ROCCO CASTORO: Hi, I'm Rocco, and today we're in Venice
Beach at the Rose Cafe, which is a favorite
eatery of Rob Delaney.
He's a very funny comedian and what some have termed the King
of Twitter.
He writes a column for us at Vice on the website.
And today we're going to have breakfast with him and chat
about eating vaginas, Rick Santorum, hairiness, and all
sorts of other fun stuff.
ROCCO CASTORO: I'm hear on a lovely Wednesday morning with
the lovely Rob Delaney.
ROB DELANEY: Hello.
ROCCO CASTORO: The first thing you did for us and how this
relationship started was a piece in our Larfs issue a
couple years back.
And the piece was called "Comedy."
ROB DELANEY: It was.
ROCCO CASTORO: It actually opened the issue.
ROB DELANEY: Yeah, well, I had been approached by your
magazine to write for them anything I wanted,
essentially, about comedy.
And I remember lamenting that most magazines, when they do a
comedy issue, it's usually really awful and unfunny.
So I really just tried to sort of plumb my depths, so to
speak, psychologically and just talk about my motivations
for doing comedy, what I think is funny, what's not funny,
why it might be funny, what sort of drives me.
Because I like comedians.
I like it other comedians.
And I like fans of comedy.
And I wanted to give them something like this that would
hopefully nourish them.
I wanted them to have the sandwich.
ROCCO CASTORO: The subject matter of that article--
sort of lay of the land at that point in your life, what
you're doing.
And you told me earlier that you were--
I don't know if you were at the time, but right around
then working at a call center but also doing comedy, and
this was a year and a half ago.
But you also talked a little bit about what happened to you
10 years ago, which you can say much better than I can.
ROB DELANEY: Yeah, well.
Yeah, first, I'll say you're right.
I'm very lucky right now to be making a living doing comedy,
but it was just 10 years ago that I was in a big car
accident that prompted me to quit drinking.
But yeah, I drove into a building in LA and broke both
my arms and was in jail in a wheelchair.
And it was then that I was like, oh, if I keep drinking,
it'll kill other people.
And I didn't want to kill other people.
I don't like to kill people.
Sorry, guys.
So after I kind of physically got better from that accident,
I said, oh, I'm a comedian now.
ROCCO CASTORO: So do you remember the first time that
you found out what Twitter was?
ROB DELANEY: Well, the first time I heard what it was, I
think I was at a comedy show and somebody mentioned it.
I'd heard about it maybe on the news or something.
And it sounded very unappealing.
Why?
Who cares?
I was on Facebook and Louis CK had said that
he had joined Twitter.
And I thought, well, maybe--
he usually does things that I think are funny and
intelligent.
I should check it out.
So I did.
And what I tried to do was just post jokes rather than,
like, I ate this.
ROCCO CASTORO: So where did your Twitter--
picture?
I don't know if it's an avatar?
You're in Speedos.
ROB DELANEY: Yeah.
I am wearing a Speedo bathing suit.
And that is a bathing suit that I do genuinely own,
because I live very close to the beach.
So if I go swimming in the winter, I will wear that
'cause it just makes more sense under a wetsuit.
So I totally am aware of the fact that it's a disgusting
look on a hairy large person.
But basically, I was getting ready to go swimming at night
with my wife, and my friend John was there, and I took off
my clothes and had the Speedo, and he's like, Jesus.
He took a picture.
And then when I first signed up for Twitter, I thought, oh,
this is so stupid, I'll put the worst picture of
me that I have up.
And that's it.
And then after a while, people were like, you
gotta rid of that.
And I was like, no, I'll never.
ROCCO CASTORO: And your last--
well, we'll say your last two tweets.
Pepsi's Twitter account said, The best place to
hide a Pepsi is blank.
And Rob responded, in a cop's asshole.
Nothing aga-- cops--
we need 'em.
I like 'em.
But the word "cop," it's (ENUNCIATING) cop.
So I've always taught cop was a funny word.
I have words that I just think are funny, just
the sound of them.
ROCCO CASTORO: Phonetically?
ROB DELANEY: Yeah, like cop--
ROCCO CASTORO: Cock?
ROB DELANEY: Ham.
