Fan Mail

My good old buddy Frank Lunney aka Captain Rowdy croaked this month. He was a "triple X-rated" comic and pretty big in the southwest when I first started out. He took me under his wing in the early years and sometimes under his fists or shod foot. His beatings were like a gift from an angel. Shit started going downhill for him after a while and never seemed to stop. Diabetes had them whittling his limbs down like scrimshaw and his kidneys finally left him like so many of his wives. He was a damn good human being and I can't say how much I appreciate all he did for me starting out. 

If you care to help, buy my merch. His 13 year old son Gage is now an orphan and I'm sure he'll be jacking me up for cash soon. I'll say it's from you.

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I've been lazy about putting up fun fan mail. This one showed up as actual hand-written snail-mail near 4th of July a year ago. My friend Hack read it out loud in the kitchen and we all laughed at the fan-boyish tone. At least at first.

I'll transcribe it as it was written.

"Dear Doug... or should I say feloow drunk Doug,

I was at your show last October or November down in Ft Lauderdale, I was the creepy kid in black among the crowd of creepy kids in black and I really enjoyed the show and I'm glad I got to see you live because I was beginning to think you weren't real; I was starting to think you were some form of CGI digital Santa Claus that was sent down by God to save us from this retarded society we live in. At least I got to see the philosopher Doug Stanhope do his magic and I'm talking real magic, the kind that makes you want to drink even when you really don't want to.

Anyway, since you're reading this you should knw that I'm already dead by the time you get this. I'm no fan of the world and even less the way I live in it, and there are some good things but I've had 23 almost 24 years to do those things, and although I want to stay a little longer and get to see some more I can't, for the moral justice thinks I have to do 7 years in a prison for looking at the wrong kind of porn even though that happened to me as a kid and I never complained about it.

Anyway, now that I'm completely out of hope, I'm leaving you my favorite book, which I think you will like and maybe give a few ideas for new material. It's not perfectbut most of the concepts in the book are similar to your views, just a little less vulgar.

So Doug, thanks for giving me something to laugh at, that was almost impossible with my gloomy outlook and sick sense of humour.

Thanks for being the one person with the balls to speak out the truth. I hope you are much more successful in what's left of your career and save some worthy people before it's too late.

Thanks and good luck

Your fan and follower.

Liam S.V. Hughes

Oh and by the way, it's painless helium suicide in case you were wondering. At least I DIED LAUGHING!"

**

We checked it out and he indeed killed himself after being arrested with child porn on his computer and facing 7 years. My lawyer friend who looked up the case said he did the right thing, considering his odds in prison. I don't think I could have offered a better suggestion aside from using something other than helium as I already have a bit about a fan that killed himself that way.

Comics always say that they are happy to be able to make people laugh, to give em a small break from their daily grind, their grueling nine-to-five. A lot of my people have a much darker grind and I'm happy to give them a nice chuckle and release at the end of a long day setting fires, drowning their kids in a car and blaming it on the blacks or debating between suicide or prison.

Liam Hughes was certainly not the only really fucked-up fan I've had nor will he be the last. I don't know exactly why I appeal to so many wrecked, scared, miserable, ugly, angry or otherwise ill-suited for life as we know it. But I'm not unhappy that you're here. Every time there's somebody like the Aurora theater shooter, I check my mailing list and Facebook to see if they were a fan. I know that if it weren't for comedy, I might be sitting in a dark room stockpiling weapons and putting names on lists. 

Maybe you should try writing jokes. Or kick-boxing or something. Join a Neighborhood Watch. That's where all the real psychopaths hang out. 

I don't have all the answers. I just do comedy.

But in the meantime, certainly keep your cards and letters coming to 212 Van Dyke St. Bisbee AZ 85603.

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In case you're wondering, the book Liam sent with the letter was called "Think!: Why Crucial Decisions Can't Be Made in the Blink of an Eye." Pretty unremarkable but it's the thought that counts.

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Wow, this update has been pretty death-heavy.

Here's a great story for anyone who's fantasized about riding over the Westboro Baptists with a combine followed by a Zamboni, a more clever way to fuck with em!

Me, I feel better already.

Doug Stanhope's Big Stink Comedy Tour

The 4th of July party started June 28th and finally wound to an end on July 10th with only one visit from the Bisbee police on a noise complaint when the band moved inside at 5 am. All apologies to the neighbors. Funny thing is I slept though the whole thing only feet from the amplifier. I musta needed it. Thanks everyone for coming. My hands are still a bit shaky and we haven't finished sorting out the wreckage or found Bingo's phone. We're considering moving the Super Bowl Party to Vegas this year to let them deal with all the bullshit and just enjoy the game.

