Laughter at the edge

He has a hangover to match his gambling debts and he’s feeling rough. It doesn’t help that his wife, Renée Morrison, is reaching a happy state of incoherence having been drinking since brunch.

Stanhope decides he needs a half-hour nap and heads to his room with Morrison in tow. “He’s just a funny guy,” says his friend Kelly Sheehan, a singer and advertising sales rep, who worked with him in a Las Vegas telemarketing company in 1991. Stanhope was part of Joe Behar’s Comedy Troupe and Sheehan remembers him doing impressions of the misogynistic shock comic Andrew Dice Clay.

“How horrible is that?” she asks. “That was a long time ago. He’d do little shows here and there, sometimes open mic nights at terrible hole-in-the-wall bars in the city.”

For a taste of those early performances, Stanhope’s forthcoming DVD/CD, Deadbeat Hero, will include clips of what he now considers his most embarrassing material. He’s doing it to give hope to budding stand-ups.

“I was 23 years old and talking about really dumb shit with a fake New York accent,” he says later. “I mean, it got laughs, but from stupid people.”

Sheehan also remembers Stanhope’s capacity to rub the audience up the wrong way. He is uncompromising in his insistence on seeing the world from his own perspective and never pandering to audiences.

“There were a lot of times when people just didn’t know how to take him because he was so extreme and blatant,” says Sheehan. “He’d be so truthful that people were shocked. He always stood out.”

In the main body of the hotel, the casino is going through a transition. This is a holiday weekend — tomorrow is Independence Day — and the middle-aged and overweight Saturday gamblers are starting to make way for the young and gorgeous set who come for the hotel’s painfully fashionable Ghostbar. It was at this club in January that Britney Spears spent the night with her childhood sweetheart Jason Alexander before their misguided 4am wedding.

You can understand how Britney lost touch with reality. The drone of the poker machines, roulette wheels and craps tables is punctuated by the bleeps, trills and occasional rattling of coins from the one-armed bandits. The bar is pumping out American power ballads in competition with the baseball match on the nearby televsion.

Stanhope, now refreshed from his nap and necking a bottle of lager, is not expecting a favourable response. “There’s no continuity to a Vegas audience,” he says. “You’ve got grandma next to bikers next to frat guys next to stupid Ghostbar girls. There’s no way to play or cater or twist them. That’s why Vegas hires middle-of-the-road entertainers.”

Whatever else you could say about him, Stanhope is not middle-of-the-road and he’s all too aware that his audience can send his act spinning.

“See that guy behind me?” he asks. I look over his shoulder but see nobody. “No, look down,” he says and, indeed, there is a man of restricted growth walking past. He grins at my recognition. “I hope he’s not in the show,” he says.

Stanhope doesn’t mean to offend, it’s just he can’t help wandering into areas that touch a nerve and next thing, people are walking out.

As comedy clubs go, the Lounge is a classy joint — certainly quite unlike the atmospheric basement dive of Edinburgh’s Tron where Stanhope will perform for six nights as part of the Velvet Laughter Master Series. Here in Las Vegas the stage is dressed like a living room with couches and standard lamps.

Just after 9pm, he saunters into public view. In person, he is quiet and modest, but in front of an audience, he has authority. “I tried to watch some news,” he drawls in a voice that makes him sound 20 years older. “You probably don’t watch it because you’re in Vegas and why the f*** would you — you’re not bitter and angry like me.”

His set continues, pondering the merits of murdering workmates, his desire for sex with conjoined twins (“You can stand in judgment all you like, I’m not going to be friends with you after the show”) and the fourth of July (“228 years ago the founding fathers stopped beating their slaves for long enough to write the Declaration of Independence”).

It’s quality stuff, but he’s been fazed by the audience mix and doesn’t feel he’s on top of the material. He retrenches into a few sick jokes, then launches into a routine about alcohol and drugs, only to be interrupted by the arrival of someone at the front of the room.

“Hi baby, how are you?” he says. It is Morrison, miraculously fortified and ready to see how her husband’s doing on stage. He takes it as a chance to chat. “Are you here to beat someone up? This show’s going poorly enough. Are you losing at the tables? Hang on, let me do this drug bit, then the closure bit.”

After he’s finished Stanhope is quick to write off the gig as a “complete panic failure” but doesn’t seem concerned about it. He’s more bothered about letting himself down than selling the audience short.

“What is important is impressing myself,” he says. “Saying things the way I thought them, to get the words processed succinctly enough that I can do it without becoming incredibly tedious, to put my thoughts into words. If they stared at me blankly and I did everything I wanted to do, I would have no problem. That’s when you become an artist.”

As a comedian, he wants to be liked, but “not at the expense of a lie”. It’s what sets him apart from run-of-the-mill comedians.

“I don’t have any interest in talking about something I saw on TV,” he says. “The stuff I talk about is the stuff that is glaring to me about the world.” He hesitates to use the word “political”, because of its “boring flavour”, but it’s the best way to describe his act.

What makes Stanhope essential viewing is that none of this is an act. He grew up in a middle-class family in Worcester, Massachusetts, the kind of “horrible industrial town” where his act goes down best today. He had his political conscience pricked by reading books such as Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen and You Are Being Lied To, edited by Russ Kick. He has been angry ever since.

“How could you not be angry if you were aware?” he says. “Once you have an awareness you can’t go back to being dumb. Sometimes you wish you could.”

He says he hates confrontation in daily life, but loves it on stage, and he does worry that as he gets older, he might lose some of his edge.

“If I could stop doing this and write, I could live without doing stand-up. It’s the only complete outlet where you have no rules and you can do whatever you want. But at the same time, you gain a contempt for the audience — or I do. I can only say something so many times before I’m tired of saying it.”

Coming to Edinburgh is a way to jolt himself into writing new material. “I’m terrified of the reviews because you never get reviewed over here,” he says. “You don’t want to see it in print and you don’t want it in the back of your head when you go up there. I don’t want to be trying to impress somebody. I’ll spend the whole time in Edinburgh staring at a notebook. It makes you work — the bad review staring you in the face.”

It’s time for the second show of the evening. He’s broken free of his hangover and is on blistering form, delivering vicious tirades that pummel the audience into delirious laughter. “In this show, if you want to walk out, if you’re even borderline, shout out the topic you didn’t want to hear because I’ve got friends at the back who didn’t get seats.” Nobody walks.

Doug Stanhope’s run at Edinburgh Comedy Room, The Tron, is sold out. Tickets for an extra show at the Reid Hall, Aug 28, 7pm are available on 0131 662 8740