[APPLAUSE]
ROB DELANEY: Thank you.
Hi.
Hello, everyone.
Actually, this is what picks me up, so this is just a prop.
It doesn't even matter.
I can do that.
Get away from me.
Thank you all for coming.
I don't know why you're here, meaning,
like, do you work here, and you were forced to attend?
Somebody shook your head.
You don't work here?
AUDIENCE: No.
ROB DELANEY: Great.
OK, that's good.
Then that means at least he wasn't forced to come here.
You have a Google shirt on.
You don't know who I am.
You wish you were somewhere else, but you're smiling.
That's OK.
Thank you.
You have the book.
Maybe you paid for it, maybe it was a gift.
I don't know.
In any case, thank you for coming to see me here now.
I appreciate that.
And thank you, Jason.
You could have dressed up.
You kind of dressed like a slob to introduce me.
The joke there is that I'm wearing the exact same thing.
[LAUGHTER]
ROB DELANEY: The Mitt Romney thing.
Yeah, I played him for "Funny or Die."
So what?
But then I got invited to the Obama headquarters.
That's true, and I'll just talk about that for a second
before I read the book.
What's funny is I had written I think that it's probably
a good idea to make access to health care easier
in the United States.
That's a radical position that I hold,
and I've written about that a lot.
And I didn't really care-- like I'm not a Democrat.
I'm not a Republican.
I just vote like on the issues.
And health care I liked a lot, so I wrote a lot of stuff
about that.
And then the Obama administration
contacted me and said, it seems like you
care about health care.
Would you want to maybe do ba liddle da?
And I was like, well, let me tell you how I feel,
and you can tell me, because I bet
I can tell you some things that'll make you not
want to have anything to do with me.
And I told them, I was like, I want
Barack Obama to be reelected as much as Michelle wants him
to be reelected, but not because I care about him.
I mean he's some insane millionaire
with the mental problems that you
need to want to be president.
So I didn't ever wear a Hope t-shirt or anything
crazy like that, you weird sloganeers.
So I was like, but that said, I'm insane,
so I'll happily go around the country talking about health
care policy and all that, why it's important,
but I might not even say the name Obama.
And they were like, it's been great speaking with you.
But then as it got closer, and I started to talk more fervently
and began to just like brutalize Mitt Romney in a real--
you know, I studied Karl Rove and his scummery,
and it seemed like a great way.
So I just went after him just because it was funny to me.
I remember he personally like outlawed forever assault
weapons in Massachusetts, which is where I grew up,
so I'd followed him for a lot longer than a lot of people
had.
And then three years later, in 2007, he joined the NRA.
So just watching him, I was like-- and the health care
thing.
Anyway, even Google now is like, why did we invite him to talk?
So I just was nuts about the Affordable Care
Act and its awesome website, right Google?
And it's OK to admit that that is garbage and embarrassing.
So then, finally, they did invite me, though,
because I did work so hard to help Obama get reelected.
And I was there election night, and it was pretty fun.
It was pretty fun.
My wife was pregnant with our second kid.
And she's a woman, so she has a uterus and a vagina.
And so there are people who like,
well, women should pay a million dollars to get a pap smear,
and men should get free, blow-up "Penthouse" blah, blah.
Anyway, drives me crazy.
So anyway, that was just a way to kill some time because I'm
secretly afraid to speak in public
and read from my own book.
No.
So I'll tell you.
Why the hell did I write a book?
A lot of people know me from Twitter, which is great,
and I had been doing stand-up for a long time before that.
And then in 2010, Julie Grau from Spiegel and Grau, who
published this book, wrote me on Twitter and she just like,
at replied me, like the way you would say, hey,
want to grab a club sandwich, Rick?
Like to your friend?
And she said, hey, would you write a book for me?
And I wrote, OK, and then forgot about it
because I didn't know who she was.
I'm sorry, I didn't know who she was.
And then Matt Johnson, an amazing, real author and guy
that I know wrote me, and he said, hey, asshole,
you need to pay attention to that.
She's like legitimately a towering figure
in the publishing world, and you're an asshole, again.
He said it twice.
And so I wrote her back, and I was like,
yeah, remember when I was like, yeah, that was just joking.
I mean, I want to, but I didn't mean
to so cavalierly, what do I-- how?
And so we started talking, and I said to her, I was like, well,
you know-- I live in Los Angeles-- and I said to her,
I was like, it so happens I've got a show next month
in New York, just trying to be so casual,
and maybe you could come.
And then she was like, OK.
And so then I immediately called every theater in New York,
I have to do a show next month in New York.
Because I didn't really have one.
And [MOCK YELLING] and I found one.
And then I was like, yeah, oh, I forgot the information
because I have so many shows, I forgot.
And here it is, and told her where it was.
I'm going to try to just gradually move
this throughout the thing.
And so we started talking, and she came to my show
with her team.
And they read all the stuff that I'd written for "Vice"
and saw my stand-up, which is very-- if you did find me first
on Twitter, you'd be forgiven if you thought
that my stand-up was like Steven Wrighty or Mitch Hedbergy,
like short joke.
