"My shit’s never necessarily ironed out, even if I know what I’m doing. Either my head is telling me they’ve heard it before or my head is telling me that it’s not ready yet. So I’m never comfortable."
– Doug Stanhope
Doug Stanhope: Hey Guy.
Guy MacPherson: Doug.
DS: Sorry. I forgot I had an interview. I’m like, ‘Fucking stop calling me! Who is this?’
GM: Want me to call you back?
DS: Yeah, sure.
GM: Okay, I’ll call you right back.
DS: Alright, bye.
…
DS: Hello!
GM: Hey, there.
DS: Hey.
GM: Doug, how are you? Your manager really knows you, doesn’t he? He told me to keep calling back until you answered.
DS: (laughs) Oh, did he say that?
GM: Yeah.
DS: Yeah, my memory’s shit. I’m not the guy that has a techno head to get into my phone and set reminders and have a ledger and a day-at-a-glance.
GM: So this is why you have a manager; not because you’re a big shot now.
DS: I’ve always had a manager but this is more of a partner.
GM: Ah. Well in the past I would always just email you to set up an interview and you’d go, ‘Yeah, sure.’ And now he responds.
DS: Yeah, it’s got like that because of him. And because of everything else: podcasts, getting a thousand fucking emails going, ‘Hey, will you do my podcast?’ And at first I’d be, ‘No, I’m not doing fucking internet radio.’ But once it became obvious that some of them are actually reaching people – this is over the last six years. But it used to be you’d get all these people going, ‘I want you to be on my podcast’ and that might just be me talking to you; it could just be some kid that wants to fucking talk to me. Now you have a podcast which means you have a microphone hooked up to your computer and it reaches no listeners and I talk to you for an hour.
GM: There are so many goddamn podcasts out there, it’s hard to know where to begin. I listen to yours. I’ve listened right up to the most recent one. I haven’t heard that one yet.
DS: Yeah, the last one’s the best one. Well, it’s the funniest. It’s not nearly as compelling as the story of my friend who was in a Brazilian prison but that story didn’t really pan out. This one is just my girlfriend’s sister talking about awful things she’s done even though she’s a sweet person. If nothing else, it’s fucking good practice. I don’t have a place to do sets in Bisbee so doing a podcast is great because even if it goes nowhere and I just delete it because it stunk, at least I’m talking into a microphone. Right now I’m trying to fucking write material for this Canadian tour that’s only being worked out in my head. That doesn’t always work. That never works. It works for a joke but it doesn’t work for fucking bits.
GM: So when you’re talking into a mic for an hour, you might get a germ of an idea and have something to work off of, is that it?
DS: Right. Yeah, it’s my only open mic is talking to me or talking to me and my friends. And if it sucks altogether, I just dump it. But unlike open mics, where someone might be filming it with a fucking cell phone camera and putting some shitty version of an idea out online before you can even get it together, I can say it into a mic that’s not live and if it’s great I don’t put it out because I’ll use it on stage and if it stinks altogether. And if it’s just a good podcast, you put that out.
GM: I like that yours isn’t tied to a schedule where you’re dropping one every Monday, or whatever, because I can’t keep up with all of them.
DS: There’s no quality control. For me, if I were on a schedule, I’d have to put out shit. If that’s all I had, fuck it. Bill Burr is fantastic. I should listen to Bill Burr before I do any podcast because it inspires me. But at the same time, when I listen to him I pick up the accent that I lost 30 years ago
GM: He does his solo, off the top of his head. You could do that easily, I bet.
DS: No, I’m too much of a stuttering prick.
GM: I like that the Canada Tour isn’t included in the Shit Town Tour. That’s very nice of you. But surely there must be some shit towns in Canada.
DS: Oh, there are, but they’re not close enough you can do them driving. Whereas in the States, the Shit Town Tour are places you’d generally never play. Some of them, though, because of routing, we had to take some not-so-shitty towns just to make a route.
GM: And that’s what you’ll tell every town you’re in: This is the not-so-shitty one.
