Catastrophe: noun; an event causing great and usually sudden damage or suffering; a disaster
There’s a huge titanium plate in Rob Delaney’s right arm, one that goes pretty much all the way from his wrist to his elbow. Delaney is a man who doesn’t do things by halves. It’s a constant reminder to him of the time he should have died, and the time he chose to get to grips with life.
The standup/writer/actor/Tweeter of note was a drinker in his 20s. Actually, he had been a drinker since the age of 12. Not a casual drinker: a voracious drinker. He is 6ft 3in, and broad with it – a huge petrol tank of a man – and he just loved to fill himself up with booze. A dozen beers or more for starters, on to the wine, then the spirits. Nothing made him feel so fine as alcohol, so he would drink till he passed out, and when he woke up, often in the middle of a blackout with his memory shot, he’d drive himself home.
It was on one of these journeys that he drove into a branch office of the Los Angeles department of water and power. He broke his right arm and left wrist, and his knees were ripped to the bone. It was a miracle he was alive. After they stitched Delaney back up and put him in leg braces and a wheelchair, they packed him off to jail for the night.
Delaney couldn’t remember a thing. He asked if he had killed anybody, and promised himself that if the answer was yes, he would kill himself, too. He was told nobody else was involved, and says he can still feel the surge of relief. From that moment on, he swore he’d never drink again. It’s tempting to say he never looked back, but life is not so simple.
Delaney was 25 at the time, and working as a comic – an unsuccessful one. It took him another decade to make his name, first for being funny on Twitter, then as a standup, and now as the star and co-writer of Channel 4 romcom Catastrophe. The show about the lives of an accidentally married couple (Rob, played by Delaney, and Sharon, played by Sharon Horgan) blurs reality and fiction. American Rob and Irish Sharon have a brief affair; she finds herself pregnant in her late 30s and decides to have the baby (as Horgan did, six months after meeting her now husband); he returns to London from America, and they try to make it work.
The writing is wincingly truthful: the throwaway comments that escalate into huge fights; the chaos that comes when sex and alcohol are combined; the vile things we say to each other (“Is your email still fat-idiot-at-bad-breath-dot-cunt?”); the hankering after something better and still settling for second best. But there is also a sweetness to Catastrophe: when they are not being horrible to each other, Sharon and Rob share something special.
We are in a photographer’s studio in London, where Delaney is having his picture taken. He is sitting in a chair with his back so thoroughly reclined that he is virtually horizontal. “This chair will be like sodium pentothal,” he says. “It’s a truth serum. If you take it, you will give up secrets under interrogation.” Has he ever taken sodium pentothal? “I haven’t. I don’t know if I could, because I’m sober. I don’t drink or take drugs, so it would probably be a bad idea.”
Delaney tells me that Richard Linklater’s wonderful Before trilogy of films was an inspiration for Catastrophe, which surprises me, because Linklater’s films are so searingly romantic, while Catastrophe is grounded in fart and shagging jokes. But it makes a kind of sense: both look at how the early euphoria of a relationship is challenged by the prosaic demands of everyday life, and how we learn to love each other despite the compromises; both are about how couples grow up.
As well as Horgan’s unplanned pregnancy, Delaney’s drink problem has been written into the show (his character turns up for interviews smelling of booze). Sharon is a teacher, as is Delaney’s wife. I ask him if some of the script’s more intimate details are true. Like what, he says defensively. I’m thinking of one occasion when Rob is lying in bed by himself and Sharon asks if he has just been jerking himself off. Delaney looks relieved. “Oh sure, yeah, my wife will come in and say, ‘Hey, you jerking off there?’ Yes, definitely.”
How does she feel about seeing their private life served up in a TV show? “It was hard for my wife to watch the first series. But as we’ve veered further from the reality of our actual lives, I think she has appreciated that. Because, you know, I’m the person who decided to go and be in public and be silly and assassinate my own privacy. She didn’t. So, yes, Catastrophe has been educational for me in learning that it is OK to not want to have your business on TV.”
