And with that, is everybody ready for your headliner?
Artie, to his extreme credit, followed this wail of me being booed by opening with: “For the record, I agree with everything that Doug Stanhope just said.”
And to the extreme credit of the doorman whose many concussions on the college gridiron had left him without the ability for discretionary reasoning, he probably wouldn’t have let Artie in without a pass either, regardless of his face and name being on the side of the building.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR FEEDBACK. YOUR OPINION IS VERY IMPORTANT TO US.
The only show other than Iceland that I can remember doing sober in the last two decades was years before at Ohio University. It was coming off the heels of The Man Show. It was called the No Class Tour but it failed to meet my standards of “classlessness.”
I was headlining with Christian Finnegan, at that time known for the priceless “Real World” sketch from Chappelle’s Show, and Ed Helms, then a correspondent for The Daily Show and now known from The Hangover movies and probably a lot more.
There are a few invariables when it comes to working college gigs and the main one is that it is going to suck. There is a difference between playing a college bar in a college town versus playing at a college on campus that the college itself is paying for—out of tuitions the students will never be able to pay back. Student activities are for the kids too stupid to get a fake ID or for those who don’t find it amusing to watch a frat pledge drink himself into a coma chugging beer out of an enema bag. If you don’t find that funny, then you will not like even the lightest parts of my show.
Campus comedy was always a sad sack of downers, some with blank picket signs and a Sharpie waiting for you to say the wrong buzzword so they can tell you and the world why you’re an asshole. I’ve heard that it’s gotten far worse since I last did one.
The Ohio University show was doomed from the start. The show had been accidently listed under “Family-Oriented Events” on parents’ weekend, where parents were there to send their freshman sons and daughters into adulthood.
And since they weren’t serving alcohol at the show and I only had to do twenty or twenty-five minutes, I figured I’d do it without drinking. It would have gone even worse if I had.
I’ll give you a post that showed up online the next day.
From Ohio University’s website.
Family-oriented events offered by OU, Athens • University Programming Council welcomes Comedy Central’s “No Class” Tour to Athens. Comedians Doug Stanhope, of “The Man Show,” Ed Helms, a “Daily Show” correspondent, and Christian Finnegan, a stand-up comic, will share the stage at 8 p.m. at the Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium.
Audience Member Posting
(whoever didn’t do their research at OU is going to get shit on so hard…)
Hol-y fucking shit… that’s what I was saying to myself tonight.
Ok, picture this. Ohio University… Sold Out Comedy Central Show, about 3,000 people… It was 99% Freshman, and it was mom and dad weekend, where mom and dad came to visit their newly released into the college world kids.. It was mom and dad and kid every 3 seats.
I was thinking oh Doug MUST have a clean set, no way he would ever do his regular shit to these fragile people..
I was SOOO very wrong.
There was 3 comedians…
ED HELMS, from the Daily Show
CHRISTIAN FINNEGAN, His most recent thing I knew him from was Dave Chappelle’s Show..he was the dude from the “real World” skit that brought his girlfriend home and everyone fucked her.. Funny guy.
And DOUG.
We’ll when Chris went on and the first time he said “fuck” I saw about 50 people’s head flinch. oh yeh, this was going to be brutal.
Chris was very funny, but I could tell he held alot in..while not 100% clean, I still think he was censoring himself a bit..
Then Ed came on, he is VERY funny on the Daily Show, his set was good in parts but I think he was either not a frequent stand up, or he just had a off night… but still good stuff..
Doug was GOLD…. his best show I have seen yet, not because he did anything new, but because his balls grew 10 folds today..
HE WAS BRUTAL.. talking shit about college, scaring the parents, he was being as dirty as possible. But then he got into religion….
It was hard to watch, seriously.. it was like watching someone you knew get raped. About 1/3 of the people (about 1000 people) stood up and left, people were yelling, people were screaming…. it was awesome!