DS: Oh, no. No. I tweeted that initially when I saw the first handful of towns, I’m like, ‘These aren’t shitty towns.’ You have Milwaukee and Lexington, Kentucky. It’s because Brian [his manager] was having a harder time getting ahold of anyone in West Virginia.
GM: What makes a shit town?
DS: Like Youngstown, Ohio. Those bleak, rust belt kind of old steel mill… I’m going to play the place they had the wedding in Deer Hunter. That’s the room I want to play. That kind of shit town.
GM: Do they make for better audiences because it’s so bleak there’s nothing else there and they’re so appreciative when somebody comes?
DS: Uh, let’s hope. (laughs) I just love playing towns I’ve never played. Most of the time that rule holds true: the shittier the town the more appreciative they are that you came. And you feel more free to fuck around. And you’re not thinking, ‘Oh shit, when’s the last time I played here? Did I do the same material? How much crossover is there?’ I don’t have a fucking set list that tells me exactly what I’ve done where. I overburden myself with, ‘Oh, shit, did I do this joke last time?’ So I always love playing new towns.
GM: You last came to Vancouver a couple years ago. So you don’t need to write new material specifically for Canada, do you? Because what you’re doing now would be different anyway.
DS: The problem is, this is the first time this has happened where I’ve taken an extended vacation and my new special is coming out on Netflix somewhere around there so I won’t be able to use any of that material that you haven’t heard because it just came out. The only chunk I would close on is stuff you have heard two years ago that didn’t make it on the special, that’s going to have to wait till the next special.
GM: I like that we’re at the end of the Canadian tour in Vancouver because it’ll all be ironed out by the time you get here.
DS: Oh, not necessarily. My shit’s never necessarily ironed out, even if I know what I’m doing. Either my head is telling me they’ve heard it before or my head is telling me that it’s not ready yet. So I’m never comfortable.
GM: I like that Brian Regan is playing the night before you’re here. You guys are polar opposites in every way right down to interviews. I interview him next week at 8 a.m. Your manager was saying, ‘As late in the day as you can.’
DS: Just call my show the Brian Regan Afterparty.
GM: Do you like comics like Regan?
DS: I like comics, period. I’ve learned that, since I’ve moved to Bisbee, where there’s no comedians, I really never feel like I have anyone that I can really talk to, that I can really find any connection with. To the point where Kyle Cease, who I assassinated on every fucking level, personal and otherwise, in a web blog when he was doing his comedy class – he’s in our death pool – that’s how much I miss comics. I tweet back and forth with Dane Cook.
GM: I remember years ago you said to one of those Dane Cook haters, that you have more in common with Dane Cook than you do with your fans.
DS: Yeah, I remember that blog. It was like, ‘Keep in mind, with all the bullshit, if I went into an airport bar and there were 50 of my fans in there and Dane Cook, I would race to Dane Cook’s table hoping he didn’t notice me. Because I can talk to him.
GM: Have you talked to him? Would he talk to you?
DS: Yeah, no, we’re friends. He got me verified on Twitter. The analogy is the Yankees and the Red Sox. As much animosity there might be amongst the fans, they’d hang out with each other at dinner before they’d hang out with the fucking Yankees classic cap with the two beers on either side and straws going into his mouth.
GM: You like comics on that personal level. What about listening to them? Everyone loves Brian Regan no matter what their personal style is.
DS: I don’t know a lot of his stuff and I don’t listen to a lot of standup comedy. Usually the best or the worst is all I can stomach. Like it’s always fun to watch someone horrible go down in flames at an open mic. Occasionally I’ll watch standup. Again, I don’t have any way to see it live where I live. And specials just seem so rehearsed, even when I do my own specials. And they always do them in a fucking giant theatre where huge waves of applause fuck up the timing that you’d hear live. It feels really sterile to watch and to do.
GM: You choose smaller venues for that reason, right?
