No Place Like Home

Doug Stanhope has spent his career cultivating the air of a highly articulate gutter philosopher, and this hour leans heavily into the insular, lived-in reality of his lifestyle. He spends a significant portion of the set explaining the absurdity of local bureaucracy, specifically detailing his partner Bingo’s experience trying to get mental health treatment in Arizona. Her provider, Community Intervention Associates, is located in a strip mall next to a gun shop and a brewery, forcing paranoid patients to walk through a door prominently marked “CIA” only to consult with a nurse on a Skype screen. It is the kind of dark, institutional dysfunction that Stanhope is uniquely suited to point out.\n\nRecorded in November 2015 at the Bisbee Royale in Bisbee, Arizona (the small, sleepy desert town where Stanhope resides) and released on the short-lived streaming platform Seeso in September 2016, the hour serves as a homecoming. The project was executive produced by his friend and occasional Bisbee drinking partner Johnny Depp. Released the same year Stanhope published his memoir, Digging Up Mother, the set captures a comic who was increasingly vocal about preferring his living room podcast to the grind of touring.\n\nThis exhaustion shows in the structure. The set relies on loose segues and inside references that reward regular podcast listeners but occasionally leave casual viewers out in the cold. When he focuses, the material is as potent as ever, particularly a segment where he compares his target demographic of disenfranchised, angry youth to the online recruiting tactics of ISIS. Other bits tackle global poverty, the cancer vanity of public sympathy, and a bizarrely uplifting closing philosophy about why everyone should simply “kick like they kick.”