Thanks for everyone who came down. I miss the fuck outta you guys.

*****

My latest special "Before Turning The Gun on Himself" premieres on Showtime Friday, August 3rd. 

Set your DVR. Or wait an hour and wait for someone to put it online.

The audio version is available now digitally on Amazon if you can't wait or don't have Showtime. Or you can just steal it somewhere online. 

The DVD won't be released in the U.S. until November. But it's already out in the U.K. so you can probably just steal it online.

So long as you tell people about it. I kinda like this one except for my face and body of which I am not a fan.

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Next, the Doug Stanhope Big Stink Comedy Tour launches in Chattanooga on Aug 7th. I don't know why we titled it that other than it's fun to title a tour. And we can probably unload some t-shirts. The first run will have Carlos Valencia and the Junior Stopka on board and then the September run will have Brett Erickson and Geoff Tate. The last couple years I've just been flying into towns, saying words and getting back on a plane. There's no fun in that. This tour is gonna be old school, bunch of drunk friends in a van, driving around the country and fucking off heavily. Probably not as healthy physically but a lot more fun.

Check the dates and get tix now. Will be adding more soon. Note that I'll finally be in Boston at the Wilbur November 17th. About fucking time.

The first three weeks are in the southeast. If you miss us, maybe you can catch Neil Hamburger, Todd Barry and Brendon Walsh on tour together at the same time down that way. That's a hell of a show as well. Their dates are at http://www.americasfunnyman.com/tour.html

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Update. Bingo got crawling drunk on a mountain vacation in Pinos Altos, NM and somehow found her phone. Lost it in a blackout and found it in another state weeks later in a blackout. 

That Bingo. She's a pill.

I'm in Wolverhampton by Henry Phillips

Here's a special bonus. The great song that Henry Philips came up with on our UK tour.

Who Reads These Turkeys?

I can't imagine that Allison Pearson has any friends within her profession. Otherwise someone would sit her down and stop her from making such a buffoon of herself repeatedly in a national newspaper.

Allison Pearson is a columnist for the UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph. She has also written two romance novels, a feat as impressive as a songwriter landing a jingle for a toilet paper commercial.

A few weeks ago here a man named Tony Nicklinson made the news with his fight with the High Court for the right to die. Mr Nicklinson is what they call a Tetraplegic. He's 53 and his mind works perfectly but he is trapped in his body and can only communicate by blinking his eyes. He's been there for 6 years. In short, Mr Nicklinson is as fucked as you can get.

His story made national news here and Allison Pearson followed it up with a half-assed, empty-calorie, op-ed piece disparaging not just the right to die but seemingly Mr Nicklinson himself.

She had very little or nothing of any bolstered argument on the issue, only snide, condescending personal jabs at the expense of a man who can only communicate by blinking his eyelids.

She suggests he should just starve to death if it's so bad. She suggests he just go off his meds and hope for an infection, like some cruel version of Mother's Home Remedies. All in the most sarcastic, condescending tone.

She suggests he just make the best of it like Stephen Hawking.

Vulgar.
 
My problem wasn't with the point of view - she didn't seem to have one other than "I think it's wrong" - but with the snarky, dismissive attitude like this poor fuck was a whining child asking for too much dessert.

So after reading this I threw out a Facebook/Twitter post that included the word "cunt," of course, to share the story. I also tweeted that I had gone Christian just to pray she got a fetid ovarian cyst. Because that's funny.

This started a bit of a Twitter war that I won't bother going into too much detail about here. It's better treated on stage and you'll most certainly hear about it if you see any of my remaining shows in England. At the end, I will tape it and put it out on my website for those who couldn't make the live shows.

Allison Pearson responded with a series of head-scratching tweets threatening to report me to Twitter (?) investigate my employers (??), call the police (???), before tweeting "I am writing a column about vile misogyny of @dougstanhope. If you know of any other woman thus attacked let me know. Pls RT."

Well, obviously someone did sit her down and explain why using the word "cunt" in the UK rarely has any gender distinction and that writing an article about me being a woman-hater based solely on one word might be too stupid even by her standards. The only evidence she might find of me being abusive to women are the juvenile videos of us fucking with my girlfriend Bingo  on this road trip.

This whole affair seemed to come to an end when someone turned up another column she'd written two years previously in which she completely contradicts herself, entitled "Why I Admire The Mother Who Killed Her ME Daughter." ME is some kinda disease that left a woman in a state similar to Tony Nicklinson and after years of suffering, the mother did as her daughter asked and put her out of her misery. For some reason Allison Pearson didn't think that woman should suck it up Hawking-style. That's because Allison Pearson doesn't really have an opinion. She just has a job and she does it in a slip-shod fashion without giving a fuck who gets hurt.

