The comedian Doug Stanhope at his home in Bisbee, Arizona. Photograph by Chris Hinkle / The New York Times / Redux

In the years since my first visit, in 2011, to the home of the comedian Doug Stanhope, in Bisbee, Arizona, for what his manager called “the conversion experience,” Stanhope has asked me to keep only two things off the record: his own, unrecorded material, and how much he pays his opening acts on tour (a good deal more than many of his comedy peers). No subjects are off limits—his mother’s suicide, his vasectomy, his failed attempts to quit smoking. (He once isolated himself in a trailer, called it “Tin Can Rehab,” and podcasted his rangy nicotine-starved self.) Stanhope doesn’t spare show business any more than he spares himself, or anything else. He loves pranks, especially those that require legal help. He leans libertarian and revels in dissecting hypocrisy and the American passion for blaming others. When Gawker recently published a piece about rumors of a very famous comedian’s alleged bad behavior, Stanhope happily claimed, via Twitter, that he was the culprit.

Stanhope is best known in the United Kingdom, where he has appeared as the Voice of America on Charlie Brooker’s “Weekly Wipe,” a popular news satire. Although Stanhope is admired by comedians and comedy connoisseurs, in the United States he’s still considered underground. His core demographic—disenfranchised white men, known as the Killer Termites—are of real interest to the media now.

Stanhope’s most permanent stage is the FunHouse, a large tin cube in the back yard of his home, at 212 Van Dyke Street, in Bisbee. With its cartoon Ka-Pow! aesthetic, the FunHouse serves as a sports bar, comedy club, flophouse, and podcast studio. A recent visitor, who arrived on foot, was a wandering minstrel named Cave Magghie. (She and her ukulele found a cave in Bisbee for a temporary home.) Earlier this year, Magghie played a tune on his podcast, and she maps her hitchhiking to catch Stanhope’s shows when she can. Other regulars at the FunHouse include Bisbee friends like Floyd, who survived anal cancer. (Stanhope live-podcasted the goodbye party he threw on behalf of Floyd’s departing body part.) Stanhope’s comedy, often debauched and obscene, can be silly; this month, he hosts the FART Festival—an art festival, with an “F.” (“Just an excuse for a party,” he said.)

In August, Stanhope went to Las Vegas to celebrate his twenty-fifth anniversary in comedy at the Dive Bar, the space where he performed standup for the first time. His intimates—who included Bisbee neighbors and a motley collection of comedians self-named the Unbookables—convened at a casino called the Plaza, on the old Strip downtown, miles from where the action is. It was unlikely that the Plaza had ever been a hot spot, even before the city moved on and left it behind, but hotness is not a priority among the Stanhope crowd.

“Everything’s supposed to work here, but it doesn’t, and it’s still great,” Stanhope said, after discovering that his poolside suite wasn’t a suite and that access to the pool ended at 6 P.M. By the time I arrived, on Friday night, the non-suite had already been set up as the weekend’s well-stocked, if low-budget, bar. The Styrofoam cooler was the only container larger than the bottles of cheap vodka. The anniversary show was scheduled for Sunday night, but I knew from experience that the stage isn’t where the fun begins.

Before I had even checked in, I found myself dancing to the Wonder Boogie Band in a small lounge in the casino with Stanhope and an Unbookable named Andy Andrist, holding a drink someone placed in my hand. Andrist, a blond Oregonian, was wearing a white suit jacket much like those of the members of the Wonder Boogie Band—except that he was in silk pajama bottoms and sneakers instead of bell-bottoms and sequined platforms, and he didn’t have a fake Afro. The cocktail waitress working the roulette table where Stanhope settled after dancing was so frail that she not only couldn’t remember drink orders but also had trouble walking, one knee turned painfully inward, as if she were balancing on warped stilts. Her wig was a bob with bangs. When Stanhope’s suggestion that she write down the orders she kept mistaking was ignored, he cheerfully called for drinks for everyone, paying the waitress, and then giving away whichever ones he didn’t order until he tried again on the next round. His roulette strategy was similar: he asked everyone for a favorite number, then played them. (By morning, when he gobbled down a shredded-beef taco at the food court, followed by the last of the double-digit number of cocktails and a Xanax, he was twelve hundred dollars up.)

