Doug Stanhope Gives Comedy Fans Renewed Reasons to Subscribe to Seeso

That Johnny Depp would befriend Doug Stanhope makes perfect sense.

Depp, the eccentric movie star, not only played Hunter S. Thompson on the big screen in 1998 but also became such close friends with Thompson that he funded the journalist’s funeral following his suicide in 2005. Stanhope is the Hunter S. Thompson of stand-up comedy, blazing his own Gonzo trail across American bars and European theaters, fueled by booze, drugs and a passion for the truth we usually dare not speak about.

Depp is an executive producer on No Place Like Home, Stanhope’s new hour on Seeso and his strongest stand-up work in several years.

Since its launch, Seeso’s first forays into stand-up specials have embraced the so-called comedy nerds, booking their darlings such as Upright Citizens Brigade co-founder Matt Besser, Rory Scovel and Cameron Esposito.

Stanhope is no comedy darling. Even if he and Depp are BFFs. Fringe favorite? Maybe. Cult hero, maybe definitely.

Over the course of five years, Stanhope took on the challenge of recording a stand-up special on the fly in Oslo, took on rehabs and Dr. Drew Before Turning the Gun on Himself for Showtime, and first revealed the assisted suicide of his mother and other complicit actions in a Beer Hall Putsch for Netflix. He has since written about that and more from his youth in a new memoir, Digging Up Mother. All the while, he has lamented his diminishing lack of social relevance and mocked his own health.

He continues these themes in No Place Like Home, joking that if one of six Americans live below the poverty line, then four of six Stanhope fans live there. Five out of six if you count his friends and neighbors in Bisbee, Ariz., just north of the Mexican border. “My fan base, generally,” Stanhope jokes.

But don’t get it twisted. Americans use the term “broke” as if money wasn’t actually worth the paper it’s printed upon. “Our landfills are third-world bling,” he says. Stanhope acts out a scenario to illustrate how Americans prisons (say what you will about our justice system) feel like paradise compared to life behind bars in the third world, then jokes about how the difference allows him to segue to ISIS recruiting techniques.

Here Stanhope stands his ground, personally and professionally.

Disenfranchised, angry young men? “That’s my demographic. F— off, ISIS! I’m working this corner.”

He continues:
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Stanhope says he cares more about the angry, frustrated and disillusioned — the weird loner kids — than the terrorists occupying parts of Iraq and Syria, though. ISIS would do well to simply try to take credit for the mass murders that occur all-too frequently in America already.

Which, in turn, gives Stanhope a reason to segue into “the mental illness chunk” he really wants us as people to address. He acknowledges he’s oversimplifying by choosing to divide all of mental illness into two camps: one umbrella group for those disturbed; the other, developmentally disabled or challenged. Only the latter earns our societal sympathy, Stanhope argues. Our disturbed neighbors get kicked to the curbs, often literally left homeless and alone. Stanhope feels parents let themselves off the hook much too easily, claiming that having a child is a lifelong responsibility, and a gamble, too — he uses that analogy to explain how we shouldn’t have to cover your losses like a forgiving pit boss if your child goes bust. As for the mentally challenged, Stanhope knows it’s “unfashionable” to say “retarded” still in 2016, but he points out that a sign in nearby Douglas, Ariz., includes the term. And “retarded” only became the de facto term, replacing scientific diagnoses of moron and imbecile once we turned those words into slurs. If you pick another word, Stanhope says we’ll co-opt that, too. “You can make it as difficult to pronounce and Latin-based, and medical-rooted, and if you make it stick, that’s the new word I’m going to call my friend when he trips over his own shoelaces,” he says.

That’s not his point, anyhow.

“You have to take care of your crazy people. That’s the whole point of this,” he says.