Do they discuss the storylines before the show goes out? “I have a sense of what I should and shouldn’t put in.” What’s a no-no? “Anything emotionally delicate. My wife and I have been together 12 years, and married 10. Any marriage has difficulties. If one of us has a problem, we’ve agreed that, rather than draw from our own stockpile of stuff, it would be better if I retreated into my fantasy chamber and make stuff up. Which I think is fine and good. All that matters is that it feels real.”
Delaney, 40, has often drawn on the alcohol years in his work; he doesn’t mind it being made public because it affects no one but him. But he is intensely private about his family life. On Twitter, he will reveal that he has three children under the age of six, but little else. He occasionally refers to his wife and posts links to pictures – but these tend to be of cute animals. You’re more likely to come across a photograph of Banksy online than Delaney and his wife.
As for his screen wife, he met Horgan on social media. She followed him on Twitter, told him she was a fan and suggested they try writing together. He was known for his one-liners back then, and had never written a TV script. Horgan had already written several, including the fabulously filthy Pulling. He describes Horgan as the senior writer and says he has learned a lot from her. “Her ability to take a bird’s-eye view of a full episode or a series is unparalleled. I feel like Jack Bauer on the ground in 24,and she’s Chloe, who can see everything: ‘Don’t forget we need this, and we need that,’ and I’ll be like: ‘Fart joke, sex joke.’ She’s in a helicopter above and can see all the occupied territory. So I’m trying to take command centre lessons from her.” The new series features Carrie Fisher as Rob’s monstrous mother, in the final role she filmed before her death in December. “She died a week after she wrapped with us,” Delaney says. “Carrie was a bit of a genius – kind and empathetic as well as very funny.”
Catastrophe is beautifully written, but it’s the chemistry between Delaney and Horgan that makes it work so well. At its best, it feels as if we are eavesdropping; despite their battles, the glue that keeps them together is the fact that they still fancy each other.
Do they fancy each other in real life? He looks slightly shocked. “It’s a professional chemistry. We definitely tickle each other’s funny bones, for sure. Making her laugh remains a huge pleasure. But no, we don’t fancy each other in that way, because even though we play husband and wife on TV that would feel...” He searches for the right word. “Incestuous. Plus it would be deadly for the show. We wouldn’t want to kill the golden goose. That would be stupid.” Who does he know better, Horgan or his wife? He laughs. “My wife. Hahahah! By a long way. Oh God, yeah. I mean Jeez, Louise.” Delaney has a laid-back, singsong voice, so it comes as a surprise when he laughs, the ferocious ratatat of a Gatling gun.
He met his wife when they were in their 20s, doing voluntary work with children who had cerebral palsy. It’s a great way to meet people, he says, “because at least you know they spend some of their time being selfless”. Did she know him through the bad years? “You mean before I got sober? No. I’ve been sober for 14 years, and when I met my wife I’d been sober for a couple of years. So she didn’t see any of that.” What would she have made of the old Delaney? “She would have thought, no thanks! She would have seen shades of how I am now, but then she would have seen me drunk and said, ‘Oh! He has a very serious problem.’ I think the red flag would have waved itself pretty visibly, and she would have backed off because she is smart and has self-preservation skills.”
He says there is no profound psychological cause to explain his drinking. He thinks it is probably genetic: his paternal grandfather was an alcoholic, and there have been numerous family members with drink problems: half with, half without, he reckons.
Delaney grew up in Marblehead, Massachusetts, a picturesque coastal town with a tiny population. It was a happy childhood, he says. He loved to read, listen to music, and had a good relationship with his parents, both of whom worked in insurance. Delaney’s father was brought up by a working-class single dad who could not cope and had to hand him over to the care system for long periods of time. His mother, meanwhile, enjoyed a privileged, middle-class childhood.
Young Rob was clever, precocious and sociable. Yes, he wet his bed until he was 12, and yes, he found it humiliating, but even that didn’t make him unhappy. He was bigger than everybody else at school, reached puberty earlier, could look after himself. When he first got drunk, he thought nothing could beat it: the camaraderie, the freedom, the reckless kids who would drink with him, everything. He briefly stopped wetting the bed, but not for long. Delaney says he spent longer wetting the bed as a drunk than he did as an incontinent little boy.
