Doug Stanhope is a wild American stand up comedian whose act is lewd and, many would consider, offensive. But he’s also often uproariously funny. I fiDoug Stanhope is a wild American stand up comedian whose act is lewd and, many would consider, offensive. But he’s also often uproariously funny. I first came across him when he had a regular three-minute rant on Charlie Brooker’s review show, Weekly Wipe, on British television. I liked his irreverent style so I grabbed a copy of his memoir Digging Up Mother: A Love Story, a book about how he assisted his mother in committing suicide. Honestly, it’s apparently a true story! Full of humour and pathos, the audio version of that book featured a posse of friends kicking around the detail of events after each chapter. It was great fun. Shocking, sad and potentially inflammatory but mostly just funny. This audiobook adopts the same format with Doug himself reading some sections and one of his crew reading others.
Some call his comedy a form of social comment in that he tends to offer up a provocative position on a theme and then attempt to defend it, normally against all odds and with much profanity. In one section here he talks about a night in Ireland when he decided to try out a proposition that Irish women are just too ugly to rape. Yes, you get the picture. The audience did too, but failed to see the funny side – it really didn’t go down well. He was booed off stage on that occasion, but that's just water off a duck’s back to Doug. He’s thick skinned, as you have to be to make a living doing stand up. And it helps that he seems to be just about permanently half-drunk – but that's just when he's not fully drunk or high on magic mushrooms.
Really this is just book is simply a series of anecdotes kicking off from the time he started out on road. The yarns vary in terms of quality (if I can use that word) but the bits in between – where he just chats with his buddies – adds nothing of value in my view. However, the really good stuff probably makes the whole think worth a look (or a listen) if you're into dark, uncompromising comedy. It’s acerbic and funny but definitely not something to try out if you’re easily offended. But enjoyable as some parts of the book are this one is really isn’t a patch on Mother....more
I remembered Doug Stanhope as the American comedian who I’d seen extolling the virtues of America whilst doing down all things British. It was on a teI remembered Doug Stanhope as the American comedian who I’d seen extolling the virtues of America whilst doing down all things British. It was on a television series called Weekly Wipe. I thought it was funny, very funny (though you can make your own mind up – see below).
So I was pretty sure I'd get a few laughs from this memoir. However I wasn't so sure after the book opened with what amounted to a walk through of the assisted euthanasia of his mother. What!!
Admittedly, Stanhope did manage to extract some humour from this very dark account. This was aided (in the audio version I listened to) by the fact that he was joined on microphone by a group of his friends, some of whom were present for the ‘event’. He'd read a bit of the text and then segway into some ad lib commentary of his own before inviting some of the crew to recall their memories of it. It was bizarre, somewhat shocking but touching too. The humour was introduced mainly through the account of how, the following morning, the morticians mistook one of the sleeping friends as the body of his mother – gallows humour at its finest.
The book continued in this fashion, with regular stops for group conversation and members of the crew taking turns reading sections of the book. At first I found the interruptions and digressions annoying, I wasn't sure they were adding much to the mix and felt they were, in fact, detracting from the flow of the piece. But as time went on and I began to identify where each of the participants played a part in events I began to value their input and to look forward to the breaks from the text. The story was being challenged, fleshed out and enriched.
Stanhope’s reading was certainly the best - he's just got a natural tone and delivery that elicits a smile, even when he's not saying anything particularly funny. And the anecdotes themselves are outrageous. This man has led a wild life, fuelled by drink and drugs. He fell into standup comedy after time spent as a cold calling telemarketer (the whole thing was really just a scam) and often slept in his car as he was earning next to no money churning out his own type of humour. His act is a ranting, rude and caustic series of observations on anything and everything – nothing is sacred. It’s not something you’d see on television before the watershed. In fact I'm not sure you'd see some of it on television at all!
His mother is always there, either as a background figure or in the forefront of the tale. The relationship between mother and son is really that of best friends – true, they have their fallings out but for the most part they each revel in each other’s excesses and acts of debauchery. But in time her health starts to fail and we eventually end where we started.
Wow, what an amazing ride. Part of me is shocked and horrified, to some degree I'm really touched by the sadness at the heart of the book and yet I haven't laughed so much in ages. If you're in the mood for some dark humour, an account of an alternative lifestyle and a real story of one man's love for his mother then please do give this one a try – but please choose the audio version, I can't imagine the text will deliver anything like the same experience....more
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