An Interview with Rob Delaney… That We Did Because He Forgot to Write His Column

Photo by Mandee Johnson

Discerning readers and fans of laughter may have noticed that Rob Delaney’s weekly column, Take a Stroll…, was conspicuously absent last Thursday. We didn’t receive a heads up that he’d be taking the week off, so naturally we were worried that home invaders murdered him and his family or he fell off the wagon and was hunched over a pile of human feces in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, simultaneously huffing gold spray paint and freebasing a large quantity of cocaine.

The next day Rob emailed us to say he was sorry about not turning the column in this week, and that he had to bail on us because of some silly commercial he was shooting in Toronto. We immediately called him on the phone to see if he was bullshitting, and that turned into a lengthy interview that touches on his son’s uncircumcised penis, how he got such a large Twitter following, and the frequent and explicit sexual offers he receives from fans (that sometimes include photos).

VICE: So Rob, what gives? You abandoned us last Thursday. I thought we had a really good thing going here.
Rob: I booked a commercial in Toronto. Since I had never performed there, and people would ask me via Twitter to please do so, I also booked a couple of gigs, and through the magnificent power of Twitter they sold out pretty quickly. It was a fantastic visit. Of course, I was very busy, and then coming back I had to immediately resume fatherhood duties with a young baby. It struck ten on Thursday morning and I thought, “Hey, normally myself and others would be reading a new column from me,” but it had not been composed. I then realized that I had forgotten to do it. Then just one tear rolled down my left cheek—it’s usually my left eye a tear rolls out of first—and then the right one joined in and I started to sob, and then I called you.

And then I started to cry.
Yeah, and I mean it was just a cacophony of masculine sadness.

There you go. And then it spread to Jonathan, our online editor, and then the rest of the world. Or the rest of Twitter. They didn’t know why they were sad—because obviously we didn’t Tweet it—it was just inexplicably felt.
Believe it or not, multiple people wrote me and said, “Where’s your column?” So it made me feel happy and irresponsible. It made me feel two things at once.

So what do you think about our new site? Be honest, because your stuff’s going to live here now, and we want you and everyone else out there to be happy.
It’s fantastic. The last one was great, but, it was ramshackle, in that you could tell it was like “OK, we’re gonna hang one more thing on the wall here.” It just got a little cluttered. So the new one just really genuinely has an ease and elegance of navigation that is frankly just a more satisfying site to visit.

We had a site taped together with glue and bubblegum and all sorts of other sticky stuff for a long time. We had to start from scratch. So, I’m glad you like it. The feedback so far is mostly positive. Except for a few assholes in the comments who are just never going to be happy. Even if this website was capable of generating the most intense orgasm you’ve ever had they’d still be filling the comments section with terrible notions and bad ideas. I genuinely wonder what they look like sometimes.
The commenters are amazing people, and—

I’m not sure the particular ones I’m talking about qualify as human, but the comments on your column are generally positive. But there are still the detractors who would do better to just not read it and go back to beating off in an old sock.
There are a lot of people who say nice things, and a lot of people who don’t, and it’s funny, because any success that I’ve had in any arena came well after the internet had been firmly established. So it’s kind of been nice that I’ve been able to be forged in fire of getting truly hateful, vile comments from the very beginning of my career. It doesn’t faze me that much. And honestly, if we were placing bets, the amount of hate spewed at me in the VICE comments section, is, I’d say it’s a pretty good indicator that I’m a good wagon to hitch your horse to, because I would say that the hatefulness of the comments would suggest that I’m going to have a terrific career.

There you go.
You know how Doc Brown came back at the end of Back to the Future with that new flux capacitor that you could just throw garbage into?

Yeah.
I’m like that new adaptor for the flux capacitor. I eat your hate and grow stronger before your eyes. So stuff like that just makes me happy.

Awesome. Makes me happy too. We will have a better commenting system soon, where people can hate on things and people in a more organized fashion. And retort.
That’s so fantastic. It’s like the skinheads, when some of them realized, “We should grow our hair out so we can more effectively poison the world,” and then they got coopted by existing powerful political parties. So you definitely ought to organize your hate, and I applaud you for doing that.

