Doug Stanhope

It's unfortunate, and a bit ironic, that Doug Stanhope's most ubiquitous utterance: "Show us where babies feed!" is delivered to us via an overplayed Girls Gone Wild commercial. Unfortunate because it depreciates arguably the most provocative comedian in the country, and ironic for much the same reason. Routinely raunchy, sometimes offensive, but quite often brilliant, Doug Stanhope is a comedian's comedian: a chain-smoking, beer-guzzling pied piper who deftly punctures societal taboos and superstitions onstage with little regard to how the audience might (or might not) react. "I go onstage and it's like I'm leading you into battle," he warns the audience from the outset of Deadbeat Hero, his 2004 album. "You're not all going to be here at the end." Stanhope wields absurdity and debauchery as tools for the promotion of—as counterintuitive as it sounds—reason and morality. A distorted, subversive breed of reason and morality, but reason and morality nonetheless. "If you only know me from television, then you aren't familiar with what I do," he writes on his MySpace page. "Television is shit but you take easy money when you can. Live shows are the only true freedom of speech left." Should you dismiss the man as nothing more than an entertainingly foulmouthed, drunken sideshow, the joke's ultimately on you.
Fri., April 11, 9 p.m., 2008