But it totally isn't.
It's like super long, autobiographical, meandering
just shit, really awful, which is to say it's longer stuff.
So this wasn't a crazy departure for me,
even though some people would be forgiven
for thinking that it is.
So I started to write the book, and I
wanted it to be a-- I love memoirs,
and I love autobiographies.
But my favorite ones aren't ones where it was like, well,
my parents met at blah, blah, and then
I was born at X hospital.
Who cares?
We all have our own version of that,
and I'm not interested in yours, so why would I be in mine?
So I wanted it to be true.
First of all, err towards the side of humor,
and then deal with some of the things.
Because yes, I'm very, very lucky
to be able to make a living doing comedy,
but I've been through some darker stuff,
like anybody who survives to adulthood has.
But some of my stuff was just a little more dramatic,
I mean, the thing that sort of divides my life into two halves
was 11 years ago.
In a blackout, I drove a car into the Department
of Water and Power in Los Angeles,
and I broke both my arms very badly.
This bone was sticking out.
It was a compound fracture.
I had to have surgery on both of them.
So I was in jail in a wheelchair in a bloody hospital
gown from face blood.
And my legs were also in these leg stabilizer things
because my knees had been ripped open to the bone.
So my legs couldn't bend, and my arms didn't work,
and I was in a hospital gown.
Sometimes in jail I'd just slide out of the wheelchair,
and my hospital gown would come up,
exposing everything to everybody in jail.
And if you've been in jail, you know
that you're supposed to keep that stuff to yourself.
And so that's when I was like, oh, I
should live my life in a different manner from now on,
or I'll definitely die or kill people.
For me, it was kind of like, I didn't care,
like a lot of drug addicts and alcoholics,
I was like I could have died at any moment,
and I was totally at peace with that.
But once the cops were like, you know,
it's pretty amazing you didn't kill 30 people tonight.
And I was like, you're correct.
And so once that was driven home for me,
that's when I decided to put the plug in the proverbial jug.
And so that's sort of divides my life in half.
And it was only after that, it was some months
after that when I got my first cast off or my last cast off
and was halfway through all the occupational therapy
I needed that I first did my first open mic
and did stand-up and stuff.
So that sort of very neatly divides my life
into two halves.
And then after that, I met a woman and we got married,
and we have two kids and all this stuff
and began to make my living in comedy.
So that's all dealt with in here.
But now I'm going to read a little of it for you,
and if you fucking interrupt me-- no, I'm just kidding.
They didn't tell if I shouldn't swear or not, but I did.
[LAUGHTER]
ROB DELANEY: So this section is called
La Mer, which is French for the sea.
All the chapter titles are in French
because I thought that would be a funny, pretentious asshole
thing to do, and I did.
So here we go.
La Mer.
For two summers during college, 1997 and 1998,
I quit New York for Marblehead and drove
a boat called a launch on Marblehead Harbor.
A launch is a glorified water taxi that takes rich people out
to the middle of the harbor where their boats are moored.
Marblehead, a town of 20,000 souls, has five yacht clubs.
I'd be very surprised if there were another town on our planet
that had a higher number of yacht clubs per capita.
The Eastern Boston, Dolphin, and Marblehead Yacht Clubs
had their own launch services.
The Crescent Yacht Club employed me,
and I drove its members exclusively from the dock
to their various opulent sailboats and power boats.
Our busiest day and night of the summer
was always the 4th of July.
A wealthy community, Marblehead could
afford to mount a high-quality fireworks display.
Also, since Marblehead is a peninsula with a large island
that's attached by a thin causeway,
its natural harbor is both protected from the open sea
and surrounded by land on three sides.
So the harbor is several square miles
of water filled with around 2,000 boats ringed
by beaches and docks and parks.
You'd be hard pressed to find a better place to drink 14 beers
and watch fireworks.
Though my earliest 4th of July's found
me sitting on my dad's shoulders and watching fireworks
from the beach, after puberty I saw the holiday
as one of the few days of the year
when it was perfectly acceptable to drink into unconsciousness.
The launch would operate nonstop on the 4th, ferrying people
to and from their boats.
Then, after the fireworks, my fellow launch operators and I
would respond to radio calls and pick up families with kids,
old couples, and dangerously-crowded motorboats
filled with drunk people in their 20s.
Our staff consisted of our boss, Dockmaster Bill, my high school
friend and band mate Michael.
Our band was called Scaramanga, and it
was named after Francisco Scaramanga
from "The Man with the Golden Gun," the James Bond movie.
In that movie, Francisco Scaramanga--
they've never seen a picture of him,
but they know that he has the identifying feature
of having a third nipple.
So Sean Connery as James Bond has
to pose as him at one point, and the way that he does it,
he just puts on a prosthetic third nipple.
And the occassionally would be like, yeah, I'm him.
And they're like, oh, OK, come on in and play baccarat
with us.
