Doug Stanhope, self-identified “road pig” who plays “all over the country and all over the world in a lot of shitholes,” and who says, ” Shitholes are my favorite places to be,” has published a screed on his myspace on how to book yourself into a string of those very shit holes for fun and profit. Sort of.

Essentially, he’s talking about liberation from comedy clubs and comedy club owners and striking out on your own to do, for lack of a more technical term, “door deals.”

Listen up, queercakes. You don’t need club owners. On every corner of every town there’s a bar with a stage and a microphone. They also have seats where they’d like people to be drinking, the heavier the better. They don’t care if you’re doing comedy, stripping or juggling onions to get people in the door.

Between Myspace and YouTube and the thousand other copycat sites, there is no reason you can’t build up a fanbase that will fill those seats in any given town, be it a comedy club or an Elks Lodge or any other boozer joint.

The lengthy, often rambling essay makes its points amid vivid, Thompson-esque depictions of life in the clubs and tangents that talk about the kind of acts he prefers to open his shows.

But the basic thrust is that a comic can be captain of his own comedy vessel. And there is much to recommend in his tract. And there is a lot to be said for crafting individual deals and handling much of the detail.

But it’s not easy, it takes a lot of work and it takes some risk. We figure it’s the risk that is the biggest hurdle for most. And, conversely, it’s the deferment of risk that keeps so many comics in the clubs– when you work in the clubs, you assume almost none of that risk; it’s all borne by the club owner. A lot of comics can’t break free of that arrangement and they pale at the thought of having it any other way. And it is only when they attain a certain level of notoriety that they even think of asking (or their management/representation even thinks of asking) for a “piece of the action.”

We’ve done the occasional door deal. We’ve had success here and there. And some disasters. It is a lot of work, but when it succeeds, the reward (and the attendant freedom) is great.

It is even more work when you are not a draw. Not being a draw means that you must plan (and maybe even finance) some ambitious promotion. Difficult when it is in your own backyard, much moreso when it is 100 miles away or 1,000 miles from home. Modern conveniences notwithstanding– YouTube, MySpace, college radio– it’s still quite a logistical undertaking.

Stanhope maintains that comics who choose to work in clubs (which he characterizes as venues, “who peddle mediocrity through fishbowl lotteries”) are creatures of habit or comfortable in those surroundings– the implication being that they’re lazy or mediocre. There’s even a hint that such comedians might be “chicken.”

The further implication seems to be that clubs stifle creativity and that they serve up mediocre acts to ordinary audiences. Stanhope prefers the “chaos and adrenaline” of what has become known as “non-traditional venues.”

That might be true in some clubs, but it is certainly not true in all. We’ve had spectacular, savvy crowds in comedy clubs. Conversely, we’ve played non-traditional venues who had no idea how to handle comedy crowds– or who attracted audiences who had no idea how to consume comedy– and the whole thing was a shit mess.

But the big difference between the clubs and the non-trad door deals is that there is a guarantee in the clubs. Most comics (it is probably safe to say) are desirous of a guarantee. So much so that they gladly give up more lucrative arrangements that might require more effort on their part. It’s a tradeoff.

And, let’s face it: No matter how many MySpace pals you have, no matter how many clips you have up on YouTube or .wav files of your act are circulating through LimeWire, you’re still going to be at the mercy of the venue and you’re still going to be dodging all manner of obstacles toward your goal of a packed house.

We just had a bad experience with a door deal. It illustrates the perils of such a mode of operation. But a previous experience with the same venue illustrates nicely just how pleasant and profitable they can be, too.

We hooked up with Higher Ground, a mainly music venue in Vermont. We agreed to do two shows on a Saturday in January and it went well. Not perfectly, but, if every such engagement went as well, we’d do them all that way.

We agreed to another deal at the same venue, this time in August of this year. There were at least two reasons that it might not go as well as the last time, however: 1) It was summer and 2) A show, with local comedians, was scheduled the Saturday before our show. We agreed to take the chance and we pulled out all stops, promotion-wise.

Then came the deathblow: A MySpace Secret Standup Show, featuring Louis CK, on Thursday night, two nights prior to our show. And… it was free.

There is no way that enough people (in a market the size of Burlington, VT) were going to pay $12-$14 to see us when they had just seen a comic the magnitude of Louis CK two night earlier– for FREE! (And, since it’s a MySpace Secret Show, it wasn’t announced until Monday!) After some deliberation, we pulled the plug.

Some comics would say that we should plaster on a smile, make the trip anyway and take the chance. But here’s where the absence of a guarantee and the assumption of risk comes into play: We weren’t just looking at the prospect of not making money, we were looking at the real prospect of losing money just by making the trip. And losing money is something that we simply cannot afford to do right now.

The Female Half is having surgery tomorrow (a left-breast ductoscopy with major ductile excision… or, as she calls it, “hooter surgery.”). We don’t have health insurance. We pay cash for everything. We can’t assume that kind of risk.

Perhaps in the future, our situation will change. Perhaps we’ll have the fiscal cushion to absorb the risk and the MySpace muscle to ensure a healthy turnout. Until then, though, the clubs, with their supposed oppressive atmosphere or their allegedly arbitrary or corrupted methods for choosing or rewarding talent, will be where we predominantly ply our trade.