DS: Yeah, but it’s still, to an extent… I think a better special would be to have a camera on the road with you for a six-week tour and catch different chunks of actual riffed parts or even do seven shows at a club in a week and wear the same shit every night and try to catch the best of anything that makes it feel live.
GM: You’ve put Bisbee on the map. Are you a celebrity there?
DS: Uh, not that I know of. But it’s that kind of town where even if they thought you were a celebrity, they’d never tell you.
GM: How many people?
DS: Uh, I think under 6000. And that’s 6000 with 25 miles to the next town. There’s towns like that in Massachusetts, where I grew up, that probably have 6000 people but between that town and the next town is a house. Literally, that’s the border. Urban sprawl to its fullest. This is an outpost.
GM: I know you’ve said sometimes you feel you’re being preachy, but I never get that impression, even though I feel that way with some other comics who talk about big issues like you do. I can’t put my finger on why I don’t find you preachy when I find others preachy.
DS: Every several years I’m forced to watch or listen to my own shit. Because after this many years of doing it, you go, ‘Did I already do that? That sounds familiar.’ So I’ll force myself to watch old DVDs and listen to old CDs. I’ve watched a couple that where I’ll go, ‘That sounds kind of fucking pompous.’ I don’t know about preachy but definitely ‘oh, I’m better than you.’ And I never meant to do that. But some of the shit you look back on – because I hate watching myself so badly, I have to get drunk just to edit a DVD, to sit there and watch it, because in my head I still look like I’m 25 years old, then I see myself. I don’t have mirrors in my house for a reason. I just cringe. So it’s really one of the best things or the best thing you can do as a comic is listen to yourself. People say tape every set. Well, I tape every special and that’s hard enough to get through every two years.
GM: So you see this about yourself and then you try to change so you don’t sound so preachy?
DS: No, I’ll forget everything I just watched in the last three days because I won’t do it repeatedly. But hopefully something sticks. It’s like watching documentaries. I watch so many fucking documentaries on Netflix and something I gave a 5-star review to, a week later I remember I liked it or I didn’t. Same with books: I liked it or I didn’t. But I retain so little of the meat of it, but if I remember two or three things that stood out that either informed me at worst or at best I get a bit about or a reference for a bit… So hopefully I watch myself and go, ‘Oh, you come across really arrogant, saying everyone else is fucking dumb and you’re not’. I addressed it in one DVD where I go, ‘Hey, listen, I’m the kind of guy who’ll call you stupid for not knowing something I just found out about yesterday.’ But that’s just that one DVD. Maybe that should be some kind of asterisk at the beginning of every thing, the same way TV shows after every commercial break go, ‘Warning: some of this material may be inappropriate for younger viewers.’ I should have that at the beginning of every DVD. ‘Viewer be advised: This guy might not know what the fuck he’s talking about with a surly attitude.’
GM: Comedy always has drama. The latest is Kain Carter stealing Patrice O’Neal’s act.
DS: Yeah, it’s good he’s getting shut down but it’s a guy who’s not getting stage time stealing from a guy who’s dead and not getting stage time. Right now it’s simply principle. Like when you have Mencia allegedly stealing from comics who really are up-and-coming, where every joke fucking matters to them, that’s a different story than a YouTube sensation who’s getting nothing but fucking idiots that ‘like’ his page stealing nothing from a dead guy.
GM: Not following. Where do you stand on that? Who cares?
DS: No, no. But that guy’s not really gaining anything other than some nebulous fucking ‘like’. It’s not like he’s brought this into a career. And he’s stealing from a guy who’s dead and hopefully doesn’t give a fuck. I have no idea of what happens in the afterlife but I would think that – I would hope that – if there’s an afterlife, you’re not sitting there going, ‘Oh, that guy’s got fucking 280,000 “likes” on his YouTube page on my material.’ I hope that if anything good comes out of death, it’s not really giving a shit about that stuff. Before YouTube, before the internet, there was probably a million of those guys that were famous around the office place for being the funniest guy and all they were doing was George Carlin but no one knew it. Now you got YouTube where, ‘I’m funny at the office doing this guy’s stuff so I’ll put it on YouTube. It’s not like I’m on stage.’