[LAUGHTER]
ROB DELANEY: So Bill was a salty dog in his 40s
who'd grown up on the water and worked
at the Crescent for at least 10 years.
Michael and I had known each other
since we were about seven, and then became very close
in high school when we both were heavily involved in theater
as well as drinking and talking about boobs.
Our work day finished up at 11:00 PM,
and then we were free to get into whatever trouble
we felt like getting into.
For Michael and me, in the summer of 1998,
that meant getting drunk, appropriating a little dinghy
that belonged to the yacht club, and using it to cruise
around the harbor to see who was out and about.
It wasn't rare for us to take the 12-foot motorboat out
for a drunken cruise in the middle of the night.
We'd do this a few times every summer
with no real fear of getting in trouble, since drunken
shenanigans on the high seas of Massachusetts
are as run of the mill as moustaches on cops.
Being filled with beer and on the water
is something people have been doing since they figured out
how to ferment hops, and it's easy to understand why.
It's fun, and it feels good.
You've thinned your blood with the alcohol that's
sloshing around in your belly, complementing the rise
and fall of the sea you're floating upon.
It just feels right to have booze in your guts
as you float around mother ocean like a dumb, fat buoy
at the mercy of the sea and filled with spirits.
Sailors refer to the ocean as "the drink"
too, as in, I slipped and grabbed for a halyard,
and my wrench fell in the drink.
So there's clearly something substantial and enduring
to this alcohol/sea connection.
Sometimes Michael and I would putt out to Children's Island,
an island about a mile beyond the the mouth of the harbor,
and go for a stroll.
Growing up, I'd gone to day camp on Children's Island for years,
and it felt entirely naughty to trespass on it
as a drunken adult.
Like most islands around New England,
it smelled like seagull shit and wild grass.
I'm sure if I caught a whiff of it right now, I'd start crying.
When I was a counselor on the island,
I'd had to become a certified life guard.
Part of the training consisted of an overnight springtime
visit to the island, where we were supposed
to practice different rescue techniques.
Upon arrival, we discovered that the Marblehead cop
who taught the course was insane.
He must have been certified 40 years ago
over the telephone or something.
Clearly, no one was checking up on him
because he had gone entirely rogue
and used educational techniques that were, I now realize,
abusive.
The most memorable thing he did was
show us a slideshow of actual dead drowning
victims from Marblehead Police files.
He began the slideshow by asking,
what's the difference between a saltwater
drowning and a freshwater drowning?
I'll tell you.
Saltwater animals eat people.
Freshwater animals don't.
So when you find someone who's drowned in saltwater,
they'll have been eaten somewhat.
And when you find someone who's drowned in freshwater,
they'll be all bloated up.
So what you find is horrible, just in two different ways.
[LAUGHTER]
ROB DELANEY: He then got a slide projector,
positioned it in front of a white sheet that was suspended
in front of a fireplace, and started showing us
pictures of a variety of corpses that had been pulled out
of the water a few miles in various directions
from where we sat in our sleeping
bags in a lodge on a small island in the middle
of the dark, terrifying night.
My friend Ellen was there.
We were adhered to each other in fear
as he clicked from corpse to corpse.
The island didn't have electricity,
so the slide projector was powered by a portable gas
generator that hummed outside the building,
efficiently masking the sounds of any approaching
ghosts or child murderers.
[LAUGHTER]
ROB DELANEY: One particularly ghastly saltwater
drowning victim was a skeleton whose meat
had been almost entirely removed from it.
Almost.
The gut contents within the ribcage
had proven difficult to access for the fish
and bottom feeders, so the ribs rather effectively
caged a rotten buffet of guts that poked out the bottom
and protruded between the ribs.
The slide that followed, that was
of a dead baby, a fucking dead baby.
And since this baby had drowned in freshwater,
it was bloated and huge.
Next photo was a close up of the dead baby's bloated face.
We cringed, and then the screen immediately went black,
and the generator went out.
Then it came back on.
Then off again.
[LAUGHTER]
ROB DELANEY: The generator sputtered.
The dead baby's face strobed on and off
as the generator outside choked and a room full of 16-year-olds
screamed.
What in Christ's fuck did this have to do with life guarding?
20 years later, my best guess remains, not a thing.
[LAUGHTER]
ROB DELANEY: Officer Soul Murder went out
to check on the generator.
And when he returned, he said, bad news.
The generator broke.
We shuddered in relief, and then went outside
to practice moving people with spine injuries
from one end of the island to another.
OK.
[LAUGHTER]
ROB DELANEY: I'm going to leave it there.
And here's another one, another semi-nautically themed one.
Man, even reading that.
That fucking happened.
What an asshole.
[LAUGHTER]
ROB DELANEY: This one's called Le Courage.
One night in the summer of 1999 I
jumped off the Manhattan Bridge.
It wasn't a suicide attempt.
I had a bungee cord attached to my ankles.
But it was still illegal and not part of any tour package
or team-building exercise.