Parents wanted to leave, the kids begged to stay. After I saw a woman trying to get people to sign a petition to get a refund, security was worried for Doug’s safety, religious people were crying.. oh my god, what just happened…
We drove back to Columbus, and got wasted at their hotel bar, and talked about everything from cell phone plans to midgets, my lungs hurt from laughing and smoking. Doug was paranoid that he is going to get kicked off the tour from tonight.
Anyways, I have some poor quality media at…
The university responded to the post that the ticket count was actually about sixteen hundred and only about three hundred walked out. The video I saw showed several but one old stooge was close enough to be heard shouting loudly from the back at the exit, saying something to the effect of “This man is a sick fuck and any of you that stay and watch him are sick fucks too!” Nice way to talk in front of the children, sir.
The link is no longer there but I’m sure you can find it if you search hard enough. Or you could just ask Redban. He was the kid who wrote the post and made the flip phone–era video. He is the one who eventually became Joe Rogan’s videographer flunky and has now come into his own as the comedian Brian Redban. He is the creator of DeathSquad. They are like the Killer Termites only far more POWERFUL!
I’d tell you a story about a night that I killed, where I got a standing ovation in a sold-out theater. A night where everything went perfectly and made me feel strong and confident. But nobody wants to hear those stories. Those stories, like recounting dreams, are only interesting to oneself at best. I don’t even take pleasure in remembering them. My brother is a cook and I remember him telling me that, with meat, the fat is where the flavor is. I am a comedian and I will tell you that the suck is where the funny is, and the funny is the meat.
Let’s get back to sucking.
Hate mail is nothing out of the ordinary. I have a folderful. They were far more prevalent before people knew who they were coming to see. I used to sometimes fight with them. Then I’d just ignore them. Now I miss them. They were always fun when you had time to be creative with them.
From: “f*****” <*****@hotmail.com>
To:
Subject: APPLETON WISC
Date: Sat, 8 Apr 2006 16:20:12 -0500
I JUST WANTED OT TAKE A FEW MINUTES OF YOUR TIME TO LET YOU KNOW HOW UNHAPPY I WAS AT YOUR SHOW AT SKYLINE ON THE 7TH OF APRIL. YOU GUYS WERE TERRIBLE. I NEVER EVEN LAUGHED (NOT EVEN SMILED TO MYSELF)
I DONT KNOW HOW YOU GUYS THINK YOU ARE FUNNY. I THINK YOU WERE GETTING LAUGHS FROM THE DRUNKS THAT WOULD LAUGH AT ANYTHING. YOU ALL HAD GOOD DELIVERY, TIMING AND GOOD CHARISMA ON STAGE. (EXCEPT THE CHICK) SO I DO THINK YOU WILL GO PLACES BUT YOUR ACT NEEDS WORK.
THERE IS NOTHING FUNNY ABOUT 911. THE TSUNAMIE, ETC.
THANKS FOR LISTENING,
F
From: “doug stanhope”
To: *****@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: APPLETON WISC
Date: Sat, 08 Apr 2006 22:11:22 +0000
Dear F-
Thank you very much for your email. Your comments are taken very seriously and we happen to strongly agree with you on this matter.
As you are probably aware, The Skyline Comedy Club provides us with scripts each time we perform to insure that we present a new “act” every show. We were shocked to see some of the material we were asked to recite last night and argued fruitlessly with manag
ement to change or completely remove some of the more offensive and risque parts of the monologues. We also do not like the fact that we are forced to act as though we are intoxicated just to increase alcohol sales, a practice implemented by many comedy clubs.
I hope that you forward your thoughts onto the Skyline upper-echelon so as to bolster our own arguments. The fact that I am asked to poke fun even indirectly at 9/11 knowing that my friend Lynn Shawcroft, also on the bill, lost her brother-in-law in those tragic events - is insulting to me as an actor.
Please call Cliff or Pat at Skyline - 920 734 5653 and ask that we be allowed to go back to Thursdays script that dealt more with difficulties in relationships, Brokeback Mountain and Hooters restaurants - subject matter that is more palatable to the audience as well as ourselves.
