Doug Stanhope on controversy, outrage and Twitter

Comedy is under pressure these days, struggling to keep abreast of changes in social dynamics, as well as the increasingly surreal nature of the world around us. For example, The Skinny recently spoke to Doug Stanhope, America's spokesman for the profane and an angry voice against the conservative establishment. Between that interview and the publication of this piece, someone accused David Cameron of fucking a pig. How do you keep up with that?

Back in that lost age of innocence of mid-September, when none of us had ever really thought about what noises David Cameron might make when spunking into offal, Stanhope is sitting out on his manager's driveway, bracing himself for another tour of the UK which kicks off in Glasgow on 2 & 3 October. He's done a lot of press recently and he admits that his head's still not quite in the interview game yet.

“I'm thinking of putting an FAQ on my website for shit like 'where do you get your ideas from?', or 'why did you decide to be a comedian?' I'm sick of answering that shit. And people always ask me like, 'how far is too far? Where do you draw the line on offensive material?' I'm supposed to be the fucking expert on that.”

When we last spoke in 2011, he finished by declaring that: “There’s nothing really edgy in comedy any more. There’s no more bridges to cross.” Comedy, he said back then, would have to wait for another 9/11. Little did anyone know that less than a week later, we'd be speculating about whether there was photographic evidence of the British Prime Minister [allegedly] having his dick in a pig's mouth, an event which was quickly dubbed #swine11 on Twitter.

Social media – especially Twitter – is maybe the driving force behind what's changing comedy. For one thing, it's now policed a lot more heavily than it was a few years ago, with events such as 2013's #CancelColbert campaign showing that no one is immune from criticism, while comics such as Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld raised questions about outrage culture and its effect on comedy.

“Yeah, there's a whole bunch of fake outrage these days,” Stanhope says. “There's definitely a huge backlash to everything on Twitter. The thing is, the people who get upset are not people who go to comedy clubs, generally. It's one blogger somewhere and then some shitheads like fucking Gawker or something will make a big story out of it, and it will develop into an argument, when there's actually no offended group. It's all fake.

“They want to get someone in trouble, they want to get someone to apologise. Over here it's been the rape joke thing. Like Daniel Tosh made some aside about rape and it blew up into this huge conversation about it. It was comics versus comics, and it kind of bifurcated the comedian base.”

But Daniel Tosh is an asshole though.

Stanhope laughs. “I love him!”

Does Stanhope think he could survive a major online backlash if Twitter rose up against him?

He laughs again. “I talk about that onstage. I often wonder what I would have to do to lose my fan base. Cause they're a unique group. Trying to offend them is hard. I think if I quit drinking, they might get upset. I'm a role model to some. They draw inspiration from my perfect attendence drinking record.

“But it doesn't matter. I think it was Amy Schumer who said recently that comics have got to stop apologising for everything. And the thing is, comedians don't have to apologise. We never have to apologise. The only ones who ever end up apologising are people who have a network deal and worry it might get pulled from them. If you just do stand-up you never have to apologise.”

Stanhope has been on TV, famous from The Man Show in the States, and best known here as a contributor to Charlie Brooker's Wipe stable of programmes. Brooker, of course, once wrote a TV drama about what it might be like if the Prime Minister fucked a pig, and even he wasn't prepared for the 'Bae of Pigs' incident.

But Stanhope's attention recently has been on literature. “I'm sorry I can't string a sentence together today,” he says, “I feel like I just got out of prison, writing this book. So I haven't been doing stand-up or watching news.”

What was the process of writing like?

“Evacuating. I feel like I took a huge dump. And I still don't remember half the shit that happened.”

The upcoming book is going to be autobiographical, centered on Stanhope's mother committing suicide after a long illness. The two were very close, his mother having appeared regularly on The Man Show to review porn. Stanhope is a passionate advocate for assisted dying, another news story that's been through the Twitter cycle and out again in the past few weeks.

“It starts with my mother's suicide, and goes back and looks at how she affected my sense of humour and style of comedy,” he says. “I haven't figured out how to pitch a book about life with your mother without making it sound fucking boring. A lot of the time it just seems boring, and I realise that that's because I lived it. It's not surprising or odd to me. You go through vacillating periods of being like 'No one else is going to read this shit,' and then sometimes you think 'Well, nobody else has had a life like this.'”

Did he learn anything during the writing of the book?

“I learned that stand-up comedy is way easier than writing a fucking book.”

We talk a bit about other Twitter-driven changes in comedy, like the rise of unscrupulous content thieves, from semi-anonymous accounts with the word LAD in their handle to questionable individuals such as The Fat Jew. This represents an existential crisis for most modern comics, although Stanhope seems to be bemused by it all.

“There was one act who wrote something complaining that The Fat Jew stole one of his jokes, and I was reading this and I was like, 'Wait a second, you stole your set-up from one of my bits!'

“I don't really give a shit. It actually works in my favour. I'm doing longer and longer stuff these days, like 20-minute bits, so if you want to steal my jokes, you have to steal a lot."

Maybe the wily comedy veteran has instinctively figured out where stand-ups will fit in the post-Twitter world. When you throw something like a pig-fucking Prime Minister into that ecosystem, it's like feeding time at the piranha tank, with every last morsel of comedy stripped from the bone in under 30 minutes. By the time a comedian gets to the next gig, the audience have moved on. And even if you find a great gag, other people will just steal it.

Maybe the real role of the 21st-century stand-up is as a storyteller, offering deeper, richer insight into the world around us. Or maybe not. We'll check back in with Stanhope in 2019, and see how it all worked out.

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Doug Stanhope tours the UK this October, playing Glasgow's O2 Academy 2 & 3 Oct, and Salford's Lowry 16 & 17 Oct