Doug Stanhope

The surprises in Doug Stanhope’s comedy owe little to subtlety and much to a frenzy of vile details, rattled off with the ease of small talk in bits about child molestation and abortion. But on projects like the 2009 album From Across The Street, Stanhope isn’t pretending to be much better than his perverse subjects; he certainly wasn’t when he did his brilliantly horrifying version of “The Aristocrats” for the documentary of the same title. Stanhope’s bile-spewing rants garner him constant comparisons to Bill Hicks, but unlike Hicks, he backed his political critiques by launching a (quickly aborted) run at the White House in 2008. Stanhope recently released his ninth stand-up album, Oslo: Burning The Bridge To Nowhere, and did a set at Litla-Hraun, Iceland’s only maximum security prison. 

Updated 09/28/2011