[420 Girl]

He’s stoned again.

It’s 8:30 in the morning on Wednesday in the studio of WMMR’s Preston and Steve Show. Doug Benson, their special guest, whose credits include The Marijuana-logues (”Like The Vagina Monologues, but with pot”) and Super High Me (”Like Super-Size Me with weed instead of McDonalds”) sports an unshaven face and a baseball cap. A cushion of gray bags cloud around his eyes, which are relaxed and almost squinting from his tell-tale doobie smile.

Then the inevitable topic of Benson’s green lifestyle is raised by the radio hosts.

“Philly is one of my favorite cities to spend Thanksgiving in because it’s one of the only places where none of my relatives live in,” he said. “My family is totally supportive about my pot smoking. During holiday dinners they’re like, ‘You smoke pot and you’re successful in endorsing an illegal substance that children shouldn’t use. Good job, son.’”

By 9 a.m., Benson is hurried out of the studio and into a cab. Next stop: Main street in Manayunk for MMR’s Spanksgiving Day Parade. Benson is the presiding honorary guest in the freakish spectacle, seated atop a fire truck next to a hot tub of bikini-clad P&S bimbos/groupies, a slew of Mummers, burlesque dancers and leather-masked gimps chugging close behind. Save for the WMMR Vans, photographers, and locals news cameramen, the whole scene is like something out of Hunter S. Thompson novel, the experience surely intensified with Benson’s perpetually off-the-charts THC and sleep deprivation levels.

Later, sitting in a booth at Mad River after the Spanksgiving spectacle ends, Benson is relieved to munch on eggs gand pancakes from a breakfast buffet. Maybe he always says that whatever city he is in at the moment is one of his favorites to visit when he appears on radio shows, but Philly actually is — at the very least since Helium is a no-brainer East Coast stop for comics.

Plus, the weed is decent too.

“People always ask me what my favorite strain is, but I really don’t have one,” he says. “Actually, I went to the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam last year and there was a strain called ‘choco-lope.’ That was good.”

Benson has adapted to a lifestyle working on cable networks, making jokes at the expense of Britney and Paris on VH1’s Best Week Ever and placing sixth in the finals of NBC’s Last Comic Standing without ever downplaying his stoner lifestyle, a recurring motif in his stand-up routine. But many of Benson’s jokes are about other things, too, from his new orgasm cry to three-legged cats and the danger of meeting a girl on MySpace who’s really a front for To Catch a Predator.

But, Benson says, “If my jokes aren’t about smoking pot, then I’m usually high on pot when I write them.”

He often tells a true story about how he left a huge bag of weed in his jacket pocket when he dropped it off at the dry cleaner. Nervous about how they’d react, Benson stayed cool and picked up the garment as if nothing happened. The dry cleaners pinned the bag of weed to his lapel and also pretended nothing happened.

“Drunks always have these epic stories about the crazy shit they do when they’re drunk. Mine are like, ‘So I smoked a lot of pot, got sleepy and passed out,’” Benson says. “There’s a lot of forgetfulness. One time I looked for my sunglasses for a half hour when they were on my head the whole time. Then there’s the old waiting for the elevator that never comes because I forgot to press the button. But non-stoners do that stuff, too. Old people do it all the time.”

Anyone who’s seen Benson knows some of his funniest lines come from shutting down hecklers. “A lot of people like seeing comedians fire back a snappy retort at a heckler because it makes drunk people look really stupid,” he says. “It’s not something you can plan for. You have to assess each scenario differently and listen to what they yell at you, because usually it’s something really funny that can be thrown right back in their face.”

“I also understand that I’m in the business of sitting people down and getting them drunk, so I can’t complain, but when people are drunk, all the rules go out the window,” he adds. “I wish comedy clubs had a two-joint minimum instead of a two-drink minimum because then people would be a lot more mellow.”

But Benson is anything but mellow as he stumbles on stage to the cheers of a jolted crowd at Helium last Wednesday night.

“Hi, everybody,” he says with an ear-to-ear grin into the microphone. “Give it up for those two opening guys whose names I definitely can’t remember right now.”

His eyes have the same eased, tell-tale squint — albeit with a reinvigorated twinkle — as he sips from a clear liquid in a tall glass.

“Wow, thats definitely not water. Hey, did any of you guys hear me on the Preston and Steve show this morning?”

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