An audience member helps Stanhope make the point, foolishly making a mockery out of his polling them to see if any of his fans struggle with mental illness. He notes with irony that Arizona “ranked 49^th in mental health care” while Gabby Giffords served as his U.S. Congresswoman before a mentally ill man shot her and killed others in Tucscon five years ago, and realizes “this might be a little touchy for the locals” in the audience as he jokingly suggests karma and more. Even now, though, as Stanhope’s longtime girlfriend “Bingo” seeks out care for her own mental health, he describes how she has to walk past a gun shop and a bar in a strip mall, into an office called CIA (for Community Intervention Associates) and talk to an RN over Skype who dispenses two-bit advice instead of medicine.

Then again, we live in an America where journalism has been corrupted by gossip, where TMZ has become a legitimate news source.

Stanhope argues that the Nazis could’ve rationalized the Holocaust for Jews if only to prevent Harvey Levin from living and creating TMZ (“He’s the Fagan of celebrity gossip.”), then jokingly backtracks. “Don’t worry, I’ll be apologizing for that joke tomorrow at noon at a press conference. It will be attended by absolutely no one.”

Stanhope would love to have to apologize for something, just for the attention, not that he would, and imagines his own “Aristocrats” meets the Duggar daughters act as perhaps the joke to give him that outrage. “Still wouldn’t get any press!” he claims (since filming this last winter, Stanhope briefly did make headlines and incur a lawsuit by jumping into the divorce fight between Depp and Amber Heard).

“I’m only famous within 100 feet of my show on the night of the show for a half-hour before and after,” he concedes, before admitting something even more disturbingly ironic: That Robin Williams had emailed Louis CK and told their mutual friend “that the Doug Stanhope episode of Louie was the most powerful dialogue I have ever seen on the subject of suicide.”

Stanhope’s reaction? “That’s nice! Pat on the back! Made me think perhaps even the lowly-rated Doug Stanhope might have influenced the great Robin Williams in the last days of his career. Maybe I am reaching people.”

Zoinks.

Before you can get offended, and really now, who stumbles into a Stanhope hour and decides more than halfway through it to take offense, the comedian references his previous Netflix special from 2014, and wonders wistfully that his closing bit – a homoerotic fantasy about NFL players – may have convinced Michael Sam to come out of the closet. The ubiquitous question reporters pitch at athletes, though, asking if they care if a gay teammate shares the showers with them, has Stanhope questioning why sports teams still shower together in the first place. What other corporate industry does that? (Spoiler alert: None, not even gay porn, Stanhope jokes, although he also could have scored bonus points by mentioning the stark reality of jailhouse bathrooms). If Beer Hall Putsch‘s closer served to help normalize homosexuality for kids struggling with their identity, what purpose does Stanhope’s mocking assertion in No Place Like Home that he’s actually transgender, yet unwilling to transition, serve? Other than to thumb his nose at intolerance, not much.

Dressed in earth tones of yellows and browns, with an old plaid jacket to match his tie in wardrobe he says he finds in Goodwills and Salvation Army outlets, Stanhope looks like a throwback and talks like a man from a future parallel universe.

Would that he were a time-traveler, shaking his head at the backwardness of our present society might explain his perpetual drunkenness and dumbfoundedness at the rest of our collective conventional wisdom. He maintains at the end that despite all of the hours of rants and rambling you’ve heard from him over the past quarter-century, he’s neither negative nor pessimistic. He merely knows that history has proven us wrong time and time again. So, perhaps Stanhope is as much Henry David Thoreau as he is Hunter S. Thompson, hearing his own drum and beating it for all of us to follow. In fact, he implores as much, using a football analogy to suggest you “kick like you kick,” and “Don’t be afraid to put it out there. Don’t be afraid to be wrong.”

Football is Stanhope’s sport of preference to watch, but onstage, he’s much more the wrestler, slamming ideas in our face and playing both to and against the crowd. In No Place Like Home, Stanhope makes the amazing turn from heel to face. After years of kicking himself down, he has become comfortable enough with how he kicks at a time when we need voices like his more than ever.

Could Stanhope be the new Face for Seeso? He already is.

Seeso just announced a 12-week series of stand-up specials to stream on its platform beginning next month. Stanhope’s special should give anyone reason enough to start their trial membership now.

[Watch Doug Stanhope: No Place Like Home on Seeso]

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.