GM: How’s the Atheists Unite thing going?
DS: It’s done. She got, I think, $260 over the median, average price of a home in that community: almost $126,000.
GM: Was a giant cheque handed to her?
DS: They sent her the money. The indiegogo page sent her the money.
GM: Have you met her?
DS: No. I thought about going out and flying to Oklahoma and doing the giant cheque thing and then doing a podcast with her – and I can still do it; it’s not real time sensitive – but my girlfriend had some surgery scheduled that day. But I can still go out and podcast with her. I talked to her just randomly. She got a cell phone right after the tornado because it destroyed her home phone, but she hadn’t had a cell phone. She got a burner temporarily and then texted me shortly before the thing ended saying, Here’s my Google number, some internet phone. She goes, ‘I don’t want to have a cell phone anymore.’ Yeah, she’ll do good things with the money.
GM: It was great how she responded to that inane question from Wolf Blitzer on live TV. She probably wasn’t expecting the question. It’s not like she had this statement in mind that she was going to get across no matter what. It just came up organically.
DS: Yeah, well he kind of forced the issue and she said it with a smile, very politely. And that was great. And when I finally did talk to her – I didn’t talk to her on the phone until after we had already started it – and she was like, ‘I don’t really feel like I have a bond with other atheists.’ She was saying it kind of apologetically, like I was doing this for the cause. No, I was doing this because it’s fucking funny. And I knew people would be behind it on some level. I had no idea that it would be on that level to make that much money. But just the idea of having a fund raiser for just you, I want to keep doing that. That’s something that hopefully I’ll be talking about when I’m up there. Not for atheists, just for individuals. I give money to things where I feel like I should, especially community-based things, and the Bisbee Food Bank at the holidays, but when you give to fucking American Throat Cancer or whatever, whatever it is, it’s almost like you’re trying to buy karma. But you don’t feel good about it because you know most of that is going to mailers and other nonsense and buying pink ribbons. When you fucking actually change a life like that, I’ve never felt better. I’ll talk about it on stage.
GM: Has there been any news of it on CNN?
DS: No. Someone did a blog the first day we started it. No one ever followed up. They could get no press out of it. In fact, there was press that ignored it on purpose. There was some kind of Time magazine thing about how religious groups do so much more and you don’t see atheists doing anything, which is a bit that I’ve done. There was a big response that I retweeted. Someone who is going through all the things different atheist organizations did for that. It’s just that atheists don’t do it under the banner of atheism. Atheists do good shit all the time as individuals. They don’t print up fucking, ‘Hey, we’re atheists! Remember, we did this for ya!’ And those t-shirts don’t come out of the fucking final cut of what you’re giving to charity.
GM: His question was just odd anyway. It would seem to me that a Christian might become an atheist after a tornado devastates their town, not thank God for saving his life.
DS: Right. But to Wolf’s imbecilic credit, he was probably so used to every single interview he did someone thanking God because that’s that part of the country. Everyone’s thanking God for not killing their cat even though it took all the rest of their shit. I’m sure every interview he did ended with God, so he just thinks, ‘Hey, this is my closer. I always go for the God and then say, Back to the studio.’ And then when she didn’t thank God, he doesn’t know how to close. That was actually Rebecca Vitsmun, the girl, that was her hypothesis of why he kept pushing her. It makes perfect sense.
GM: Are you back in the good graces of Just For Laughs now?
DS: Probably not. I don’t know. Bruce Hills is a douche. And I stand behind everything I had an argument with him about that got me thrown out of there the first time. I was physically removed from a green room.
GM: And you haven’t been back since?
DS: Just For Spite we did one more time, when we did the carwash party. Then someone else tried to recreate the carwash party without us and I heard that was a miserable failure. Yeah, but the Just For Spite thing ran its course. When you forget why you hate him so much, there’s no reason to keep drumming that up.