Stanhope wants people to open up to the absurdity of life by engaging with the ugliness and pain in their midst. Andrist, his unbridled companion, suggested we take a stroll on the Fremont to find someone upon whom he could bequeath the Screwdriver that Stanhope didn’t want. Fremont, where the first casino was built, had been “revitalized” by local investment: a pedestrian mall with a light show and stages that hosted bands with names like Spandex beneath a zip line spiriting tourists launched from Slotzilla, a huge slot machine that appeared in the constructed sky. The ground beneath them included the Heart Attack Grill, where anyone over three hundred and fifty pounds eats free, and the waitresses wear nurses’ uniforms. The local investors renamed the mall the Fremont Street Experience.

Beyond it, modern investors were creating an experience of an apparently different kind: a trailer park of fine tiny homes and vintage Airstreams sheltered some of Zappos’s top brass. That weekend, the lot was as silent as the desert. (A neighborhood clerk told me that the trailer-park tenants had decamped for Burning Man.)

Approaching showtime on Sunday, after some drinking in the Vegas sunshine, the performers passed through the Dive Bar kitchen. Cocaine and prescription pills bolstered some of the middle-aged for what would inevitably be a very long night. The club was stifling, standing room only for the hundred and seventy-five people—twenty-five of them friends—who formed the crowd. The plywood walls were covered with band stickers. The show comprised Stanhope; four Unbookables; Geechy Guy, the Guinness World Record holder for the most jokes told in an hour, and Mat Becker, who co-owned the largest bar in Anchorage, Alaska, and is one of Stanhope’s closest friends.

“Make it up as we go along,” Stanhope said, when asked about the order of the lineup by Greg Chaille, his road manager, who had a shock of hair like dune grass. “The show is just chaos, us fucking around.”

Much about Stanhope had stayed the same since he stood onstage twenty-five years earlier, although the Dive Bar had been named the Escape Lounge, Too. Back then, the stage had been behind the bar, so that Stanhope had to project past it, over the din of video-poker machines. Now there was a sound guy and a microphone. Two of Stanhope’s friends from his telemarketing days were there, one of whom was now polling Democrats. The Unbookables behaved as usual, each doing his own thing, and only collectively teasing the fan in the front area who was in a wheelchair. (Stanhope christened him the “para-Olympian of the bar” and ordered him a drink). Stanhope read aloud from his set from twenty-five years ago, which was funny mainly because it contained the DNA of the comedian he would become. Today, instead of living out of his ’84 Oldsmobile Cutlass, Stanhope has a road manager and a 2016 Chevy Suburban to carry merchandise “MC Hammer-style,” as Stanhope put it, in the parking lot outside. There were CDs, DVDs, T-shirts, and posters from a prolific touring career; a new memoir; and the usual stolen Bibles signed by Stanhope, which sold for thirty dollars.

People hung out, enjoying themselves, for well over an hour. Cave Magghie had made it, and, with Stanhope’s urging, as he continued signing autographs, she performed “The Gentrification Song.” The night’s very drunk girl, who kept slipping to the ground from the hands of the two men who tried to hold her, managed a slack smile when they put her near Stanhope for a photo. The party continued in the non-suite past dawn.

Stanhope created a life away from Hollywood because he wanted to speak freely and live as he chooses. His brand is his particular honesty. Television, which has changed more than he has in the past quarter century, is a platform that is willing to host him now. Seeso, a comedy-streaming service on NBC Digital, released “No Place Like Home,” Stanhope’s fourteenth special, on Thursday. It probably doesn't hurt that Johnny Depp was an executive co-producer. The new hour covers poverty, ISIS, and mental illness, for starters. It was taped among Stanhope’s neighbors and friends at a local home-town theater, the Bisbee Royale.