I'd just graduated from NYU and was
working as a waiter at the Atlantic Grill
on the Upper East Side.
Right before I graduated, I booked the role of Sir Lancelot
in a touring company of "Camelot."
But the tour didn't begin rehearsals until fall,
so I spent the summer waiting tables.
The night in question I ate probably
25 pieces of exotic sushi that patrons had left
untouched on their plates.
Rich people ate at the restaurant and thought nothing
of ordering $200 worth of sushi and eating half of it.
What was I supposed to do, not eat it?
At around 11, I split up my tips with the busboys,
then headed out and took the 6 train back to Alphabet City,
planning to drink a 12-pack of Lowenbrau without assistance.
When I got back to my apartment, my roommate Kish
was pacing around and smiling.
"Guess what I'm going to do tonight?" he asked.
"What?" "I'm going to bungee jump off the Manhattan Bridge."
I'd met Kish during my junior year in Paris.
I'd been drawn to him immediately because he
was a smart, fun, well-read guy who
was always up for adventure.
He was named for an island in the Persian Gulf off of Iran,
which is where his father Menushar was born.
Menushar had an archetypal entrance to the United States
in 1963, when the boat that took him across the Atlantic
encountered fog as it approached land.
After a period of very low visibility,
the Statue of Liberty herself emerged from the fog,
looming over the boat, welcoming them to the United States.
Rather than ask Kish any questions like, why are you
jumping off the Manhattan Bridge?,
I told him I was coming with him.
And we headed out the door to meet "some guy" who
has a bungee cord near the Brooklyn on-ramp
to the Manhattan Bridge.
Kish didn't know the cord owner, but he
did know a Polish guy who knew him,
so we went to meet his friend Dariosh at a bar.
I didn't know Dariosh, but he endeared himself to me
by immediately launching into a story about how he'd
learned the hard way earlier that day that wearing
a tiny Speedo bathing suit to the beach
draws a lot of attention in the US.
He presented Kish and me with a cogent argument
as to why Speedo suits are superior
and why American men were silly for not wearing them.
We told him that he made a great case,
but that American women tended to prefer a little mystery
where a man's junk dimensions were concerned,
even though solving such a mystery
might involve facing down a disappointing penis
lurking in the shadow of a fat gut
after drinking a bucket of wine coolers
at a rented beach house.
[LAUGHTER]
ROB DELANEY: Dariosh was pretty fit,
though, so I'm sure his ensemble made some people happy.
After bonding with Dariosh we headed out
to meet the guy who'd show us how to jump off a bridge.
About 15 people were gathered on a busy corner
of Flatbush Avenue waiting for the guy with the rope.
For something wholly illegal and intrinsically dangerous,
it was a rather well-advertised operation.
After a few minutes, Tony arrived and led us
along Flatbush Avenue toward the on-ramp to the bridge.
As we traveled, Tony gave us instructions, including
the order to lie down if the subway passed us on the bridge
so that conductors wouldn't see us.
Tony had me carry the bungee cord
up the bridge in a big bag.
It weighed maybe 50 pounds, and I told myself
its substantial weight meant that it must be really safe.
When we'd covered some distance, he
handed out walkie talkies set to the police frequency
to a few of the customers.
He'd asked us to give him $20 apiece.
He told us to listen for any discussion among the cops
about a large group of people sneaking out onto the Manhattan
Bridge with crazy gear.
He said that it'd be hard to get away
if they wanted to arrest us, so what we were really listening
to was for any mention of Truck 2 or Truck 6.
He said that those names referred
to tactical anti-terrorist units that
would kill us first and then figure out who we were.
He said if we heard that those groups were being sent
to the bridge, we should just drop everything, run,
and not stop until we were in New Jersey.
I listened very carefully for Trucks 2 and 6
for the next few hours.
We walked out over the East River, hitting the deck
whenever a train came by, and made it about one eighth
of a mile from the Brooklyn shore
and then set up our station.
Our first instructions from Tony were
to climb down a level on the bridge
and-- I swear to god-- disable the red lights
that hang from the bridge to alert airplanes, hello, I
am a bridge.
[LAUGHTER]
ROB DELANEY: I'm sure that today,
after 9/11, New York law enforcement would Truck 6
your ass off for that stunt.
But our adventure took place two years prior to the attack,
so we didn't imagine anyone would be too upset that we were
turning a piece of vital metropolitan infrastructure
into an amusement park ride and making it partially
invisible to air traffic.
Then Tony, who claimed to be a theatrical rigger,
took out the bungee cord and secured it to something.
To what?
To a piece of bridge, I guess.
I have no idea.
Then Tony asked who wanted to go first,
and a short guy with a buzz cut volunteered.
Before he let the test subject jump,
Tony thrust a tape recorder in the guy's face.
"What is your name?" "Dave." "What are you about to do?"
"Jump off the Manhattan Bridge." "Are
you doing this of your own volition?" "Yes." "Jump."
The guy jumped, screaming.
