I checked his Wikipedia page and under the heading “Influences” I’d hoped to see “cocaine” or “Drambuie.” It only mentioned Saturday Night Live.
Should my berating of his brand of comedy go the way of Dr. Drew and Jon Taffer and lead to an invite to be on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, I’ll decline in advance. But I’d drink and do blow with that kid anytime. Blow that is cut with pabulum, like his jokes.
I used to want to drink with Chelsea Handler. I don’t even know where she came from. I never heard her name or crossed paths with her in the small world of stand-up comedy even when I was in the heart of it in Los Angeles. Then one day she was famous. And she was a drinker who celebrated it. I wanted to drink with her.
So it happened that I was invited to be a guest on her show, Chelsea Lately, which I agreed to only because she seemed like a cool broad. I had as much business appearing on a celebrity gossip roundtable as I would being on the MacNeil/Lehrer Report.
I rolled into LA straight out of a Death Valley party, dressed in a filthy 1970s baby-blue suede jacket and a tie because I wanted Chelsea to know that I was professional. I still had a pocket full of mushrooms of questionable integrity that someone had given me. I only traveled with them because they were ground up and put into capsules that I carried in a jar of psyllium husk capsules. I overthink things sometimes. My comedian friend Lynn Shawcroft was in tow and the perfect bad influence when I suggested that we eat these mushrooms posthaste before the taping. Lynn never thinks I have bad ideas. Lynn was also perfect to be with, as I was about to go on a gossip show knowing absolutely nothing about pop culture. Lynn reads any tabloid rag she can find and probably eats lots of psyllium husk just so she can shit more often in order read them on the toilet.
We drank our sneaky drinks in the greenroom waiting to see if the mushrooms would kick or if we’d even be able to tell based on the residuals we were already riding. Shawcroft was trying to fill me in on the claptrap that was the tabloid news of the day in a ridiculous attempt to prep me for a show where I was completely unqualified. She was teaching the tango to an amputee moments before Dancing with the Stars. Dave Navarro was on the show and came into the greenroom. I blame him for killing the buzz. Something is wrong when you feel out of line for being drunk and on drugs around someone else’s rock-and-roll hero. By then he was doing a lot of reality television while keeping the rock-and-roll eyeliner. Maybe the buzzkill was just the fact that we were both doing a basic cable celebrity gossip show and only one of us was taking it seriously.
Chelsea stuck her head in at some point and thanked us for being there. Noticing my grotesque suit, she sneered: “Thanks for dressing up.” I couldn’t tell if she was being a funny cunt or just a cunt. Sometimes you have no choice but to trust your paranoia. I don’t remember a word I said on the show but I know they were few and far between and inappropriate when they finally came. I left knowing that there was little chance the public would clamor for me to return to the show or that Chelsea and I would be going out for a drink.
I googled “doug stanhope chelsea handler” to try to find the date of that show. In the results I found a podcast featuring a comedian named Dustin Ybarra. The topics of the podcast included “Chelsea Handler” and “The time Doug Stanhope…” It didn’t ring a bell. I fast-forwarded through the podcast waiting to hear my name, the same way most comedians listen to podcasts. When I got to it, I realized I’d already had the story in my notes for this book. I just couldn’t remember his name.
Funny how shit works.
His name is Dustin Ybarra.
Please hold.
THE OPENING ACT SHOULD ALWAYS BE FUCKED WITH. TAKE IT WELL. IT MEANS YOU ARE ONE OF THE GROUP.
The only opening act that I ever remember fucking with because I didn’t like him was in my early mullet days doing a rural one-nighter in Farmington, New Mexico. I was with an ex-girlfriend and I’d played this dump before. These were always live-or-die gigs where the only friend you could count on was the other comedian, who was rarely anyone you’d met beforehand. This night it was some fat kid who looked like any overweight gamer who, when you talked to him, acted like you were rudely interrupting him while he was staring at the carpet.
