Rob Delaney: ‘I am very good at sitting in a Jacuzzi’

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/may/25/rob-delaney-interview-comedy-catastrophe

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For someone who seemed to sneak into comedy by stealth, proceeding almost unnoticed from Twitter sensation to standup phenomenon to sitcom star, Rob Delaney does not exactly blend into his surroundings. The 38-year-old Boston-born comic is as tall and hulking as Frankenstein’s monster and as slickly handsome as Superman. It’s a fitting combination for a man who presents himself on stage as a kind of cerebral savage or conscientious caveman.

Even at their most scandalous, his gags and routines always come from an informed, liberal place. No matter how much of a salacious goofball he makes himself seem, nor how many abrasive tweets he dispatches to his one million followers (“Wi-Fi at my uncle’s funeral is a fucking joke”), this is still a man who has written eloquently about subjects from war to homophobia, from abortion rights to Medicaid.

Even the material he performs about his preference for women with large breasts and stretch marks emerges plausibly from a desire to rehabilitate female body image. This he credits to his parents. “I can remember my dad holding up a beauty magazine and saying, ‘This is bullshit and let me tell you why.’” We’re in a London pub on a bright afternoon. Delaney is wearing jeans, T-shirt and clomping Chelsea boots, his lantern jaw hidden by a thick beard.

Delaney has performed sold-out London shows solely on the basis of his popularity on Twitter, though his profile was raised even further when he co-wrote and starred in the snappy Channel 4 sitcom Catastrophe with Sharon Horgan – he plays the amiable American businessman while she is the Irish teacher who becomes pregnant by him during a fling. Only now, though, is he starting his first UK standup tour.

“Imagine if people derived pleasure from watching you sitting in a Jacuzzi,” he says. “That’s what it’s like for me to perform.” I point out that this rather understates the effort he has put in over 12 years as a standup. After all, there’s no skill to sitting in a Jacuzzi. “That’s true, though I should say I’m very good at sitting in a Jacuzzi. I have developed quite the technique. You need to have the jet aiming just so.” He lifts one leg and angles his bottom toward me. “It’s just gratifying for me to be on stage. In fact, it feels better than sitting in a Jacuzzi. Honestly, fuck your Jacuzzi. Get your Jacuzzi away from me!”

However relaxed he is up there, he isn’t immune to nerves. He has simply got better at hiding them. “I did a set a few weeks ago and one joke didn’t go so well. Actually, it tanked. I could see the controls in my head flipping out, the needles flickering, the alarms flashing: ‘Warning! Nervousness levels! Shitting pants!’ But no one in the audience knew until I left the stage at the end and hosed off my pants in an alley.”

He is, he says, acutely aware of the mood in any room he’s playing. “When you’re nervous, the audience is nervous. They’re like a dog, a big hungry dog. They’re hungry for human flesh. You have to let them know you’re an aggressor with lots of weapons and you’re going to feast on their blood.” He flashes a bright toothy smile. With such carnivorous sentiments, it’s no wonder Delaney has called his tour Meat. “We’re made of meat, we eat meat, we wanna play with other people’s meat, and we want other people to play with ours.”

Meat crops up a lot in his conversation, too, such as when he discusses the phonetic pleasure of certain words. “Ham never gets old. That word is so funny to me. And bib. I’m gonna try to work that in more.” There’s more meat when he reflects on the pleasant nature of British discourse, such as the jolly chit-chat between “the butcher and his customers”. When I ask him to choose a downside to life in London, this turns out to be food-related, too. “It should be easier for me to get an amazing taco here. But that’s not London’s fault. That’s because in Los Angeles I was living so close to Mexico. What else? I guess the UK should have more desert national parks. More sequoia trees.”

Those things apart, he’s happy here. He moved to London from LA with his wife and their two young children last year to make it easier to work on the second series of Catastrophe. They recently had their third child, born a few weeks before we meet, but he halts my congratulations almost before I can offer them. “That’s not necessary at this point. Now we’re on our third, we’re really just inflicting this whole thing on ourselves.” He has the slightly dazed air of a man waiting for the chaos to kick in. “So far it seems manageable, but I’m sure I’ll be proved wrong. Stay tuned.”

Mostly he’s glad to be raising his family here. “The NHS is the best thing to happen to me in many years. Except for Catastrophe. Oh, and my children and marriage. This city is an amazing place for kids. You have parks here with a fence around them and only one or two entrances so your child doesn’t walk out and get hit by a bus. In America, they’ll put a park next to a freeway. With no fence.” His evenness of tone allows exaggeration and irony to be smuggled in under the conversational radar. “You have an investment in your society that pays dividends. British people on a person-by-person basis, however, I do not care for.” The pause he leaves before giving a “Just kidding!” smile is long enough to be uncomfortable.

Delaney’s air of gratitude isn’t surprising, given the recovery he has undergone since the traumatic early years recounted in his 2013 comic memoir, Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. The alcoholism, which stretched from his teens to his mid-20s, was bad enough, leading him to smash his car into the side of the LA Department of Water and Power building, and to spend stints in jail and rehab. Alcohol has in some ways been supplanted now by comedy. “That’s definitely addictive. If I’m not making people laugh, I do feel a little deficient or sad.”

After sobriety came depression. That he survived all this, and is now 13 years sober, has left him infinitely thankful. Just over a decade ago, he volunteered at a summer camp for children with learning difficulties. “People had been so amazing to me after my accident – not just doctors and nurses but volunteers – that I thought, ‘I’ve gotta do something for other people.’” Among his fellow volunteers at the camp was the woman to whom he is now married. “It was a really good way to meet a spouse. It wasn’t the reason I went, but now any volunteer work I do is in the hope of meeting another wife.”

Delaney insists that the advent of parenthood has not precluded him from addressing unpalatable topics in his comedy. One routine, in which a riff about women being pressured to shave their pubic hair, spirals off into a what-if scenario about having sex with a child. That was five years ago, but he maintains he would still perform similar material today. “Being a parent has not softened me. I’m happier but my capacity for anger is greater. If anything, I’ve realised the importance of comedy. If you get to do it, you should use it to talk about things you care about. So I hope to traffic in lots more horrible imagery that upsets people. Definitely!”

• Rob Delaney: Meat starts at the Lowry, Salford, on 31 May. robdelaney.com/