By Robert Scucci
| Published
Ever since the late 90s and early aughts marked the death of the monoculture, I’ve had a heck of a time keeping up with my favorite musicians, artists, and comedians because of their guerilla marketing campaigns, or, in some cases, their lack of marketing all together. The amount of times I’ve ended up pulling an all-nighter because I found out a new album had an unannounced midnight drop after years of radio silence is palpable, but ultimately worth it because that’s how I choose to enrich my life with media, and I’ll sleep when I’m dead. This is all to say that I had no clue that Doug Stanhope quietly released his latest stand-up special, Discount Meat, for free on YouTube on December 31, 2024.
Having just come out of a digital detox in the form of deactivating all of my social media accounts, I was equal parts surprised and thrilled to find out that Stanhope had a solid new hour and 18 minutes ready to be beamed into my eyeballs within an hour of getting back into my usual doom-scrolling.
The Comedian’s Anti-Comedian
Discount Meat starts out like many other Doug Stanhope specials in the sense that he shows up on stage half-in-the-bag, ready to go on the rant of a lifetime. Letting the audience know that there’s no opening act because it’s easier for him to just not be as funny as he normally is for the first 20 minutes of his set (which is basically the same thing as an opening act), he explains how he worked out most of the material heard in Discount Meat before the COVID lockdowns, and then started working on more material somewhat recently, and has no clue how to end his set because he has two different closers that are completely unrelated.
If you know anything about Doug Stanhope, he’s spent his entire career flying by the seat of his pants, showing up on stage wearing whatever thrift-store jacket he purchased the day before (without washing it), and approaches stand-up comedy with the same level of unpredictability that he approaches his personal hygiene.
Kicking off by debating which was funnier, COVID or 9/11, Stanhope wastes no time setting the tone in Discount Meat, and puts a unique spin on what would otherwise be a standard/hack kind of premise if it came from any other comedian’s mouth. After spending a considerable amount of time weighing out the pros and cons of both global catastrophes, he resolves that 9/11 had better conspiracy theories, which he doesn’t necessarily believe, but celebrates as a form of entertainment. In Stanhope’s mind, the conspiracy theories of yesteryear held more weight because even though he knew he was being lied to, the production values of documentaries like Loose Change came off as valid enough to actually fool a healthy amount of people.
Weighing on his conversations with Roseanne Barr about QAnon, lizard people, and how flat-Earth conspiracies don’t hold up under much scrutiny like somebody simply shrugging their shoulders, Stanhope pivots into the good stuff, like revisiting the time he helped euthanize his mother (which is spoken about in greater detail in Beer Hall Putsch), the ongoing suicide pact that he has with his wife, and letting his on-the-verge-of-death dog run into the Safeway with no leash for an epic last supper without a care in the world.
Not Just A Stage And Microphone
Discount Meat isn’t like any other stand-up special you’ve seen because it’s not presented as a guy on a stage with a microphone talking to the audience, but rather played through vintage TV screens on your screen as if somebody was watching Stanhope perform from the comfort of their own living room or study. At first I didn’t think I’d be into this kind of delivery, but once I got locked into his routine, I felt like I was quietly watching along with somebody else, which made for an intimate experience that I wasn’t expecting.
While I can’t say for certain why Stanhope approached Discount Meat in such an innovative way, the prevailing theory among his fans is that he wanted to “broadcast” his special in a way that mirrored how he grew up watching stand-up and working on material himself.
Proving that he’s still got it, Stanhope remains cynical, vulgar, insightful, and wickedly hilarious because his whole shtick is that he’s just riffing on half-baked ideas, hoping he finds his groove in real time even though it’s safe to say that a healthy portion of his act is, in fact, premeditated. Stumbling over his own words and messing up punchlines as expected in Discount Meat, Stanhope proves that no matter how prepared or unprepared he actually is, he knows how to command a crowd at the highest level, making him one of the greats.
If you’ve slept on Doug Stanhope’s Discount Meat like I did, there’s still time to wake up and head on over to YouTube and bust a gut laughing.