GM: You need to attach yourself to a festival and do an Andy Kindler-type of State of the Industry speech. Because I’d love to hear Stanhope’s State of the Industry.
DS: I’d love to do the same thing, too, but I’d also love to have any idea what the industry’s like anymore. I’m really starting to feel not part of it. Because I’m not. I don’t see comics, I don’t know who’s up-and-coming. I forget what I was watching where they were talking about all these different comedians and I’m like, I don’t know a single one of those names they just dropped in a list of names I should know. I just told Bingo tonight to DVR every sitcom. I’ll hate them, and it’ll be drudgery, but I just want to watch a half-dozen of the sitcoms that are on now in case I need a reference. If I had to have a bad sitcom reference, I think According to Jim might be it, and I never watched that. I at least want to get the reference if I hear it, even if I don’t use it.
GM: Last time we spoke, you were really planning on the Mayan calendar end-of-life thing to be true.
DS: (chuckles) I think I said that facetiously. Yeah, but I wanted it. For years, that’s such a great thing to capitalize on. We were going to do a giant festival out of it but then we couldn’t decide where to do it. We could go to Costa Rica but who can go to Costa Rica? It became a goof early but if we started selling hundred-dollar tickets to that a couple years out, we could have got the people that actually believed it. But the problem was it was in December so there’s no place warm enough to do an outdoor thing like we wanted to do and have people camp out. And Costa Rica’s too far out. ‘Hey, we could do it in Bisbee’ but you don’t want that fucking many freaky people near your house. So then at the end, me and Rogan and Joey Coco Diaz did a show in LA. It was a fucking great time.
GM: I saw on your website, you did a little video for PETA.
DS: Oh, yeah.
GM: Is that one of your causes?
DS: No, no, they wanted to interview me because of that killer whale closer I did on the last DVD. They cut out all the stuff that kind of bashed them.
GM: You’re not a vegetarian, are you?
DS: No. It’s one of those things I feel like I should be, because I am an animal person. But if it’s already dead and it’s there and it tastes good…
GM: These sides of you, the Atheists Unite, the animal stuff… I’ve always felt you were a really polite, maybe even a little bit shy, good guy. Do you get the sense that some of your fans think you’re something that you’re not?
DS: I guess if you based it on a body of my work. No, I’m a really fucking boring guy. I’m really good at doing nothing. I like watching shitty TV, like Bar Rescue and hating it. I’m not really much of a drug guy anymore – I just don’t have the time or need or access or motivation. As I’m trying to put new material together, [I think] ‘What’s the angle on this? I gotta do mushrooms again.’ Like I really need to for professional reasons. It’s so difficult to do the drugs that I should be doing – doing acid or mushrooms and just going through that whole weird body thing with the anguish. It winds up where you go, ‘Aw, fuck, I should be doing this all the time.’ But it’s, ‘Ah, not now. I got bills and I got this.’ It sucks being an adult.
GM: You don’t have to write about that stuff if you’re not doing it, though.
DS: No, no, no. To get like a different point of view. Like, instead of copying some formula that you have about writing, like ‘Okay, what’s wrong with this Boston Marathon’ thing. Doing mushrooms, you can look at that stuff and just see it from a whole weird backward point of view. I’m sure weed helps to some extent, it’s just that weed has never agreed with me. It just makes me everything that I shouldn’t be as a comic.
GM: Do your fans get disappointed when they meet you after the show?
DS: That’s the best reason for not meeting them. I’ll sell merch after the show just because that’s how I pay my road manager. And then after that I disappear. I’ll find a bar that no one’s at. Especially when we’re doing these driving tours. For years I was just flying to gigs. I’d just fly, get off the plane, go to the gig, tell my jokes, stay in a hotel for seven hours, get on the first plane out. And it was boring as fuck. You don’t talk to anybody, you don’t see anyone, you don’t travel with your friends, you don’t have an opening act except for whoever’s local at the club and you never talk to them. And it was just like delivering comedy. Like literally Fed-Ex: ‘Package! Here’s 45 minutes! Bye.’ So now I my road manager is my buddy. Not in Canada but generally I’ll travel with a friend of mine so we’ll all drive around and we’re listening to podcasts in the car and fucking off. That’s what I want to do.