It was loud for a fraction of a second, then immediately much
quieter, as though someone had very quickly turned a volume
knob down.
The reason his screaming got quieter to us
is that he had just jumped off a bridge.
I looked over the edge, and he had disappeared into the black.
Disabling the bridge's lights had effectively shrouded us
in inky darkness.
I very sincerely believed the rope had broken,
and he had gone into the river.
I was certain I'd helped facilitate
the death of someone, someone stupid like me.
But then Tony yelled, "You all right down there?"
And the test subject meowed a weak, "Yes."
Then a cop car pulled up at the water's edge in Brooklyn.
There was no activity on the scanners,
but Tony yell-whispered down to jumper one,
"Just chill out for a second.
Don't move."
[LAUGHTER]
ROB DELANEY: Kish and I looked at each other, incredulous.
Don't move?
What if his head filled with blood and exploded?
How long can a person hang upside down
without passing out or becoming permanently stupid?
What if Truck 6 fired a missile up his defenseless asshole?
After a few terrifying minutes, the cop
left not having seen us.
We threw another rope with a carabiner
down to dangling Dave.
He hooked it on to his waist, and we manually
pulled him back up to the bridge.
I calculated that he probably weighed 75% of what I weighed,
so there was probably a three out of four chance I'd survive.
He said whoa a bunch, in a manner
that suggested he was properly odd, but not necessarily
retarded after the rush of blood to his head.
Good enough for me.
Then it was my turn.
Though I counted maybe 11 reasons as to why I shouldn't
jump, several of them potentially fatal or crippling,
and all of them criminal, I was determined
to have a stranger tie a rope around my ankles
and leap off that bridge at 3:00 in the morning as planned.
Tony stuck his tape recorder in my face.
"What is your name?" "Rob Delaney."
I must point out that Kish made fun of me
without interruption for several years at how much
naked fear was audible in my shaky, high-pitched voice
as I answered Tony's questions.
"What are you about to do?" "Jump
off the Manhattan Bridge." "Are you
doing this of your own volition?" "Yes." "Jump."
I jumped.
I looked out over a sleepy, twinkling Manhattan
as I plummeted into the night.
It was wonderful and visceral, like my mind and body
were violently wiped clean and rebooted
to take in the majesty of the experience.
It felt like a reverse birth as I
flew into and through the darkness toward the river.
Then the slack in the cord tightened as my rocketing mass
stretched it to its limit, and I shot skyward and bridgeward
almost as fast as I'd descended.
I made it almost to the bridge, then fell again,
and began a series of bounces.
It was like being in a giant glitter
globe as the city's lights shock around me.
I felt entirely buoyed and supported and loved
by the dirty river, the ugly bridge, the beautiful city,
and the questionable rope.
Then Tony threw down the yank-him-up rope.
And after it swung past me a few times,
I was able to grab it, hook it to my waist,
and get pulled back up to the bridge by my fellow jumpers.
Then Kish and the others jumped, one by one,
and we pulled them back up.
We packed up as the sun rose and took the train home to Alphabet
City to sleep, arriving in full daylight.
It had been entirely magnificent to watch
about 20 people in a row have an experience you knew
they'd talk about for the rest of their lives
and participate in it as well.
It was interesting to see the few people who backed out
so totally at peace with their decision too.
Nobody gave them a hard time either.
I know I thought, well, of course
you didn't want to jump off a bridge.
Why would anyone do that?
That would be crazy.
Those of us who had jumped were pretty much aglow.
As my reflections began to gather and coalesce
in my brain, I was absolutely glad I had done it.
But I knew I would never do it again,
nor would I allow a loved one or really anyone
to do it since I'd seen how ramshackle an operation it was.
It was a singular rush and an extraordinarily terrible idea
all at once.
And while I have difficulty imagining a scenario where I do
something that reckless again, I'm very happy I can say I
jumped off the Manhattan Bridge, and you, statistically, cannot.
[APPLAUSE]
ROB DELANEY: So if you have questions or anything,
now would be the time for that.
Thank you very much.
This is the first I've ever read that out loud to people,
so thanks for listening.
You do the Q's, and I do the A's.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Hi, Rob.
Thanks for coming.
ROB DELANEY: Thanks for having me.
AUDIENCE: You're probably the most prominent example
of someone, of a comedian, especially, now, who
has made their name almost exclusively through the web.
Do you think that model is kind of here to stay,
or do you think that there will always
be a place for comedians to kind of just go on the road
and work the clubs and do it the way it's been done for years?
ROB DELANEY: I'm going to repeat that question.
So I know you guys all heard it, but they told me to,
so I'm going to.
Do I think that the web is here to stay?
Can you still achieve notoriety slash fame slash a career
through touring and the old-fashioned methods
of getting your name out there?
I sort of think that it is here to stay, of course,
or it'll morph into whatever the next thing is.
But a variation on what we see now
will endure, assuming there isn't a singularity T2
situation where electricity stops existing
or there's a nuclear winter, which is, also, we
have to be prepared for that.
