“Life is like a movie, if you've sat through more than half of it and its sucked every second so far, it probably isn't gonna get great right at the end and make it all worthwhile. No one should blame you for walking out early. ”

Standup comedy is the new punk rock. Patton Oswalt and co. came out with a documentary last year in which they toured through small pubs and bars across America in The Comedians of Comedy. David Cross did something similar in Let America Laugh, a made for DVD special in which he barely masks his contempt for Middle America, battling hecklers, drunks, stoners, and run down venues in dead industrial towns.

In the Netflix funded DVD documentary (which I shamelessly downloaded) Patton goes on to say how this is how he wants to reach younger audiences who aren’t able to pay for the two drink cover charge, and how this particular tour is his way of reaching a demographic that will eventually, hopefully pay dividends when they have more disposable income.

Pfft. What a sellout. If you want the genuine article, Doug Stanhope is your man; one of America’s most fascinating freaks. He’s a rare species: a confident drug user, has been himself for the last decade and a half, covering the most dangerous territories in standup comedy, and winning against the stratified sensibilities of his bovine audience.

Stanhope doesn’t rage against Middle America like the other merchants of cool, he’s not a pro-democrat like Cross or Oswalt. Doesn’t make fun of racial stereotypes like Russell Peters, he’s not a leftist like Robert Newman with a faux concern for the environment. Next to him, Lewis Black’s rage seems pathetic and childish. Because they all seem to miss the point, in some flawed way. The American political landscape is divided into two very narrow spectrums, both extremely limiting to the real problems that ail America. None of these guys talk about the erosion of civil liberties, oligarchic control of media, increasing corporate control, and the sheer hopelessness of a social system where consumption is the only route to happiness.

Stanhope takes most of the staple bipartisan issues that have been floating around for more than 40 years and tears them apart, his stands are more argumentative, and strike at the root of the problem.

Gay Marriage: “Marriage should not be a legal institution!”

Priest Molestation: “The real abuse is the horrifying shit the priests put inside your head when you’re young. Cause that shit will stay with you long after the semen has been washed off!”

Chemical weapons in Iraq: “It’s a WAR faggot! There are no rules to it! And if you have a problem with me using the word faggot, I’ll suck your dick. It’s an important word to me.”

Terrorism: “I’m thinking of using my mother as a suicide bomber.” (This bit is really good, so I’ll spare you details, cause every sentence is a punchline)

Medical Marijuana: “If veterans are going to get government subsidized bong hits of some dirt weed, I want mushrooms at Walmart! Start the argument where it starts: I have the right to do what ever the hell I want to my own body, if it kills me slowly, happy for me, fuck you, "clack clack" (miming a pump-action shotgun) stop me!”

To me, his finest hour comes in a comedy bit in which he defends child pornography by arguing against what it’s really about: censorship on the internet. “If severed heads on rotten.com are okay, why is child pornography the only violent crime that you’re indicted for merely watching? What if I find child pornography hilarious? What if I jack off to COPS?!"

Hunter S Thompson dealt with the limitations of journalism by abandoning all pretenses of objectivity, when he took on Nixon: “I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn't quite reach the lever on the voting machine.” Stanhope advances most of his arguments by abandoning all pretenses of virtue. And it works. “Your sins make you more interesting,” he says, and peppers his social satire with the crudest of dick jokes and graphic accounts of sexual misadventures with transvestites, midgets, dildos, and vibrating anal beads.

The true practitioners of free speech in America suffer persecution in a different way: anonymity. Big media doesn’t just limit you with 7 words you can’t say on television, it limits you by making you a part of the assembly line, and once you’re a cog in that wheel, it’s very hard to come up with original material. Doug Stanhope quit his gig for a frat boy driven The Man Show in disgust, and chose to go back to small time gigs. This about-face he attributes to a psychedelic trip, in a bit about good drugs and bad drugs: “The bad drugs are those that you can do, and forget about, the next morning. The good drugs give you experiences that stay with you. Once you’ve had DMT, and understood everything, seen the universe as a sea of information, and your place in it… it’s very hard to get back to work on an episode of The Man Show next morning.”

Stanhope has often been compared to Bill Hicks, and it’s true because both chose anonymity over watered down mass market entertainment. In terms of content however, Stanhope’s method, delivery, ideology, is completely different. And the big difference between the two is that Stanhope, surprisingly, is still alive. He’s one of the liveliest people I can think of, the kind of person who’d say stuff like “Irish women are too ugly to rape.”, and get booed of stage instead of dealing with the boredom of repeating himself in his standup routine.

Stanhope’s discography is a great marker of his personal evolution, and Deadbeat Hero is one of his finest albums. It’s classified in the music category on Amazon, and shares one quality with good music. You can listen to it over and over again.