Read the transcript for the stand-up comedy special 'The Dying Of a Last Breed' (2020) by Doug Stanhope on Comedy Buff. Track transcripts ready: 1/1.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Doug Stanhope. Thanks. Thanks very much. For public release, on Saturday night, May 25th, while performing in Las Vegas, I made comments and performed material that I now understand to be utterly deplorable and indefensible. It is now a source of great shame and embarrassment, and I want to offer my heartfelt apologies. I'm gutted by my own carelessness and beg you to know, deliver earnestly, this is not who I am.
I intend to take the time and the future for great soul searching and hope to come back a more sensitive and insightful human being. I only wish there was some way I could go back in time and erase this whole ugly affair. I like to get ahead of problems. I decide I'm going to do this whole show backwards, kind of, where I'm going to open with what I was going to use as my closer, but my closer I really like.
And it's about dead kids and that makes me happy and it sets a tone for the entire show. So I go, yeah, let's, let's do it that way. Perks me up in the beginning. And I'll tell you, there used to be in any given recording or special or whatever the fuck you call them, a large portion, not a large, but a certain percentage of my material was based on cable news. Cable news shit I watched on CNN or whatever cable news.
And I don't have that anymore because since the election, there's only one fucking subject on cable news anymore. And it's just that one boring fucking story that I don't care about. I have nothing to add to. I never even say his name on stage. Just ignore it. It's your fucking problem. You deserve that fucking guy because you're the generation that made this happen. You are responsible for making all these talentless blowhards famous just for being fucking assholes.
And now you got one that you call your leader. So fuck you. None of my business. I'll be dead soon. But where it became a deficit to me, I remember right before the election, there was a story about a family at Disney World that was enjoying a vacation and they were having a nice picnic at the end of the day on a fake beach at a fake lake at Disney World with probably a fake sunset too. And the little toddler boy of the family wandered out into the drink just a little bit and a real alligator sprung out and ate the boy, which the dad probably thought was fake too after a whole day at Disneyland, he, oh, there's no surprises for me anymore, a real alligator.
Oh, fuck, that's my boy, it's a real alligator. So the dad, he grabbed the boy by the wrists, but by now the alligator has the boy up past the feet, past the waist. And as they say in the business, possession is nine tenths of the law. And that has to be a very emasculating, devastating experience where you have to concede defeat in a tug-of-war with an alligator when your boy is the rope, like, ah, I can't, ah, fuck.
Oh, fuck, you try it, honey. It's a goddamn alligator. The fuck am I supposed to, this whole vacation was your idea. I'm not responsible for, I tried my best and it was like weeks after that story, I remember watching that at two in the morning and then the election happens and then, then that's all they talk about. All the cable news. Oh, did you see what he tweeted this week? That contradicts what he tweeted last week.
Let's have a panel of eight eggheads all sit out here and discuss this for an entire hour. Should he apologize? What's your opinion, Brian? Well, you know my opinion because of the network we're on. We all have the same fucking opinion. How many kids being eaten by alligator stories am I missing because of this fucking onion head in office? I have a business to run, people. So now I just get all my news off the internet so I can read the headline, make sure it's not about that guy.
I don't know if I fixate on dead kids stories because of that alligator thing or maybe I just have a weird dark interest in dead kids stories. But every day I click on all the dead kids stories because they're always interesting. They're always tragic. Necessarily. I've never read a dead kid story where at the end I felt justice. How many times did your dad warn you not to talk on the cell phone in the tub while it's charging?
No, they're all tragic. But one of the patterns I've noticed is almost every dead kid story ends with, and the family has set up a GoFundMe page. For what? I don't know anything about what it's like to lose a child, but if there's one thing I do know, if nothing else, you're making money. A lot of money. Shit loads of money. The littler the kid, the more money you're making. Because now all that money you no longer have to spend on the big boy pee pants and the lunchables and the juice boxes, that's your petty cash coming right back into your pockets.
It's all the Pop Warner gear and the Air Jordans and the tuba lessons. That's your fucking money is racing back into your fat khaki pockets. The orthodontist, he had teeth that came straight out at you. No longer your concern. That's your bank. It's like you're in one of those phone booths on a game show where cash blows all around and you get to snatch as much out of the air as you possibly can. And you're going to start a GoFundMe page on top of that?
You greedy cocksucker, playing on the sympathies of your friends and neighbors. You robber baron, you road agents. You have a little kid that dies. You start a GoFund someone else page and pay it forward. Share the wealth. You have a friend that has a little kid that dies. Jack him up for a loan. That's the day. Day one before everyone else gets to him. Sorry, as awkward as this seems, Kevin, I heard you won a lottery of sorts.
And I don't know if you heard about the predicament I'm in. I'm in a bit of a pickle. My kids are, uh, they're still alive. So it's tough times at the Jenkins household hate to show up with my hand out. The fuck do you need a GoFundMe for a dead kid? The only time I've seen it in a story is where it says to help pay for funeral costs, which is another scam altogether. A funeral, you're just fucking, it's dead.