I made every overture to make him feel comfortable and let him know he could hang out with us, even after we both took the beating onstage and nobody else was fighting for our attention. I thought he was an asshole when he probably just had social anxiety issues. He didn’t have the clout to be an actual asshole.
We were staying in some old U-shaped motor lodge in side-by-side rooms. When my lady and I pulled in late that night, I meticulously parked within a half inch of his driver’s side door, a tiny Honda or something similar that would barely fit him much less his luggage. We giggled like drunken sailors. By that I mean that we giggled like our beloved veterans of the United States Navy who, while risking their lives for our freedom, snuck up under the woolen sheets of a sleeping berth in a submarine and sniffed Wite-Out from one another’s ass-chambers. We giggled in the same fashion and it wasn’t even Veterans Day.
In the morning, we got up early and called his room. I put on what would now be considered a very racist and stereotyped Indian accent but back then would have been just a very believable impression of the Patel-motel mafia front-desk people.
“Hello, will you be checking out today?”
He fumbled with his internal clock and then noticed the time.
“Huuuhhhm, whuuu? Wait a second… it’s only nine o’clock in the morning???”
“Oh, yes. New policy. Nine a.m. checkout.”
We could hear the blubber-flunky through the adjoining motel door as he went into fits, slam-packing his bags in frustration. We peeked through the curtains watching him come outside and realize in theatrical exasperation that he would have to plow his fat ass through the passenger-side door and lumber sideways, wiggling around to get into the driver’s seat.
I got a call later on from the booker, chastising me for being mean to the opening act. I cried ignorance to any of it. Never heard his name again.
Snitches get day jobs.
Tim Mitchell was no snitch. He was a team player but a rookie nonetheless. He was a Minneapolis comedian back in the day when it was a scene. He could give as good as he could take and better. I was there on a night off for open-mic night at the Acme Comedy Club. The manager at the time was his roommate. He told me that Tim kept all of his joke notes on his computer. This was in the days before the Internet. Tim was the kind of guy who may have actually built his own computer from thrift-store electronics. For all I know, he may have built the Internet to go with it. He was that smart and that stupid for letting his roommate know how to gain access to all of his jokes.
His roommate went in and printed off everything that Tim Mitchell had ever thought of doing onstage. Not just his bits but all the premises he’d just noted as perhaps one day being funny. The manager made sure that on open-mic night he had to follow me. I went onstage and blew through all the bits that I’d already known of Tim’s. Then I pulled out the sheets of paper that had been printed off and burned through every premise machine-gun style, preventing him from even riffing.
He followed me with an empty wallet. I’d bankrupted his entire vault. I did not find out until afterwards that he had old friends in the audience who were visiting from Ireland. This was the only time they were ever going to see him perform comedy live onstage.
In the moment he told me that, I felt kinda bad. But in the long run, that’s the only reason I remember the story. For the deep-track fan, you may also remember Tim Mitchell’s name from a bit called “Rubber Fuck-My-Face” on my obscure first DVD titled Word of Mouth. The story itself might sound more familiar still from an HBO special recorded years later by a comedian who wasn’t me, who changed a few details and didn’t have the courtesy to mention Tim Mitchell.
Dustin Ybarra could take a joke. Eventually.
Bingo and I were working a week at the Addison Impr
ov with Brendon Walsh. I’ll pause to tell you that a “week” in a comedy club generally means four days and that the Addison Improv is generally referred to as the “Dallas” Improv, much to the chagrin of neighboring Addison where it is located. I will also add that when I say Bingo and I were working that Bingo doesn’t go onstage. She does a million other things like write down new bits or tags that I riffed and wouldn’t otherwise remember, facilitate introductions with people I’m only pretending to remember and help sell merch, including one night at the Addison Improv where she followed a crying bachelorette party that had walked out of the show into the lobby. As the bride-to-be wailed and her friends demanded a refund, Bingo asked straight-faced if they’d like to purchase a DVD as a memento of their special evening.