GM: What openers are you using in Canada?
DS: No idea. Different people every night.
GM: How do you choose them?
DS: I’m not. I think the venues are. Brian’s pretty much taken over all of that. Especially places like Canada where I don’t know one place from another. I know Pittsburgh’s near Cleveland, and I know a comic that’s near there that can do all three. And in Canada, I don’t know where fucking Kingston is versus whatever. I let him figure it out. I do other shit. You get to a place where it’s far easier to let your manager take care of shit. Especially when my manager only works for me. That’s his only job. He has no other clients. We have a very unique business model.
GM: How did you find him?
DS: He’s the guy that brought me over to Edinburgh the first time. He had a room over there for the festival and I was recommended to him by David Crowe. That was my first time in the UK so he did all my Europe bookings from then on up until I parted ways with Judy Brown in ’07. And it was his suggestion: ‘Hey, let’s do it like this.’ Unlike all the fucking assholes – I won’t name names but you can find them all at the Montreal comedy festival – that just sign 150 comics, let them make it on their own, then whoever gets lucky and makes it on their own anyway, they take full credit for. If I don’t work, he doesn’t fucking eat. You gotta have trust both ways on that one. I’d like to do the opposite: I should sign like 100 managers and whoever gets me the best deal, they get the commission.
GM: You’re on to something! I asked you in 2005 if you were going to do a book and you said, ‘Yeah, I gotta get on that.’ I just read recently where you said, ‘Yeah, I gotta get on that.’ Are you any closer? Everyone’s doing one now.
DS: No.
GM: You’re such a good writer.
DS: In short bursts, at best. I think if I were to actually write a book that wasn’t just a compilation of things I wrote on my website or old bits that I regurgitated into a book – Brain Droppings – if I were to actually write anything, by the time I finished it, I would have no memory of how it started. Writing’s as bad as reading for me. I read so laboriously, it could take me weeks to read a book, especially if it’s good. The better it is, the longer it takes me to read because that fucking makes me think of this and now I’m off in my head: I’m writing bits and then I forget where I was and now whatever I was thinking about, it’s like, Was that part of the book? Radley Balko, his new book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop, was fucking fantastic but it was so hard to concentrate because it was so insanely infuriating and at the same time, obviously, inspiring. So every couple of pages you find yourself drifting off in thought and murder and finding the people responsible and killing their kid in front of them and fantasies like that. ‘Where was I? Oh, page 12. I’ve been working on this for a day!’ So yeah, I’m a terrible reader.
GM: This ADD thing, is that because of your years of drugs and alcohol or were you like that even as a kid?
DS: It would depend on what therapist you asked. Some people would say that. Who fucking knows? How do you pinpoint that? Was it from four years of drinking or now that it’s 30-some years of drinking, is it that? Or is because my mother never paid enough attention to me so I always find myself crying out? She put me in a room with a book and said, ‘I’ll be back.’ Anyone who can find the reason that they’re like this… It’s just like Intervention. They set up the initial shots of the person fucking up and sucking a dick for fucking meth amphetamines or whatever. And then at some point about eight or twelve minutes in, they’ll do a montage of baby pictures and they’ll go through how they grew up. And they’ll always find some tacit way of explaining why they are like they are today. ‘At 12, her parents divorced. She didn’t see her father again.’ I’m like, Okay, so you’re trying to say that that’s the reason. You can’t just say, ‘Maybe he’s just a fuck-up.’ Maybe that guy went into a theatre in Aurora and just fucking killed people because he’s an awful person. I’d like to see the montage of Hitler.
GM: I guess we’re looking for a reason but the problem is you could find someone with the same background who turned out great.
DS: Exactly. I have that background. My mother was a drunk for a little while and my parents divorced. I was an awful kid. I was a fucking terrible kid. I tortured fucking insects and stuff. It had nothing to do with my mother had fucking too many cocktails. I was just a shitty awful kid.