Your friend,
Doug Stanhope
From:
Sent: Monday, April 10, 2006 12:14 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: APPLETON WISC
I AM SO SUPRISED TO RECEIVE SUCH A WELL WRITTEN RESPONSE. I THOUGHT YOU WERE AN DRUNKEN IDIOT. (HA-HA) I CANNOT BELIEVE YOUR COMMENTS. IS THIS TRUE?? IS THIS THE CASE WITH ALL COMEDIENS/COMEDY CLUBS???
I KNOW PAT AND CLIFF AND I WILL CALL THEM.
THANK YOU FOR NOT CALLING ME A C**T. I THOUGHT I WOULD GET THAT KIND OF RESPONSE. BECAUSE YOU ANSWERED SO ELOQUENTLY AND PROFESSIONALLY, THEN I CAN ASSUME YOUR WORDS AND THOUGHTS ARE TRUE.
THANKS FOR YOU TIME AND GOOD LUCK
F
What a cunt.
SUCKING ABROAD
I didn’t exactly say that Irishwomen are too ugly to rape but what I did say couldn’t have fit in such a beautifully succinct tabloid headline. And if what I had said onstage were that concise, the audience wouldn’t have had the time to boo me and shout me down like they did before I got to the point.
Kilkenny, Ireland, is a quaint village that, to my understanding, is somewhere in Ireland. Perhaps it is even the most quaint town in Ireland. I was there for five days and I will tell you that quaint turns into boring faster than lust turns into shame once you’ve ejaculated.
Quaint is good for writing a romance novel that is going to suck and nothing else. They say that if you’re bored, it’s because you are boring and I have no reason to say they are wrong. I realize on a daily basis that I have very few interests at all. In Kilkenny I found myself consciously trying to stop from complaining but I failed and it seemed that every utterance was straight from the mouth of Mother.
Ireland, as luck would have it, couldn’t stop complaining at the time either. They were what us city folk like to call “gone apeshit.” It seems the news of the day, which turned into the news of the week, had to do with a supreme court ruling that made for a small change in the statutory rape laws of the country.
As I understood it, it had been the law in Ireland that if you were convicted of banging someone under seventeen, you went directly to jail, no questions asked, even if you believed the person to be of legal age at the time. Upon my arrival, the courts had ruled that it was unfair not to let a defendant claim that it was an “honest mistake.”
Being that the drinking age was eighteen and that it is very common to have pubs serve those underage, this all seemed logical to me.
Problem was that—due to the court ruling—a convicted pedophile was released from prison pending a new trial and a few others were attempting to do the same. At the time there were only seventeen people in the entire country in prison whose cases could be affected by the new ruling.
They called the released pedo “Mr. A,” a pseudonym given so they might protect the identity of the accuser. Mr. A was on the cover of all the papers shown with a sport coat over his head and face as he was led from the courthouse. The cover stories of those newspapers sent you to the five or eight inside pages that covered the story or related stories until you thought that all of Ireland was under a siege of kid-fucking.
Mass protests in the streets and not just where this Mr. A had been let out on appeal. Across the entire country and even in quaint Kilkenny. They were all putting down their bottles and picking up their pitchforks—and then of course realizing they could hold their pitchfork in one hand and still bring the bottle. Idiots with bottles and pitchforks, not a one wondering why there was still cobblestone under their twentieth-century feet.
I do not in any way distort or embellish the level of frothing histrionics that had enveloped this country. From the moment I stepped off the plane, you would have thought rogue pedophile sleeper cells had flown hijacked planes into the asses of Ireland’s innocent youth.
People are easily swept into this brand of hysteria in almost equal line with their own boredom and how much their own lives suck. They need an enemy when the real enemy is their own poor choices. You didn’t even want to have that baby in the first place and now that child has got you anchored in this idyllic little hamlet, glued into a Groundhog Day existence. The only escape from your per diem reality of production and predictability is the newspaper, shot under your door daily like a prison kite.