Once that contradictory article started making it's way around this Twitter battle, Allison (I like to call her "Ally" or sometimes just "Sugar-Tits") Pearson shut her ridiculous clown mouth, put on her dunce cap and slinked off into the corner.

I thought that was the end of it until last week when I found a big, full-color picture of me in her column right beside a guy who'd just been sentenced to prison for inciting racial hatred on Twitter. He had live-tweeted the on-field heart attack of a black soccer player with the most puerile invective and was for a moment the most hated man in the whole country.

Here we are, hand in hand in the Holy Matrimony of the Press, under the headline "What Planet Are They From?"

Nice spin, Ally. Put me alongside the Asshole Poster-Child Du Jour as partners in crime in "cyber-bullying." And go from abuser to victim in the drop of a "send" button.

The article is so full of distortions, mis-quotes, spin and out-right lies that if I were to put it into my act, there wouldn't have been any time left for even a quick fist-fuck joke for a closer.

I'll go through the most egregious parts to show what a slap-dash attempt this is to defame and denigrate me.

The article starts out talking about the 56 day jail sentence that Liam Stacey received for online taunting of Fabrice Muamba as he was laying on the field after having a heart attack that began with him tweeting "Fuck Muamba. He's dead!!!" (He didn't die but came close.)

How this incites racial hatred, I don't know. There must be more but Ally-Pants didn't want to say. She only says that it was a "barrage of obscene racist comments that I will not ruin your breakfast by repeating." Nor inform the reader of what one could possibly say to go to jail for tweeting. That seems like it would be important to include.

After some digging I found screen shots of Liam Stacey's tweets in question. Just stupid, "what's the worst thing I can say for attention" repetitive garbage. Dick for the sake of being a dick. "Go rape your mother" and "go suck a nigger dick you aids ridden cunt". Like he took all the worst words he knew would get reactions and cut 'n' pasted them. Definitely a shithead but inciting racial hatred? Not really a White Power/Nazi Rally call to arms that should qualify for a prison sentence.

But that's another argument and another bit altogether.

In the article, Pearson basks in the schadenfreude of his imprisonment and for a reason... because she got called a bad word online and she wants to share that horror story with you here.

She talks about the Nicklinson article and the "flurry of emails, the usual mixture of support and furious disagreement" that she received. I imagine the "flurry" is probably 3 or 4 on a heavy day.

Then she writes that next "I went on my Twitter and found my name next to a well known gynecological insult. I was bewildered. Who was this guy I'd never heard of - one Doug Stanhope and why, if he disagreed so strongly with my column, didn't he find a way of saying so that didn't involve calling me a Sarah Lund?"

Just ignore the Sarah Lund part - nobody knows what the fuck that's about. I assume it was her attempt at rhyming slang for cunt that doesn't quite rhyme.

But you were bewildered? A guy you've never heard of? You mean most of your feedback comes from close personal friends? They never use any insults? Is this your first day on the job? Holy shit.

"Stanhope turned out to be an American 'comedian': being horrible and offensive is his job description."

No, my job description is a person who seeks to entertain an audience, primarily by making them laugh. Horrible and offensive, if that's how you see it, is simply my style. It's your style as well, but you do it to incite, not to entertain.

"For example, in his stage routine, Stanhope described the birth of Sarah Palin's Down Syndrome baby thus: "Threw that spastic out of that 'tard (retard) launcher ---- of yours."

I guess at this point Ally stopped caring about ruining people's breakfasts.

Nice you had to travel back four years to find a bit you thought would vilify me. And completely out of context.  You failed to mention that the whole 'retard baby/tard launcher' quote was delivered in the voice of then-VP candidate Joe Biden, saying it to Sarah Palin during the debates, satirizing the mud-slinging and personal attacks of the campaign. But being clear about that wouldn't really paint me as the monster you want people to imagine.

Like the kind of monster who would so thoughtlessly shit on a completely paralyzed guy so savagely crippled that he is begging to be killed.

You are an idiot and an ogre. But let's move on.

"Doug invited his unmerry men to join in the fun. Stanhope has 83,000 followers on Twitter and he directed them to "read this ---- Allison Pearson's column."

In full, what I said was "To fully understand my rage and upcoming vitriol you'll first need to read this cunt @allisonpearson's column..." and I posted that so people would be familiar with the piece when I talked about it on stage that night. You see, Ally-Baby, my act is my "column." I use Twitter to promote it. I'm sure you'd have no problem fitting the entirety of your hollow & hobbled arguments into 140 characters and still leave room for a retweet and a hashtag but I try to flesh it out more and save it for the stage.

"Over the next 48 hours, I learned a lot about Stanhope fans as they swarmed over my Twitter timeline like killer ants."