But it would be, in my opinion, it
would be silly to not avail yourself of the tools
that are here now.
For example, to give you a timeline
and explain it explicitly, I did stand-up for the first time
in 2002.
Then in 2007, I lost another day job
and thought, OK, now I'm going to be
a comedian full time in 2007.
In 2009, I joined Twitter.
And then in 2010 was the last time
I collected a paycheck for anything other than comedy.
So it's been about 3 and 1/2 years
that I've made my living through comedy.
I pursued a career through all the traditional channels,
but then the internet helped me, certainly,
catapult a few strata.
So I think that it's almost like once public transportation came
into play.
It's like, would you take the subway to get to gigs in 1956
or whatever?
Yeah, because if you don't, then Dave will,
and you'll get to the club on your horse and buggy
like way after his people are clapping,
and women are just throwing their clothing,
and people are bringing buffets of hot, assorted meat.
You know what I mean?
So it's here.
It's not good.
It's not bad.
It's just what's happening.
You know what I mean?
Like my head might explode from a sniper's bullet.
But the internet, I don't think, has improved lives.
You can just do more faster, but you're still doing more.
Like so that sucks.
But you can do it faster, and that's cool.
So I think it's sort of like a net zero thing.
AUDIENCE: Maybe a spin-off question
is, as someone who has sort of made their name on the web,
do you run into resistance from established industry types
who kind of resent the fact that you
didn't go through the traditional route?
ROB DELANEY: Only from small-minded people
who aren't good at what they do--
and that's not even a joke-- and aren't
good in that traditional realm.
Somebody who's sincerely funny, why would they care?
You know what I mean?
So no.
And also it's so hard to make it as a comedian.
Twitter gets me in the door, but of a club?
People don't care.
Like I would be bodily thrown out of a club
if I didn't deliver once I got in there.
So thank god I had been sharpening my sword
before Twitter ever came on the scene.
So not really.
And nor do I care that there are people
who find out about me from Twitter first.
Great.
I mean, as recently as 3 and 1/2 years ago,
I worked telemarketing in a dirty basement boiler
room near the airport selling a garbage financial newspaper
and would call people and be like,
do you want this terrible newspaper?
And they'd be like, no, why are you bothering me?
And I'd be like, I am so sorry.
[LAUGHTER]
ROB DELANEY: You know, making less than minimum wage.
So I'm not going to be like, yeah, I
wish that it was 15 years in the Comedy Cellar
that got me to where I am now.
I can perform at the Comedy Cellar now.
And if it didn't work out when I was there,
then they would say, get out of here and don't come back.
So it's sort of like it's here, so use it.
And that's my answer to that.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much.
ROB DELANEY: I hope it answered it.
AUDIENCE: Hey, Rob.
You sound like you had some interesting jobs
before you became a full-time comedian.
Can you talk about those, and how
they influenced your comedy today?
ROB DELANEY: Yeah.
Yeah, other jobs that I've had that have influenced my comedy.
I mean, I worked in a factory for a couple of years
where we made snow plows for Chicago subway trains.
And we made conveyor-- this is terrible-- we made conveyor
belts for tobacco companies that they could
sort their tobacco on and kill our grandparents with.
But working in a factory is very applicable
because the thing about-- like the best
comedians, like a Jerry Seinfeld, or a Louis
CK, or a Chris Rock, or a Sarah Silverman, or a Maria Bamford,
or a Joan Rivers, one thing that unites all of them,
that might not be the first thing that a layman would
think of, is work ethic.
Those people work, and that's so sexy to me.
They go to the factory every day, and they do the deal,
and they always get better.
Like Sarah Silverman, I see her do a lot of shows in LA.
She's been famous for a long time, still getting better.
You know what I mean?
Still improving.
Watching her hone jokes is so inspiring and cool.
Or Louis CK, an amazing touring schedule
while making his own TV show that he writes,
produces, directs, edits, and stars in.
So factory work, like it's an honorable thing
to punch in every day, do your work and whatever.
It might not be glamorous, but so what?
You can definitely apply that elbow grease
to your glamorous career as a whatever in entertainment,
and then your career will endure.
So yeah, there isn't a career that I've
had that doesn't translate into.
Oh, and I worked at a company called Intermix Media in 2004.
Was it 2003 or 2004?
And this company bought a company
called Response Base in California.
Response Base "invented" Myspace, OK,
and so I was one of the first people to work at Myspace.
I sold the first ads on Myspace, and I
wrote like email subject lines and stuff like that.
I would test subject lines against each other.
And that only hit me like a few months ago.
I was like, maybe that's why I can write a tweet because I
scientifically tested horrible spam email things
and used math to determine how to burrow into people's brains
like a horrible criminal.
You know what I mean?
So if what you're doing right now is what you want to do,
that's awesome.
If it isn't?
The thing that you do want to do,
you'll be able to use what you're doing right now.
So it's all interdisciplinary.
It all informs each other.
That's my answer to your question.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
ROB DELANEY: Thank you.