Hate organization is one of the fastest growing businesses in America, according to The Wall Street Journal.
[laughs]

I initially contacted you to write a column for us because you consistently brightened up my days with little doses of funny on Twitter. But my bosses don’t really follow Twitter that closely, or at least they didn’t follow you, so when I pitched your column to get a budget for it, they were like “Who the fuck is Rob Delaney?” How would you have answered that question?
The short answer is comedian. That’s what I consider myself to be. I am fortunate to be able to do a few things right now, but at the end of the day, my favorite thing to do was what I did last night and what I’ll do tonight, and that’s stand-up. If everything else went away and there was just stand-up, that would be OK. I’d be able to live with that. However, it’s extraordinarily hard to have success as a stand-up, so I did some writing on TV shows, and when that slowly started to happen I could afford food, so when I spoke to audiences at night I would make sense because I had sugar in my blood. All success informs other areas, so I started to write for outlets other than television shows. Then the VICE thing came along, and I’m also writing a book, which is fantastic. So yeah, I’m a comedian who writes. I take the writing very seriously, so I’m not just trying to tack that on. It’s an honor to be able to write and to have even a singe person read it, but I generally try to keep it funny. So yeah, the one word answer is comedian, and the several word answer would be, I guess, comedian, writer, actor.

Would you say anything about your penis?
I don’t think that I would. I’m libidinous, certainly. There’s a strong [laughs] sexual and often graphic nature in what I write about. The reason I do that, and I could be wrong, is that I feel like people really want to read that stuff. I think about it all the time, certainly, so I’m just talking about what’s on my mind. But I genuinely feel that when you talk about messy, visceral stuff that people are like “ [sigh] Thank you, because that’s what I was thinking.” I’m not saying I have my finger on the pulse of the world by any stretch of the imagination, but I am saying I think people breathe a sigh of relief when someone talks about their balls, or how they want to sniff women’s vaginas, and just pick them up and tickle them—we want do that. I’m talking about hugging, but sometimes, in the hug, a body part might wind up getting tangled up in a very satisfying way for everyone.

In your first column, you wrote about me, or at least my name.
I did, yeah.

Does thinking about me as a female still make you “fundamentally hard” in your pants?
Yeah, I said that didn’t I?

Yes, you did.
Well, Rocco is typically going be a male name, but it can be a female name too. I got captivated by the idea of a female Rocco right away. And you know, I like strong women, both physically and emotionally, and authoritarian-ly—I don’t know the word—but the idea of Rocco disciplining me, maybe handcuffing me to a radiator and telling me what to write about to make her happy, and then forcing me to service her was appealing. So that’s what the first column wound up being about.

I very much appreciated it. My mom saw it and was confused as shit. My grandmother really liked it, though. She’s our biggest advocate; she likes the boobs a lot, actually. A lot of people here think that’s weird, but I just think their grandmas are prudish assholes. They should be proud of their progeny.
You know what’s funny, VICE has really gone through cycles. There are issues in the past of the physical magazine that I’d pick up and just vacuum through 50 percent of it and think “God, this is amazing,” and then 50 percent of it I would think, “This is just reprehensible shit. Someone should be ashamed of themselves. This is lazily, hatefully cobbled together by a person who will probably commit suicide in the next six months, and it should all be gathered and thrown away.” So 50-50. But over time, the ratio has sort of shifted to the point where it’s pretty wonderful both in print and online. I mean it’s a living, breathing thing, and while I definitely know people who disagree with me, I think VICE has benefited from both expanding readership, scrutiny, arguments, fights—kind of like a growing teenager. It’s evolved into something really beautiful, in my opinion.

You’re a very sincere guy. That might explain the few detractors who pop up in the comments. Honesty makes many people uncomfortable. Does your honest nature ever get you into trouble?
I’m trying to think. Sometimes it does, you know? Oh, I made a terrible error of judgment recently. A woman criticized me—my sense of humor—on Twitter and I retweeted her and didn’t say anything about her. She said I’m disgusting and awful or something and she was unfollowing me, and I replied with something along the lines of “You’re correct, I am disgusting and horrible” and I hashtagged it with the words “#fistula” and “#prolapsed,” which were the two grossest words I could think of. I wanted this woman to know that she was correct in her assessment that I’m disgusting and awful and so I was like, “Fare thee well! You’re correct!” I wanted to confirm that she had made the correct decision.