The media gives them an outlet for their boredom and regret the way the lottery gives them their only hope. Today this paper encourages you to believe that one single guy—wearing a sport coat over his head whilst being trailed by a throng of paparazzi, no less—is a DEFCON 1–level risk of slipping into your shrubbery and cornholing your kid. That misplaced anger makes you feel adrenaline for the first time since you initially finger-thumped your now–old lady when you were both roller-skating and drinking pints at fifteen years old. Or however old she said she was. You take that anger to the streets with a cardboard sign, sure in your own head that this is making so much more of a difference in the world than you packing the bananas at whatever Irish version of the Piggly Wiggly.
I’d come to do the Kilkenny comedy festival and to my great fortune, this headline news segued perfectly into my favorite new material at the time. I’d already been developing a routine about all the Myspace/child predator fear-mongering in the US so it didn’t take too much coffee to rework the two into one long rant about people’s overreactions and delusions to the risk of their child taking unwanted cock.
I never actually said that Irishwomen are too ugly to rape. I did say in confidence to Hennigan as we walked down a quaint street from breakfast and looked at the ladies—that I’d be surprised if women this ugly get fucked at any age. But I never said it onstage. Too easy, not enough explanation.
I’d touched on the subject in the first show in Kilkenny, just using the current national crisis as a segue to previously written material. The audience fell stunned and silent so I went back to the drawing board and wrote even more about their specific situation.
The next night was where it really went downhill. Understand that this was before I had any following to speak of in Ireland and was working mixed-bill shows, several comedians of any genre on one show.
Comedy night. Like music night. Must all be the same.
The second night I was going up in front of beloved Irish comedian Dara O’Briain. I’d say that he was the Jay Leno of Ireland except for the fact that Dara is funny. I just mean that he was that well known from television and most everyone in the audience that night was there to see him. I’d once done a television show of stand-up comedy that he hosted in the UK, opening my set by admitting that I was blown out of my undershorts on Ecstasy. Anyone who’d ever been tripping in that fashion could tell by my eyes that I wasn’t kidding. By the time I got to the interview portion at the end of the show, I had to repeat to Dara that I wasn’t joking. I didn’t actually have to repeat it. I felt compelled to repeat it. Dara had to cut me off. Of course I was kidding, he told the audience. Doug is a comedian. Comedians make jokes. I didn’t begrudge him for trying to cover his own ass.
That night in Kilkenny, Dara was the main attraction. Not my problem. I started in on the rape issue, on the point of someone making an “honest mistake” and having inte
rcourse with someone they believed—or were misled to believe—to be of legal age. I ventured the idea that, as most of the women in Kilkenny were such misshapen pigs, if you were to actually fuck them, you would be more concerned the next morning about what species they were rather than what age. I proffered that one wouldn’t ever consider how old they were until days later when—still staring at it slumbering in the bed—you’d wonder, “How long can one of these things live?”
Now, maybe you’d think that’s just the same as saying that the Irish are too ugly to rape and perhaps it is, but I like my version better. The crowd did not and before I could segue into my own Myspace pedophile chunk, they were shouting me down in some unintelligible dialect where, although I couldn’t make out the words, I was aware of the intent. Impending violence is an international language.
On a brief aside, every time I’ve worked the UK and Ireland, the farther you get from the major cities or sometimes even in the heart of them, the harder it becomes to figure out what people are saying to you. Even though it’s the same language. Their common refrain is always: “We don’t have an accent! Yooooou have the accent!” I see your point. My point is that nobody on that block of misery has ever had to say to me: “I didn’t understand one fucking word that just came out of your mouth.” As I have to do all too often when people talk to me after shows.
You always understand what I am saying. I understand maybe a few words you say to me. Who doesn’t understand whose accent? Maybe you should adopt or at least mimic my accent. It seems to work more consistently. I mean, if you really want to communicate. The angry mob in Kilkenny did not.
The uproar at that show rose to a level where me having a microphone still gave me no advantage but I plowed on until a producer gave me the throat-slit hand gesture from the wings to shut it down. I was escorted out a back door for my safety and to the audience’s great delight.
This Is Not Fame Page 16