Like a question from a woman?
Oh, thank you.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: It's like I'm being interrogated.
Hi.
ROB DELANEY: Hi, being interrogated.
AUDIENCE: So I'm curious about how
you feel about all these things from your life
that you've now written about and kind of enshrined
in this book.
I mean, it just came out, and maybe you're
not used to reading from it or talking about it as much.
But perhaps you've used it in your stand-up as well.
How do you feel about these pieces of your life
that are now becoming kind of something else?
ROB DELANEY: Yeah.
How do I feel about personal things
that I've experienced, aspects of my life,
becoming more public and, in fact, being frozen--
AUDIENCE: Right.
ROB DELANEY: --as they are?
AUDIENCE: And do they kind of still
exist in some real way in your brain,
and what is your relationship to them now
that they're on the page, or they're on the stage,
or wherever they are?
ROB DELANEY: I do like seeing something
that I can't monkey with anymore.
You know what I mean?
This book, these stories are these stories.
I can't really revise them anymore.
And that's kind of cool because with stand-up you're
always doing that.
And I enjoy that too, but it's nice to have
to put something down.
I read something that Joyce Carol Oates
tweeted the other day about how it
was cool to have finality with a typewriter and ink and paper.
Like when something was done, it was done.
And that's really cool, and that's
a form of confinement, stricture, finishing.
Like I like the 140 characters of a tweet.
Like Picasso had his Blue Period.
So it is cool.
I heard a kindergarten teacher saying-- it's like apocryphal,
you've probably heard it-- where they were like,
oh, your kids make the best drawings.
How do you do it?
And the teachers like, I just know
when to take it away from the kids,
so they don't make it a crowded piece of kid garbage.
So I do like things like restrictions and things
being like, nope, that's done.
Take it away.
So just from like an artistic perspective, I like that.
But then as far as people seeing stuff about me,
I sort of have had practice with that, with like magazine
articles that I've written, doing stand-up,
so having done stuff in the public eye.
So yeah, I'm proprietary about it.
That happened to me.
That's my story.
It's not anybody else's unless they're in it.
And I don't know.
It made me happy just reading these just now,
and this is my first reading since the book just
came out yesterday.
So I just tried to approach it all sort of compassionately
and be nice but thorough with my history.
So I don't feel revealed or anything.
Also, since a lot of stuff is of a sensitive nature,
writing the book wasn't really therapeutic for me
because I had waited so long to write about things
like alcoholism, sobriety, depression,
when I had really gone through formal therapy
and healed to some degree with the deadlier things.
So now I don't read this and think like, ooh, ooh.
Whereas had I written it, I think, irresponsibly,
which is to say maybe seven or eight years ago,
then maybe it might have been a little scarier
to put it out there.
But I'm sort of at peace with everything,
and this book was written from a place of, I feel,
mental health or the best version of mental health
that I can approximate.
So I don't know if I answered your question,
but I did talk for a while.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
ROB DELANEY: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hey.
On Pete Holmes' "You Made It Weird" podcast,
you talked about like this black hole of death
while you were singing the national anthem the first time,
I think.
And I'm just curious, does that keep
coming up every-- because you've done it
multiple times, from what I understand?
ROB DELANEY: Ah, yes.
Yeah.
And the answer to that is no.
I have sung the national anthem at five or so Red Sox games
at Fenway Park in five or so games.
And what he's talking about, I sang the national anthem
for the first time at Fenway Park in 2004,
the year the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time
in 86 years.
And do I take credit for that?
A little bit.
[LAUGHTER]
ROB DELANEY: And the way that happened
is I studied musical theater in college at NYU,
and I had a friend who worked for the Red Sox.
And she said, hey, there's 180 games a year,
we can't always get someone good.
Could you do it one time?
And so I was like, yes, and so I did it.
And the public address system at Fenway Park is 700 years old,
and so when you sing, you hear an echo of yourself
because you're in a very large place, but there's a delay.
So you say, oh say, and then like a second and a half
later, you hear back to you, thundering much louder
than it came out your body, oh say.
But that's when you're already a little bit
ahead into the next thing.
So you're like you're doing a duet with yourself
from the past, out of rhythm, in this like syncopated singing
what is known to be the hardest song there is.
Like the national anthem, cool song, spans octaves.
The reason people screw it up, and they
pass around YouTube videos of it,
is because it's a hard song to sing.
It's not because they're bad or an idiot.
The words don't make sense.
It's just like a list of stuff--
[LAUGHTER]
ROB DELANEY: --literally.
Like it's not a ballad, where it's like, and then
a thing naturally happened that makes sense from the.
Literally, it's like "The Joker" by Steve Miller
might as well be our national anthem.
So you're singing the hardest song
in the world in the most hallowed baseball
park in America.
It's the town that I grew up in.
Fully sold out, with an echo from-- I mean,
it's like imagine if somebody was like,
I dare you to do good at this hard thing
while you're doing it.