Cock is a funny word.
I love the word ham.
Beef.
A lot of meat-related words.
So cop, cop's just such a nice word.
And anyway, so, and then asshole, that just always
makes me laugh.
ROCCO CASTORO: OK.
And your tweet before is, Virginia is for lovers, and
then in parentheses, of psychotic--
in all caps--
abortion bills.
So why did you tweet that?
ROB DELANEY: There are right now in Virginia some lawmakers
who have drafted a bill that would require women who wanted
to get an abortion to get an ultrasound.
Now what is a big part of this is that when a woman is in the
early stages of pregnancy, the fetus is super tiny.
So they can't use an over-the-belly ultrasound.
They actually have to put a probe up her vagina to do the
ultrasound.
And it's a big fucking wand.
It's like bigger than, like, three of my dicks.
And they're putting it up.
And that--
so it's like robot rape.
It's beyond--
I mean, that's psychological torture.
It's physical torture.
It's unbelievable and fundamentally wrong.
ROCCO CASTORO: One thing you really like to talk about is
women, in a way that I think is positive
but also very honest.
ROB DELANEY: I do like to take a more, I don't know,
proletariat approach to like sexuality, of like a
blue-collar, sweaty, fun approach to sex.
And I genuinely really feel the things that
I tweet about that.
Like, I don't like it when women shave
off their pubic hair.
That is a legitimate thing that I feel.
That's weird to me.
And maybe it's because I'm a man and it's easier for me to
see, like it's easier for me to be an other and see, like,
oh, I see this thing that's happening to this group of
people, which represents more than half of our planet's
population, and it's so fucking wrong that I'm going
to do my little bit that I possibly can to try and help.
So women usually, the overwhelming majority, are
funny and nice.
And they'll probably write a zinger back to me that's
funnier than what I wrote.
ROCCO CASTORO: You've had quite a few tweets and columns
about the current Republican candidates.
Who would you say is the best to make fun of?
ROB DELANEY: Probably Rick Santorum, because he's the
antipodes of how I feel about many things.
I feel like his policies, if enacted, would hurt people.
I feel that he would have a really negative effect.
So if there's something I see that I think is having a
negative effect, I'm going to use comedy to present my ideas
and to eviscerate the ones that I don't like.
ROCCO CASTORO: When was there a--
we'll call it an exponential
explosion of Twitter followers?
When did you hit a marker where you're like, wow, I have
50,000 people following me on Twitter.
ROB DELANEY: Getting to 100,000 followers took what
felt like forever.
Going from 100,000 to 200,000 was like [SNAP].
Going from 200,000 to 300,000 was like, oh, it happened.
It's crazy.
So the speed that you accumulate them gets faster.
But the big thing for me was after years of submitting
packets to late night comedy shows, and being told, like,
oh, this is terrific, but not getting hired, I at the same
time got hired by Graham Linehan to work on story ideas
for the fifth season of the British show The IT Crowd.
And also I got hired by MTV to write for a Rob Dyrdek show
called Ridiculousness.
So those two things happened at the same time.
And Vice Magazine said, hey, want to
write this comedy article?
ROCCO CASTORO: Some of the most popular pieces you've
written for us, and I would imagine tweets as well, have
concerned the nature of celebrity.
Specifically, a piece you wrote about suing Kim
Kardashian after her divorce.
ROB DELANEY: Yes.
ROCCO CASTORO: How would serious were you?
ROB DELANEY: Uh, 100% about the feelings behind it.
I think that what she did was wrong.
We know it was fake from the outset.
So I just wanted to say, no, young lady, and Ryan Seacrest,
and E Entertainment Television, and Comcast, who
were also named in the lawsuit.
ROCCO CASTORO: You're also writing a book.
ROB DELANEY: I'm writing a book.
Yes.
The book has nothing to do Twitter.
It's a memoir/novel type thing.
Since I am a relatively young person, I understand that
people wouldn't want to read a book about just my life.
I wouldn't want to write that.
So I am trying to--
I'm filtering it through the cheese grater of my
joke-writing-trained mind to make sure that it is
entertaining.
Because as a comedian, it's my job that everything that I do
be funny, and at the very least compelling
and pull you along.