All the rage

You may remember controversial comic Doug Stanhope from the tabloid furore which followed one of his performances at the Kilkenny Cat Laughs festival a few years ago, which ended with headlines screaming, “US comic says Irish women too ugly to rape!”.

“It was just really good PR,” shrugs Stanhope. “It was a mis-booking and I should never have been on a mixed bill, especially with a Dara O Briain crowd. It went poorly, a million comics have shows as bad or worse, but I just happen to have a really brilliant manager who can spin it into front-page tabloid outrage. I don’t do mixed bill shows anymore – the Leeds Festival was the last time we tried that.”
Here, Doug is referring to a performance at the 2009 Leeds Festival, where he made derogatory remarks about the Royal Family and the attitude to the English in general. This resulted in several members of the audience booing him and aiming various projectiles in his direction, although the comic happily baited the hecklers throughout the set.
“They just didn’t like me,” recalls Doug. “My act is like death metal in that if you’re just showing up at the bar to watch music, you probably won’t like it! If you’re not there to see me specifically, you’re probably not going to enjoy it. When I have to do 45 minutes, I’m gonna do it, whether you like it or not. I’m gonna fulfil my contractual obligations and get paid – I don’t give a fuck about you!
“The Leeds show was a comedy tent at a music festival, so not only were they not there to see me, they might not even have been there to see comedy. They might just have been in that tent because it had the space to get out of the rain, while they waited for Faith No More to go on. Shows like that I kind of enjoy throwing in the toilet (laughs). To this day, I still don’t have any idea why we did Leeds and Reading.

“I said to my manager, ‘It’s a music festival, they’ll fucking hate me!’ He goes, ‘Oh, I know, but they’re very prestigious gigs.’ I’m like, ‘That’s all the more reason not to do them.’ He says, ‘They’re very high-profile.’ And I’m going, ‘They’ll boo me and throw garbage at me – I’d rather that be a more low-profile event!’”
The controversy has certainly not been limited to those two incidents at Kilkenny and Leeds. Indeed, it would seem that Doug is a man who can barely tie his shoelaces without being accused of offending some sensibility or other. For sure, there were the antics that were always going to be just that bit contentious – like self-publishing a book entitled Fun With Paedophiles: The Best Of Baiting, which featured several of the comic’s ‘baits’ from baiting.org. Then there are pranks such as next month’s gig in Reykjavik, which will find Stanhope – in co-operation with the mayor of Reykjavik, comedian Jon Gnarr – performing a show in Iceland’s only maximum security prison. To attend, fans would have to commit a crime; the comedian has even gone to the trouble of inventing The Stanhope Defense.
But even when Doug isn’t trying to stir some trouble, he still sometimes ends up causing offence. An oh-so-polite recent interview with BBC Radio 5 Live’s Richard Bacon was the subject of a complaint by the Down’s Syndrome Association of the UK, after the presenter merely directed listeners to a YouTube clip where Stanhope discussed Sarah Palin’s son.

When one considers the thorny subjects upon which Stanhope touches in his comedy, such occasional controversies are to be expected. But given that the majority of people who attend his gigs are presumably familiar with his style of humour, I wonder if the comedian is really all that motivated by the desire to shock.
“At this point, I’m more or less preaching to the choir,” acknowledges Stanhope. “But it’s fun to try and find their line, when you have an audience who can’t be offended. Anything to keep it fresh. Actually, I don’t know if I find lines, but I can find an argument.”
Recently, Stanhope signed to rock and metal label Roadrunner Records, who have released his new DVD, which was recorded in 2009, in a former sewing factory and Nazi World War 2 bunker in – of all places – Oslo. Would Doug touch on last month’s tragic events in Norway in his performances?
“Yeah, certainly,” he responds. “I remember 9/11 happened and it was a week-and-a-half before I had a gig booked – I was just sitting there chewing on my arm, waiting to get onstage. After 9/11, I was over in England, and there was this random accident when a player from the New York Yankees – who I fucking loathe – was learning to be a pilot, and accidentally flew his plane into a building in New York City. I’m like, ‘Why do I have to be in the UK now? I want to be home for this!’
Unsurprisingly, Stanhope has occasionally turned his ire on his fellow comedians, and at the moment is particularly unimpressed with Russell Brand.
“He’s just hokey,” he says. “It kind of makes your skin crawl, he’s so creepy and contrived.”

To return to Kilkenny-gate, what was the atmosphere in the room like on the night?
“Oh yeah, there were getting really angry,” remembers Stanhope. “I already had a chunk of material I was working on, about people’s overblown reactions to child molesters. There was some case that got national attention, where a paedophile got out of jail on a technicality, and around the entire country – even in Kilkenny – they were out protesting in the streets, as if this guy was gonna zip right out of jail and start fucking their kids.
“The whole point of the bit was, ‘As much as you wanna believe it, probably no-one wants to fuck your kid. I know you think your kid is the prettiest and every paedophile would pick him, but probably not.’ This guy said he didn’t realise she was underage, and I said, ‘I was looking around at your women to see if I could tell if they were underage, and more often than not, I couldn’t tell what species they were, much less how old one was.’ They boiled that down to me saying, ‘They’re too ugly to rape’. Which is in essence what I said, but it was a long, detailed bit.”

Doug Stanhope’s DVD Oslo: Burning Bridge To Nowhere is out now on Roadrunner Records.