Now, I did that because I thought people would think it was funny that I did that. Some people did, some people didn’t, but a fair amount of people attacked this woman directly on Twitter. And I should have seen that coming—the amount of followers I have now is pretty big, so there is obviously going to be… even if it’s a small percentage of assholes, it’s going to be a large number of people. So some people were very mean to this woman, who exercised her freedom as a user of a free, silly website. They started engaging in some real ad hominem attacks and attacking her physical appearance, which, if you’ve read anything I’ve written you know that that’s a good way to make me get a baseball bat and come fucking attack you. So I wrote about the necessity of being kind on the internet. Even though I write in a muscular fashion sometimes and it is very explicit, it’s going to be difficult to find something where I’m ad hominem, unless it’s against someone super famous for whom “getting bullshit on the internet” is part of their job description, like Rick Perry or Kim Kardashian—people who can handle it. Anyway, I wrote a pretty long, detailed apology to this woman and—again, not saying who she was so she wouldn’t get more attention—but I made sure it got to her and I posted it publicly and told people to get their shit together. Kindness is a virtue even on the internet. So that’s one time where I made a mistake, someone was hurt as a result of my carelessness, and I sought to remedy it through the tools available to me, which is a respectably-sized internet readership.

Another tool available to you is your legacy—specifically your newborn son. I’m wondering if he will carry the distinctive eyebrow trait that was so kindly bestowed upon you by your parents.
I tend to doubt it. My wife is dramatically less hairy than I am, so I think that’s going to have a positive effect on his future hairiness. That’s a fact that the world can unite in rejoicing about.

How about his penis? Are you happy with its size?
Looks good. Yeah, we didn’t circumcise him either, but we’re going to tell him that the reason my penis looks different than his is because when I was his age I didn’t put my toys away so my mom cut off part of my penis.

Why did you leave him flappy?
Circumcision is not as prevalent as it used to be in the United States. And you’ll find this out if you ever have a male baby—the percentage of boys getting circumcised is going down. If you have occasional access to soap, you don’t have to do it. I’m circumcised, I wish I wasn’t, but regardless I’ve enjoyed having and using my penis. I would never say, “Don’t circumcise your kids.” I don’t care. It’s an interesting debate; if you want to circumcise your kids some people freak out, but for me, my boys—as long as I have stewardship of their penises until their 18th birthday—I won’t be circumcising them.

I feel like the reason a lot of parents decide on the snip-snip—outside of religion or whatever—is because they don’t want women to say it looks funny.
I understand that concern, and that’ll probably lessen as time goes on. Like, we might have dealt with that in our age, but in 15 years it’ll be more common.

I also have a theory that the high-end face-cream industry is behind it, because the expensive ones incorporate foreskin into the mix… Or maybe I’m making that up.
Oh wow.

Let me Google that real quick to make sure my sick mind isn’t just making that up. Yeah, “foreskin face cream,” there you go.
I… don’t agree with that.

OK, I think it’s time to move on. Has the amount of sexual offers directed your way increased significantly since you joined and became popular on Twitter? Of course, those offers come with any amount of fame or notoriety, but I’m referring specifically to online offers.
Yes, they have increased. I do get explicit offers for sex online. And as a rule, they freak me out because although the things I say online are jokes, they vacillate and bounce between things I genuinely feel or things that I think people will find funny and silly, that I don’t feel at all. I say things to entertain and then people say, “Oh, he must really truly be like that.” Then I get an explicit sex offer and I’m like, “OH LORD!” I’m still an Irish Catholic kid from Boston who’s ashamed of his own farts, so when people do that, women or men, I get embarrassed and sweaty and red-faced and it makes me really uncomfortable. Whenever I meet people in real life, they’re surprised by how polite I am, and how I don’t use profanity and stuff. In real life I’m a nice, polite person, so when I get a person saying something like that to me I just unfold mentally and I’m like “WHOA GOD!” I turn into a little sissy and hide behind a washing machine is what happens.

Do they send photos sometimes?
I can only think of one time that a woman sent me a picture with nudity. She sent me a picture of her bum and I thought, “Hey, wonderful! Her bum!” That was the first thought. The second thought was, “Oh, that’s sad. She’s crazy because she sent me a picture of her bum.” And then the third: “I must never show this to anyone, because if she comes to her senses she’ll be quite embarrassed.” So I just deleted it from my inbox or whatever. Those were the three phases of what would happen if someone were to send me a naked photo.

What’s the most explicit detail of how someone was going to do you?
I had a funny one the other day, a funny phrase that I quite enjoyed because I just hadn’t heard it before. A girl goes, “Hey if you’re ever bored I’ll totally fuck your dick.” Not suck your dick but fuck your dick, and I thought, “That’s great, I’ve never heard that before.” And then I thought, “How very sweet of you.” I sure as hell didn’t reply, but I thought, “How nice of her.”

twitter.com/#!/robdelaney

Previously: Take a Stroll… With Rob Delaney