And so I was so nervous that literally my vision went
like ppvvvvvvvvvvvvvv, and I could see this,
and I literally disconnected.
I totally had like a Sufi mystical experience,
where I was like-- literally, this is what I thought.
I was like the anthem needs to be sung.
I am the vessel through which it must come to Earth.
So I was like, get your ego-- I'm not singing the anthem.
The anthem must be sung.
All these people need to hear it.
So my fears mean nothing.
I literally was like, be a diaphanous fabric
that God can dance about.
I literally was like oodolodolo.
So I sang it.
Don't remember it at all.
And then when they cut-- OK.
So I go like, and the home of the brave,
and I went braaave, llaaarrghh.
[LAUGHTER]
ROB DELANEY: But that happens so often,
that people deflate and like blluurgh,
that they know to cut the sound.
So I was like, oh, my god, everybody heard that.
And they were like, nobody heard it
except the sound engineer, who was like, yep,
here's the uurrrgh.
OK, turn it off.
[LAUGHTER]
ROB DELANEY: So yes, I've never.
Oh, but now?
I can't get nervous.
I could perform it-- like I could
be being shot at in front of a million people.
I'd be like, it's not a big deal.
Like so that was good.
That was good for my comedy that I did that.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
ROB DELANEY: Thanks.
ROB DELANEY: Well, I guess-- hello.
Hi.
AUDIENCE: Does this work?
Yeah.
Thank you for coming in You're a great reader.
ROB DELANEY: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
ROB DELANEY: He said I'm a great reader,
if you didn't hear that.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: I'm wondering if you've
seen kind of the evolution of Twitter
and all the other technology that's coming out?
Have there been shortcomings in those platforms
that you've kind of seen that haven't
let you emphasize your comedy enough?
You're using YouTube, but then Vine came out,
other things like that, that you wish
was an easier platform to use to get your comedy out there?
ROB DELANEY: That's an excellent question.
Have I seen shortcomings in other emerging technologies
that I wish I could use better, or could just be used better,
could be implemented?
I think they're trying to do it.
And this is kind of nerdy, but I might be in the right place
to talk about that.
From just like an e-commerce perspective,
it might be cool for people like me and other people
to be able-- if you could like buy stuff within Twitter.
If there was like a shopping cart
in there, that would kind of be cool because then you
could be like, oh, I don't have to go three websites away.
Now that everybody knows everything
to the point of insanity about us,
and it's plenty easy to share information
across different things, it would kind of
be cool if you could be like, blooh,
now I own that thing he was talking about
and can consume it on my larger screen at home tonight
with my family.
Of course, that'll definitely be happening,
but that's one thing that would be cool.
Vine didn't really call to me.
The thing I like about Twitter is that the best tweets
are the ones that don't have links in them
and the ones where-- because you have to use your imagination.
Like I've found that when I would ever meet people
in real life that I knew on like Friendster, or then Myspace,
or then Facebook, the people that I've
met from social networks before and enjoyed the most
being around are usually people from Twitter
because I think you have to distill
your purist essence of who you are into the 140 characters.
So it's just sort of weird how somebody on Facebook
can have 800 pictures and blah, and be
like, this is the self I wish to present.
And it's not as clear as somebody
who you get a sense of from really reading
the thing that they had to squeeze and distill and diamond
compress into their little tweet box.
So other technologies.
And also, I've totally put my eggs in the Twitter basket.
So people would say to me when Vine came out,
why don't you have a Vine?
I'd be like, oh, you know, because there's
24 hours in a day, that's why I don't have a Vine,
and I would like to pay attention
to my family for a couple of them.
And so shortcomings?
Twitter's pretty cool.
Every new thing they add, I typically don't really
need it because I sort of use it in like the purest way,
like not linking, not whatever.
But I've been pretty satisfied with it.
There are certain things.
Like sometimes I wish there was a built-in or natural way
for me to like figure out who's-- I would love to have
a super "Minority Report" dashboard for the people who
follow me so that I could be like, so maybe these people,
because why do people in Albuquerque need to know that
I'm going to be playing in Cincinnati that night?
You know what I mean?
So geo-targeting crap like that would be fun.
But Twitter, it does what I need it to do.
Would I refine that a little bit?
Yes.
But no other website things tickle my fancy too much.
I don't feel that there's anything that I can identify
like, oh, I wish this existed and doesn't.
Like I'm not going to invent anything any time soon
because I'm secretly very old fashioned, and boring,
and a Luddite, and don't know how to even do what I do.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
ROB DELANEY: Thank you.
When I started working at the company that invented Myspace,
like not even 18 months before that,
when I started working there as a temp,
I had to ask somebody how to turn my computer on for me.
And they were like, and you can just drag and drop that into.
I remember after they showed me how to turn it on,
I was like, what, drag?
I remember trying to not cry, I was so nervous
about basic use of a computer.
Yeah.
So I think that might have brought us full circle,
that one right there.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
ROB DELANEY: Well, thank you so much, everybody.
You're very kind to come and listen.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]