“Drinking felt so physically and mentally and emotionally good, I just wanted to do it, and then it became more of a compulsion. And then the idea of interacting with people without some sort of lubricant became harder. So yes, I started wanting to do it, and then it got to where I didn’t know how to stop, and that was very scary.”
He would take risks, jumping from Manhattan Bridge on one occasion, climbing telephone poles and then tightrope walking the wires on another (on the verge of losing his balance, he jumped and fell headfirst). But for all his maverick behaviour, he didn’t feel miserable. He decided he wanted to act, and graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a degree in musical theatre in 1999. By then, he says, he had become embarrassed about his acting ambitions. Why? “My default is to think that it’s stupid.” He cracks his ankle loudly. I’ve never heard anybody crack a body part so loudly. “And if you do it or want to do it, you’re a silly person. My feeling that acting was for silly people came from going to university and being around a lot of very silly people.” He pauses. “I’m not saying I wasn’t one of them.” In what way did he consider it silly? “I thought, ‘Who are you? You should be working in a factory or a bank, or a pizza shop.’ Books and music I got: we’d all die if there was no music. But acting just seemed so silly.”
In his final year at university he went to a standup gig, and had an epiphany. “I was like ‘Oh! This is it!’” Why did he find comedy more acceptable? “Comedians write their own stuff, generally, so that felt more honest. Also it felt more craftsmany to me, and a more honest career path – because as an actor there’s an element of playing the lottery: ‘I hope I get cast.’ Which makes me sick with anxiety. If you’re funny, people are going to laugh involuntarily, and if you practise, you’re going to get better, so it didn’t seem as much of a lottery.”
He continued to drink himself into oblivion. He moved to Los Angeles, drank, dossed, did standup, drank. Around 9/11, he was travelling in Paris. He knew the Americans would take a terrible revenge, and briefly considered joining the French Foreign Legion, which he thought preferable to the prospect of being cannon fodder for George W Bush. But then he just drank some more and returned to LA. After that came the car crash that should by rights have killed him.
Did he have a death wish? “I was always quite a daredevil when I drank. But did I have a conscious death wish? No, certainly not.”
When he wrote in his memoir that he would have taken his own life if he had killed someone, did he mean it? “Yes, I believed that. There was massive relief – and then further relief because it was now impossible for me to hide my drinking any more.”
Delaney was ordered to go to rehab: a dry halfway house. The depression that followed was far worse than anything alcohol had done to him. “Working through that was scarier. The first bout lasted a couple of months. It was so bad it couldn’t have lasted longer.”
By now, he says, he did have a death wish, and contemplated taking his life. “I thought it would be a good idea, but I was able to recognise that as crazy.” He speaks calmly, unemotionally, as if trying to solve a puzzle. Why did he want to do it? “I felt shit and useless and of no value to the world, but I knew my friends and family wouldn’t sign off on that. And by that time I’d been sober for a year, and I’d learned enough about impulse control and acknowledging there’s a problem. I thought, you know what, I’m just going to put my own decision-making process on the shelf for a minute and get the help that people are suggesting I should. That was very freeing and helpful.”
Was there a positive side? Did part of him think: there are so many great things in life, I want to stay alive? He shakes his head. “Not at the time, no. At that time I enjoyed nothing. It was pretty bleak.”
It could have been much worse. Three friends who were in the halfway house with him died in quick succession. Delaney gradually clawed his way out; he was put on medication, which he still takes today. Would he ever come off antidepressants? “I like the idea of not being on pills, but more than that I like the idea of being a contributing dad and husband and worker and friend. I think of the brain as a crazy organ with all sorts of stuff going on in it, right? Well, so is the liver, so is the pancreas. I wouldn’t tell a diabetic, ‘Don’t take insulin.’ If my serotonin receptors don’t work the right way, then why shouldn’t I take a pill that can address that?”
He doesn’t pretend that life is now a bowl of roses, but he does talk about the joy he gets from his family. That’s the main difference between him and Rob in Catastrophe, he says: while Rob finds his children a bind, Delaney wants to be with his all the time. “If I could put my children in a belt and wear them all the time on my body, I totally would. The most important things to me are being a dad and being a husband, so I don’t want to screw those up. And I have to provide for my family, so I have to maintain a career.” No wonder he guards their privacy so ferociously. There is something unusual and touching about Delaney’s seriousness: a comedian who doesn’t like to make jokes, and doesn’t even try to most of the time.
