth Guidance Center expressing concern about Douglas. She didn’t bother to respond.


“Mother knew that it was all wasted time trying to explain that a twisted sense of funny wasn’t a mental deficiency or a desperate cry for help,” Stanhope writes. Years later, he used the letter in his promotional kit.

From a young age, Stanhope was more than the typical class clown, says his brother, Jeff: He was utterly unafraid of offending his audience.

“A lot of his earlier stuff was strictly to annoy me,” says Jeff, who lives outside Providence. “I ended up tossing him around a lot.”

They’ve had vastly different lives. Jeff, a cook, blues guitarist, and ex-Marine, has two children approaching adulthood. Stanhope, who lives with his girlfriend Bingo, took his niece to Australia for her 18th birthday, to buy her her first drink.

“I try to corrupt her, but she has no interest,” he grumbles.

When Stanhope finds himself in Worcester these days, he’ll stop by Ralph’s Diner, or Hot Dog Annie’s in Leicester.

“I’ll go to Friendly’s and have a Fishamajig,” he says. That’s where he used to spend the days he was supposed to be in school, drinking coffee.

Jeff Stanhope, who says he takes after their late, straight-arrow father, holds no resentment about his brother’s close relationship with their mother.

“They were a matched set,” he says. He also has no problem with the way his mother ended her suffering — an overdose of morphine washed down with White Russians.


“There’s nothing all that sacred about death,” Jeff says. “You take control of your own situation and make it a story. That’s much more valuable than any of your possessions.”

Still, it took Stanhope years to grow comfortable telling his mother’s story onstage.

“It took a long time to develop into a working bit,” he says. “Initially, I didn’t want to sound like I was happy to capitalize on this moment. I also didn’t want to make it melancholy. I don’t want you to cry.”

Sentimentality would be the last thing he’d want to be accused of. But he does agree that his own story sounds a lot like Lenny Bruce’s love for his mother, Sally Marr, a burlesque show host who had no qualms introducing her son to “the life” of the nightclubs.

Though Stanhope thinks he’s dyslexic, he plowed through “Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce!!,” Albert Goldman’s salacious biography of the late comedian, when he got started in comedy.

“That’s the longest book I’ve ever read,” he says.

In the early years, Stanhope studied the usual masters. Richard Pryor was a big influence. But he also learned a lot from a regional headliner who called himself Captain Rowdy, a XXX-rated comic who fashioned his act in the mold of belligerent ’80s comedians such as Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay.

Captain Rowdy wore leather chaps and his hair in a Mohawk, “even after he started male-pattern balding,” Stanhope recalls. Afflicted with diabetes in middle age, he had a gruesome mishap after falling asleep with his numb feet resting on a heater. It’s the kind of awful happenstance Stanhope can’t help but see as a source of black humor.


These days, young comedians often seek advice from Stanhope just as he sought it from Captain Rowdy and the late Mitch Hedberg, with whom he toured quite a bit. He doesn’t feel qualified to offer it.

“I haven’t ‘started out in comedy’ in 25 years,” he says. “What am I going to tell you — send a VHS tape to a booker? In the mail? Oh, and have your pager with you all the time.”

In his book, Stanhope claims he couldn’t wait to get out of Worcester. But his brother thinks otherwise.

“I think he has a lot of fond memories,” he says. “We just have a twisted version of what fond memories are.”

James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.