GM: And you’ve never killed anyone.
DS: No, but I sometimes wonder if comedy is not the reason that I haven’t. There are so many people that are horrific people, I know enough of that mentality where I go, Wow, I can see why someone might do that. But if you look at my background as a child, I have all the same profile patterns of a serial killer. Yeah, I dug up my dead cat and I boiled its bones and then bleached them and tried to put it all back together.
GM: At what age?
DS: Uh, that was probably at 15 or so. Younger than that I had torture camps for gypsy moth caterpillars. I was just a fucking rotten kid. We were vandals, we were pyromaniacs.
GM: So instead of having sympathy for those that then go on killing sprees, couldn’t you say, ‘Hey, I turned it around; why can’t you?’
DS: No, I think a lot of it is just by happenstance. I did find an outlet and they didn’t. I wasn’t sitting there going, ‘You know what? If I don’t try comedy, a lot of people are gonna die.’
GM: You’ve been speaking out against Dr. Drew for a while. I just downloaded today your episode on his show. How did that turn out?
DS: You gotta listen to it. It turned out wonderfully underwhelming. He is a really nice guy, he’s very charming. He hadn’t heard the bit. All I know is I got the call that he wanted me on the show. I was just coming back from Alaska so I had to go back to Tucson from Alaska, and instead of driving two hours back to Bisbee, get on a different flight to Burbank to go do his show. Then I said, ‘How did this come about?’ The producer says, ‘Oh, a lot of our listeners wrote in saying we should have you on the show so I put it in my book.’ I said, ‘That’s bullshit. You didn’t accidentally have some random comic you’ve never heard of on your show, not knowing I did a 17-minute on Dr. Drew is an asshole.’ I asked him on the air and he goes, ‘Well, I know you talk shit about me but I’ve never listened to it because I don’t like to see those things online because I’m real sensitive.’ Which I’m hooked right there. I don’t look myself up for the same reasons. I don’t want to hear what bad shit people have to say about me. So it was very pleasant. I stood my ground but it wasn’t contentious. It was fun.
GM: That’s the thing: You’re a respectful guy face-to-face when you’re not talking shit on stage.
DS: Yeah, but just like his show, where I gave him shit about things like going boating with Gary Busey, is that really medicine just to create conflict? But the flip-side is I can’t be a gentleman on stage about how I feel because that doesn’t sell tickets, either. I have to say I hope you get eaten by ants buried with your head in the sand. I have to have the bombast, too.
GM: Did he manage to explain himself to your satisfaction?
DS: No. We agreed to disagree at points. Like, he swore that it was still ethical to take Tom Sizemore and Heidi Fleiss and put them in the same treatment even though she had a restraining order against him for beating the fucking tar out of her. But that’s still good medicine. He stood by that: ‘Absolutely I’d do it again.’ Alright, what are you gonna say? It was very civil and I’d do it again in a minute.
GM: Have him on yours.
DS: Yeah, if he’s ever in Bisbee, Arizona. Not that there’s not people there that don’t need some kind of treatment, even if it’s bogus and hokey. Yeah, but they’re not famous enough. They’re just small town tweakers. He has no interest. The one thing I fucking forgot to bust his balls about is where he publically said if he were Lindsay Lohan’s dad, he’d plant cocaine on her and have her arrested just so she sobers up in jail. And I fucking missed that. I had that in my notes, too, and I fucking didn’t get a chance to get that out there.
GM: Did your fans ask why you didn’t go harder on him?
DS: There’s a lot of people that were disappointed that it was not a bar room brawl, but those are the fans that… They’ll grow up a bit.
GM: Alright, Doug. Thanks a lot for talking.
DS: You’re welcome, sir. Thanks for having me. Yet again.
GM: Yet again. I’ll see you at the end of the month.
DS: I’ll see you soon, Mr. MacPherson.
GM: Alright.
DS: Alright. Back to the bar.