“ONCE you do standup, it spoils you for everything else,” says Doug Stanhope.

“There’re no censors, there’re no sponsors to get offended, there’re no standards and practices. It’s just you, and it’s immediate gratification. You say it, and it drifts off into thin air, and you can say it a different way the next day.”

 Stanhope’s confrontational rants, whose live show was twice named Best Stand-Up Show of the year by Time Out New York, encompasses caustic social commentary, outlandish first-person narratives, graphic sex and perversion, sometimes within the same sentence. Fuelled by equal amounts of anger, outrage and alcohol, Stanhope rails against western civilization’s slide into apathy and stupidity.

Stanhope has been compared to such fearless comic revolutionaries as Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks.

But his work makes it abundantly clear that he’s a complete original. As Ricky Gervais tweeted, ‘Doug Stanhope might be the most important standup working today.’

 In recent years, Stanhope has won a large and rabidly devoted fan base both in the US and abroad on his own uncompromising terms, bypassing the conventional comedy circuit and most forms of mainstream media exposure.

The Denver Post calls Stanhope “A truth-teller and astute (if messy) social critic..”

Find out for yourselves when he takes the stage of  The Olympia Theatre on June 14.