By Bart Barry-
Editor’s note: For part 14, please click here.
AUSTIN, Texas – We’ll get to the meat of this column quickly, but first a goodfaith effort to tie loosely what follows to prizefighting, specifically prizefighting broadcasted by Showtime. Long before PBC and the Brothers Charlo – and if you’re now suddenly interested in the latter after Saturday’s showing, read Kelsey McCarson, who’s been keeping well the Charlo beat longer than anyone – Showtime was HBO’s scruffy cousin, in budget, and HBO’s superior, in quality.
Back then, too, this current mess of a column was blueprinted with a T-square on a draftingboard the night before it got written, and often with a background audiotrack of whatever came on Showtime after boxing. One time 10 years ago that background audio featured a guy walking in a dark New York alleyway and talking about why standup comedy only works in places it is terrible to live – the opening of Doug Stanhope’s Showtime special.
Today there are nearly a myriad of talented comedians, and thanks to Netflix, podcasts and other such services, comedians are accessible as they’ve been – Burnham, Burr, Chappelle, CK, Holcomb, O’Neal, Rock, White, to name personal favorites in alphabetical order – but only one has yet struck me as a genius of the form, as a performer original enough to fail for long stretches at a time before hitting so cleanly you find yourself alone in a room, and subsequently impervious to what the late Patrice O’Neal called laughter’s “contagious effect”, struggling for breath, eyes watering. That is, or perhaps was, Doug Stanhope, the end of whose “Beer Hall Putsch” is so caustic and original and layered one is awed by the man’s talent much as he’s offput by Stanhope’s vivid imagery.
Thus I drove for two hours the terrible stretch of I-35 from San Antonio to the capital, unrivaled west of the Mississippi for its aggressiveness, danger and misery, and stood two hours in the lungdamp heat and stench of an outdoor moshpit, Friday, to give thanks more than be entertained. Often as we’re told by cable news the political stakes have never been higher and our quadrennial vote is oh so essential, what’s been true in my lifetime is likely to remain so: Who you vote for every four years in the United States matters not nearly so much as what you do with your creditcard; your franchise is more reliably found in your wallet than any ballotbox.
Or so I believe. And so I reliably buy tickets for live performances expecting little more than a chance to offer anonymous gratitude. Stanhope is still magical but no longer miraculous, and it makes you wonder how much of the magic you now import as an audiencemember and how much of the magic he still exports from thin air.
Friday Stanhope introduced his opener, Jay Whitecotton, as a friend (and later proved it by addressing Whitecotton in the wings throughout the performance) with a short bit that felt more confession than stagecraft: I’ve been drinking since this morning, Stanhope said (or something close), but I just took some Adderall and I can feel it kicking in so I’m going to go review some notes and come out after Jay. There were a couple other references to Adderall and they were instructive for the reason much of Stanhope’s Friday show was more instructive than hilarious – process.
Stanhope’s bits are cobbled from handwritten notes on pink paper, or at least these were what he brought out and began to use after his closer didn’t punch, and they appear bulletpoints of an outline more than the sea of metered legalpad essays Jerry Seinfeld floats in his new Netflix special. Which comes as no surprise. The stakes for Seinfeld are multiples higher than they be for Stanhope. Seinfeld is as many times the professional comedian that Stanhope is as Stanhope is the artist that Seinfeld is. One man continues to build a comedic and financial legacy while the other maniacally pursues a single unforgettable experience. Seinfeld knows; Stanhope discovers.
Stanhope breaks script often, though one suspects less often when he’s off than on. There seemed less improvisation Friday by Stanhope for his being less confident in new material, commenting several times on the choppiness of his delivery and what poor timing he attributed to jetlag and the daily battle his body and mind host between depressants and stimulants.
A personal note about Stanhope’s use of Adderall: I’ve not tried Adderall but spent a fewmonths’ stretch writing under the influence of Modafinil, which promotes a similar sort of synthetic concentration under the auspices of wakefulness. I didn’t stop because of some trite dependency or moral pang; I stopped because it didn’t work in writing for the same reason it does work in Stanhope’s form of comedic improvisation: It takes you deeper in every thought like “thought, a thing one thinks, which is a thing the brain does, or maybe the mind, that collection of billions of selfinterested neurons none of which has interest in thinking but only electrical connectivity, a billion unthinking binary switches that somehow form a thought, whatever that is, like Daniel Dennett’s ‘competence without comprehension’, and don’t listen to neurologists either, that petty and selfaggrandizing lot, till they can zap a piece of fat to see an idea.”
That sort of directionless ferreting usually proves futile in writing, where it proves extraordinarily creative and funny when it meets Stanhope’s timing – a delivery perfected in the crucible of three decades’ stage performances – as he masterfully fills the second and a half his mind needs to burrow another level, with stuttering. But it also proves dark. And 30 years of deepening darkness can come to an unfunny place.
Stanhope knows this but commits to it, choosing his accommodations by one-star reviews, touring in filthy rental vans, reveling in selfdecimation, but also glancing routinely at a chemically dependent crowd that is ageing bitterly, many outpacing their favorite performer, while reflecting back at Stanhope something he no longer appears to find so energizing. Then there’s the internet and the President and just how leathery they’ve made audience sensibilities; robbed of the 1/3 of material touring comedians safely mined from the quarries of national political figures (Trump defies inventive satirizing), comedians have to find weirder social commentaries to make, but that, too, is difficult, since the web makes all intriguing local happenings global events eventually.
An hour with Stanhope previewed the ends of the craft as currently practiced.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