It doesn't care. Dead things don't give a fuck about all your goings on. And you're going to get a headstone and a coffin for what? You're going to, you're going to buy a cemetery plot for a dead kid? You're going to buy real estate for a dead thing while you're still renting? Does that make any sense at all? See, a little more energy this time, huh? You have something that you loved that's now dead.
That vessel is still sitting there. You donate it to science. It's what you do. You're going to fucking spend money on some nonsense that dead things don't care about? You, you, my parents both died and we donated both of their bodies to science because you can't chuck it in a dumpster. It's illegal for some reason. You donate it to science and what happens then is you actually help the world. You donate it to science, they show up, they pick up your dead thing, they ship it off free of charge to a medical university where some hungover 19-year-olds are going to gut open your Aunt Betty and start flipping around her internal organs.
It's like it's a Benihana and chase each other around with your mom's pancreas. Quit it! Quit it! I'm going to hurl! Still drunk! Get it down! But maybe one of those kids is actually paying attention and somehow your donated dead thing will, he, he finds a cure for something, for some disease or malady that actually has a cure for you. You actually helped society from your donation rather than you just being some weird corpse hoarder.
And then you did a good thing for the world! That kid's Asian by the way. I know they say that there's no heartache worse than having to bury your own child and I have to give that to you, I wouldn't know. I've never been in that position and never put myself at that kind of disadvantage by having one. But if that is true that that's the worst heartache, that proves my point that there's a huge difference between a child and a fetus.
Because I never had to bury my own child, but did, uh, have to pony up for an abortion when it was my turn to grab the check and heartache with an abortion? I could have watched live footage of that abortion on closed circuit TV while eating spaghetti and still gotten distracted and started checking my tweets. The only heartache you'll ever feel with an abortion is if you chug the champagne too quickly afterwards.
And if you started a GoFundMe page for an abortion, I would kick in a few dollars and retweet that to my tweeter followers. Because that is an effort worth investing in for the planet. That is an effort worth investing in for the planet. That is an effort in for the planet. Had to get that out. That bit. It's important. It's dead kid season. Memorial Day weekend. Kicks off dead kid season. You're going to get back from Vegas.
The sun's coming out, whatever shithole you live in, and you're going to peel the tarp off of that above-ground pool. You're going to start pouring the sangrias a little too heavy and a little too long. And I didn't think I was that drunk, but you stopped watching the gate. And then all of a sudden, little Kelsey is now bobbing around a little blue bobber that afternoon right beside the pool noodles.
Going to fire up the jet ski and zip Sarah around the lake. And you didn't think you were that drunk. And now she's all wrapped up in the propeller. Maybe that Asian student that was paying attention could figure out Nerf propellers if you donate her to science. I don't know where you guys are from, and I don't give a fuck, but wherever you're going back to, I'm sure I'm booked there. It's so weird to be filming this at the plaza because I have been coming here by choice since before I even did comedy.
This is my place. This is my old school Vegas place. And fucking Oscars, Steakhouse, and even the worst parts of it, I have to go, I... That's the reason I come here. It's vintage fucking Vegas. I don't get to normally play any place that I want to be or you want to be at the same time. I usually have to play where you live and you're stuck, and then I'm stuck there with you, playing in some fucking mall, some hideous city.
I just, I had to, I ate at an Outback Steakhouse last week at a fucking mall. And there was people there, like, are you a comic too? Because unless you're stuck and that's the only thing walking distance, why would you be in here? Outback Steakhouse couldn't be less authentic if Jim Jeffries was your waiter. Sorry, Jim. I had to do it. But that's what I do for a living. I come visit you in fucking horrible places, and then I'm stuck there for at least a day, usually at an airport hotel, some mid-range, like 2.5 star, beige-ish, brownish, salmon-colored inn.
It's always an inn, like a day's inn, or a comfort inn, or a quality inn, and they're all in a fucking row, and you walk in and it's full of mid-range, 2.5 star folks doing dumb shit. Oh, it's a Dance Moms competition this weekend! And there's a bunch of kids in ballerina outfits and fucking, I'm using my roller bag as a cane, coming in shit-faced, and there's kids pressing every button on the elevator, because their parents can't afford six flags, so this is a thrill ride for the kid to go up and down, and you go, "Don't hit the kid!
Don't hit the kid! It's not your kid!" If you had your own kid, you could beat your kid in effigy of that kid, but it's not your kid, so don't hit the kid. Talk to the businessman with the fucking lanyard. This old conventioneer business fuck, you look like Mitch McConnell, and you have really bad small talk, but a very large lanyard. They wear big lanyards around there and there. Northeast Arkansas Assembly of Special Needs Educators.
Well, you need a fucking backstage pass that size to get into that 8:30 a.m. Ted Talk? Are you kidding? I stole a croissant off your table in front of that fucking banquet room, and I didn't need a pass. I just stole the fucking thing. Think you're so important? You wake up in t