By this time on the road we were generally dressed in ridiculous thrift-store garb during shows just to break up the monotony of doing comedy. Addison was no different. One night might be pajamas, the next night maybe Chinese waiter uniforms and we never addressed it onstage. It was only for our own amusement.
Our opener was a local kid, this Dustin Ybarra. On the penultimate night—big word, look it up—he asked us if we always dressed in ridiculous outfits. I told him that in fact we did. Every night. I told him that the next night—the final night—we would close out on “Depends Night” where we would all wear adult diapers onstage without ever making comment about it. We were gracious enough to invite him to participate and be part of the gang. Dustin was happy if not very nervous to be included in our reindeer games.
We all dressed up in our adult diapers pre-show in the greenroom and giggled. Dustin didn’t know that we were giggling at him rather than with him. Or we were giggling for him since he was having such a hard time composing himself. This poor, tubby fuck had no chops for this. He was so new to comedy that he was lucky to remember all of his words in a row. Making him open the show in a diaper and expecting him to not mention it was preposterous. He muscled through and never made excuses despite the fact that it ruined his act. He never mentioned the adult diaper.
We missed a bit of his show while we were retreating back into the greenroom to change back into our regular clothes. We’d had no intention of doing “Depends Night.” We just knew that he wouldn’t say no. Dustin concluded his death-set and introduced the next act to the stage. The following act breached the blind zone of stage lights where Dustin could actually see the performer fully dressed and frowning at him for his silly diaper.
Dustin didn’t take it well. He found me backstage laughing myself into an emphysema cough. And then he started to chase me with violence in his eyes, a violence that he could not have actually delivered were it not for the level of humiliation he’d faced. He was as fat as I was easily winded and the chase ended after a short sprint.
Eventually we talked him down and explained that our fuck-with made him part of the group. That made him happy. It wasn’t until the Google search and listening to that podcast that I remembered that we hid his clothes while he was onstage floundering in a diaper. I’d forgotten that he still had to go up in between each comedian in the diaper. Without ever mentioning it. The kid had heart and those are the stories you remember.
At least parts of them.
SERIOUSLY FAMOUS
I had a new special, Before Turning the Gun on Himself, coming out on Netflix in 2012. It used to be that when you’d record any CD, DVD, TV special, etc. there would be at least six months or so downtime while they edited, where you could start working on new shit before the release. You can’t put out a special and then go back on the road doing the same stuff. That is unprofessional, according to me, the only person who does my act and therefore the only person who can be the arbiter of what professionalism means in said job.
Problem was that technology had sped up and the special was put out before I had time to make new shit work. That August we booked two weeks in Canada with the new special due to drop near the start of the second week. This gave me a little over a week to stitch together a new hour. I don’t mean a good hour. I mean any hour. I frantically cobbled together any bits that hadn’t been included on the last recording with old bits that I’d never quite worked out, wrote anything I could about whatever current events were happening and added a heavy peppering of anything I could riff. Anything about the town, the hotel, the neighborhood or the venue. Anything short of pointing to the guy in the front row and saying, “Nice shirt.” There wasn’t a waking moment that I didn’t have a notepad in my hand and the news or a newspaper in front of my face. Like your digestive tract, in comedy you have to feed your head a lot when you know you’ll be having to pull things out of your ass later on.
If I had a lesion for every time I’ve heard a comic say, “The day that comedy starts to feel like work to me, I’ll quit,” I’d have no remaining skin. Comedy felt like a lot of fucking work to me that week and in similar circumstances a thousand times before and since.
The new/old pebble-stone amalgamation of material flew fine for the first two nights, as I spent my time writing and rewriting on yellow legal pads. Then I got an email from a big-dick LA agency saying that “one of our clients is trying to reach out to Doug Stanhope. What is the best way to go about this?”
I paid little mind to this and let Hennigan field it. He loves big-dick LA shit. And I had a notepad of jokes to remember. Just before the show as I was waiting in the wings—wings being the piss-caked alley of a rock venue—Hennigan texted me.