It wasn’t until 2012 that his career took off. For a decade after the accident he gigged with little success. He was in debt, trying to write for comedy shows, getting nowhere. Then he read that the comedian Louis CK had opened a Twitter account, and thought, why shouldn’t he? If nobody was going to buy his jokes, he might as well give them away for free on Twitter. They were lewd, puerile and surprisingly popular (“Linger by the Cranberries is probably my favourite song about Prince Charles farting at the 1988 British Open”).
Sometimes he saw famous comedians stealing them, and resented it. Then he thought a) they must have something going for them, and b) if he couldn’t knock out new ones, he wasn’t much of a pro. So out they came – endless jokes, or perverse observations, of 140 characters or fewer. Before long, he had 1 million followers. In 2012, he won The Funniest Person on Twitter award (the only time it has been awarded). He was asked to write his memoir and began working with Horgan.
Ironically, Delaney’s Twitter feed isn’t funny any more. Trump’s election has turned him into an obsessive political tweeter, dedicated to attacking the president and promoting activist group the Democratic Socialists of America. Former fans often tweet him and complain: “You used to be funny.” But he has new fans who think he’s great. He thinks that, as the level of political discourse has become more abject, so has Twitter. “Certainly for me, it’s much less fun, so I really try to think of it as a tool. The road gets narrower the longer you are on Twitter. What do they call it, confirmation bias?”
Why doesn’t he make jokes about Trump? “I don’t feel a compulsion to be funny about it,” he says. “I’m OK with that. If I’m not feeling funny about something, that’s fine. I’m much more interested in the demonstrable historic bigot Jeff Sessions not becoming attorney general than I am in having people laugh at my next joke. [Sessions was confirmed as Trump’s attorney general soon after we met.] I have to use the mouthpiece I have.”
His political activism goes way back, though, and he credits the car crash with igniting it. “My passion for healthcare came from my accident, and having medical bills denied, and having my insurance company drop me, and having to pay for surgery with credit cards. That’s when I became really clued in to the injustices in the American healthcare system.” He smiles. “But my political disease has just got worse as time has gone on.”
Is the politics part of an addictive personality? “I don’t know. I don’t care. Some people will have to be addicts to get rid of Trump, because they will be working round the clock to the detriment of their health. And then there’ll be people who do it in a more measured manner. But it’s going to take everybody, with every positive and negative character attribute, to smash him.”
These days Delaney lives in London. What has Trump’s election victory made him think of his home country? “It’s put up or shut up time. People have to get involved. Sorry, America, you have to be engaged civically. I’ll speak for myself. I wasn’t doing enough, so now I’m doing more. It will take work and sacrifice. Some of it won’t be fun, some of it will be. But it’s going to take regular engagement, and that doesn’t just mean you vote every four years. That’s ridiculous. If that’s all you’re engaged in politically, then we are fucked.” He describes himself as “a card-carrying organiser” for the Democratic Socialists. Would he consider going into politics full-time? “No, because I would rather tell a small story that rippled outwards and made people want to be kind to each other. I don’t want to write policy.”
As he talks, I’m looking at Delaney. His is an astonishing story: from the gutter to successful author, standup, actor, TV star and political pundit. Did he ever write himself off? “Oh no,” he says, in spite of everything, “I had a congenital feeling that everything would work out.” You were always an optimist? “Yes, and I still am!” You are such a weird mix, I say. He grins, suddenly animated. “It’s so weird, right?” He cracks his ankle again, even louder than last time. The noise makes me jump.
“I’m so sorry about that. One of my heroes is the cockroach because of the endurance it has. It doesn’t survive beautifully. It’s a disgusting thing that crawls around ruins, you blow stuff up around it, and the cockroach is like, ‘It’s cool man, I’ll be here.’ So I aspire to be the cockroach. The cockroach is definitely my spirit animal.”
• Catastrophe 3 starts on Channel 4 on Tuesday 28 February.
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