No kidding. They can be fucking brutal. They scare me sometimes. You'd previously tweeted that they were like a swarm of locusts and in another article you called them swarming killer termites, both of which are a bit more creative than"ants". I think I like "Killer Termites" the best and will continue to use that as a monicker for them that they'll wear with pride. Until now, they were my "Sausage Army," but that seems to exclude the ladies.

Regardless, they can be brutal in a Liam Stacey way and that's why when I saw some of the things they were saying I immediately tweeted "And for my fans please don't randomly abuse @allisonpearson. Read her article and excoriate her smug, personal smear of the weakest of men." They didn't attack you just because I used the word cunt. They attacked you because I had them read what you wrote and a lot of em felt the same way I did. This is still all on you, no matter how you try to turn it around.

Kinda tough to handcuff me to Liam Stacey as some vicious internet bully when I'm tweeting people specifically not to abuse you. Almost libelous. But you pulled it off.

"Spite and impotent fury should not be allowed to hide under the magnificent cloak of free speech. Doesn't a Down's boy have the right not to be called a retard by a so-called comedian?"

Now, this is where I fucking lose it. What the fuck does a bit from my act, one that you are happy to take out of context, have any fucking thing to do with Twitter abuse? That's what your article is supposed to be about, isn't it? Or is it all a big fucking hit piece, a personal vendetta cloaked under the guise of journalism because you wrote some really ugly shit and I called you out on it publicly. If your article is supposed to be about cyber-bullying on Twitter, how the fuck does Sarah Palin's baby come into it? Are you trying to intimate that I have been tweeting Trig Palin - as though that's even possible - to call him a retard?

You are repugnant. And you know it. Even your own publication knows it. Did you notice that in the heat of our exchanges that your own newspaper listed my show in Edinburgh as its critic's choice? I think that was more of an internal finger to you than a pat on the back for me.

You even mention BBC radio presenter Richard Bacon and his documentary on his own dealings with cyber-stalkers into this piece as though he were some kind of ally of yours.

Well, Ally-Whacker, lemme throw you a quote from Richard Bacon during our interview last year. "Doug Stanhope is here. Just a remarkable stand-up comic. If you haven't seen him and want a flavor of what he's like go to YouTube now and type 'Doug Stanhope Sarah Palin' [laughs] and get back to me."

Yeah. That's your companion in the horrific trenches of internet name-calling.

The conclusion of your column makes me want to grab the weathered skin of the back of your neck and rub your nose in it like a puppy in his own loose stool.

You say that Liam Stacey shouldn't have been kicked out of school or sent to prison.

"Far more effective, surely, to take Liam to the bedside of Fabrice Muamba and make him stand there, repeat the callous words that he tweeted when Fabrice was suspended between life and death, and apologize."

No shit? You mean EXACTLY THE SAME fucking thing you should do to Mr Tony Nicklinson?

You try to malign me and brand me with the same mark as some headline-making internet troll solely out of personal spite. You tried and failed to have me fired, arrested, denounced as a "vile misogynist" and when all that failed, you fraudulently cast me as a cyber-bully, only because an actual one made the news and you found a weak tie-in.

You don't even understand the concept of an internet troll. I stand up alone in front of people nightly, my exact location announced well in advance and speak my opinions openly and publicly. You sit hunched over a laptop with a finger-sandwich hanging out of your mouth, blurt out whatever inane, reckless pap you can generate and think that there will be no repercussions, save for your alleged "flurry" of emails.

You would never have the balls to stand up and speak directly to a public gathering of Telegraph readers. You are the troll, Allison Pearson. You've always been the trolls.

This is the arrogance of a media that is beginning to realize that they no longer have a monopoly on public discourse. People like Allison Pearson are dipping their toes into the internet, into the medium that is quickly making them irrelevant and they are shivering at coldness of their own sudden vulnerability.

It used to be that people like me were at your mercy, Al-Zebub Pearson. If I said something considered mean-spirited or off-color on stage, the papers could lambaste me in the press with impunity. Now the shoe is on the other foot as we, the people have columns and readers of our own. You wrote what I found to be loathsome, I gave you a bad review and all of a sudden the flurry of email you're getting isn't so pretty.

You are a moribund Vaudeville act. And you can either sink with the ship or come into the future where you are gonna have to hear what people think in whatever language they choose to use. If you google my name or read the comments on any one of my Youtube clips, you'll find boatloads of comments that are far worse than any of the slings and arrows you or even Fabrice Muamba suffered. It's par for the course. And if anyone ever went to prison for even a minute because of the viciousness of their online attacks on me, I would campaign endlessly for their freedom.

Enjoy your breakfast.

BLINK BLINK BLINK BLINK

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