“Evidently Johnny Depp will be calling you. I have no further information.”
I texted back: “Whaaaaaa?”
Hennigan replied.
“Evidently Johnny Depp will be calling you. I have no further information.”
Funny cunt.
Eight minutes to showtime. I’m staring at my notes but all I could think was “Why the fuck would Johnny Depp need to talk to me?”
That night I went up and immediately addressed the Johnny Depp email. There was no joke and the bits that followed from the yellow legal pad suffered as a result. I didn’t care. I was consumed by why the fuck Johnny Depp wanted to “reach out” to me.
Meanwhile, I had to keep my phone on. Johnny Depp might be calling at any minute. If he called in the middle of my show, I could take it on speaker phone and kill ten minutes of stage time. However, he did not call during the show. But in the days afterwards, it seemed like everyone else did.
Like anybody that drinks and makes false promises in the heat of a forgotten moment, I don’t answer unknown phone numbers. But now it was a whole new circumstance. Now I was compelled to answer any and all calls from blocked numbers or odd area codes, never knowing if it might be Johnny.
Ring-ring.
“Hello?
“Hey, this is Cousin Joe from the Cousin Joe Podcast! Can you do my podcast?”
Fuck me.
Days went by and still no call from Johnny Depp. What could he possibly want? If it were for some acting role, it would all go through agents. I suck at acting so I knew it couldn’t be that. Maybe he has a role where he’ll be playing a haggard and crouched alcoholic comedian and wants to do a ride-along with me to see what makes that character tick. Maybe he wants a ride to LAX. Nobody wants to do that.
I was a forty-five-year-old man, feeling the phantom pains of his own amputated last legs. I shouldn’t be spending my time daydreaming about Johnny Depp like a fat teenage girl staring at his 21 Jump Street poster over my bed. Especially then when I needed to concentrate on my show. Jokes. New shit. I’d like to think that I’m too cool to really care why Johnny Depp would want to talk to me but that wasn’t the case.
You have to understand that Johnny Depp had as much reason to be calling me as he would have to be calling you. Imagine that you’re at work—cutting hair or milking cats or whatever you do—and when you come back from your lunch break, Millicent at the front desk tells you that Tom Cruise stopped by to talk to you and said he’ll come back.
Tom Cruise left no reason for
the visit and no time when he’ll return. How long would it be before you’re gonna be able to concentrate on a crossword puzzle?
Days more and I started to get paranoid that maybe someone was just fucking with me, maybe payback from someone I’d pranked. Anyone can send off an email saying they’re some fat-cocked Hollywood agent and get you all worked up and confused. It sounded like something Brendon Walsh would do to me. And then I thought that if it wasn’t a Brendon Walsh hoax, then I would definitely remember the brilliant simplicity of the gag and do it to him. I imagined Walsh calling me to tell me how he’d gotten an email that Harrison Ford wanted to come to his birthday party, while me and my friends were trying hard not to laugh.
The only thing that made me consider that the whole thing might be legit was that Marilyn Manson had recently gotten a hold of me on Twitter. That led to some of the most indiscernible drunk phone calls you could ever try to transcribe. Maybe I was actually becoming known despite my own best efforts.
After a week had gone by I’d given up on getting this mystery Depp phone call. On the bright side I’d developed a decent five minutes of material about it all, culminating with me turning into an elderly crazed man shuffling the streets and picking up random, unringing phones answering them with “Johhhh-ny???”
Besides, the material was what I needed to begin with.
Chaille and I boarded some plane in the latter part of the tour. We sat down in our usual seventies loud, plaid polyester suits, broke out our reading glasses and dug into the Economist and Reason magazines and I laughed at the men we’d become at our half-century mark. I made comment to all the drugs we’d turned down from fans after the shows in my effort to get my act together, to be responsible. Turns out Chaille hadn’t turned them all down. I have a hard rule against traveling with illegal substances but evidently Chaille ignored that rule as these drugs weren’t anything dogs are trained to sniff.
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