Funny on Twitter, funnier at Turner
The Twitter star's set spans everything from politics to underwear, but it's his charisma that makes him more than the man behind the handle.
Rob Delaney took his Twitter comedy to the Turner Hall Ballroom stage Thursday night. All photos courtesy CJ Foeckler.
Rob Delaney is arguably the “funniest person on Twitter.” He was certainly the funniest person in Milwaukee last night at Turner Hall. The ballroom was practically standing-room-only before Delaney took the stage and it’s likely that most of the audience members were part of his over 600,000 Twitter followers. People were psyched to see Delaney in the flesh (one young lady even tried to start a “ROB DUH-LAY-NEY” cheer).
We learned a lot about Delaney’s, ahem, private parts last night and those stories were absolutely hilarious, from how long he wears a pair of underwear (answer: until they’re as holey as Swiss cheese) or an earnest-seeming description of his belief that his balls shrank the moment that his son was born. This comedian is an open book who relies heavily on true-life events for his comedy even when those events aren’t traditionally funny – Thursday, he turned a harrowing story of drunk driving related injuries and a stay at a halfway house into a laugh riot about being confined to a wheelchair.
Delaney’s set was standing-room only, with most attendees likely part of his 600,000 strong Twitter legion.
Delaney is an incredibly likable guy, so his raunchy jokes didn’t overshadow the more heartwarming bits. For instance, he told us that at age 11 he was a rabid Danzig fan and even wrote a conjunction-free fan letter – “I cannot believe how hard you guys rock” – to Glenn Danzig, the lead singer. Danzig’s bass player wrote back to young Delaney, first to agree that the band rocked HARD, and then, months later, to ask why Delaney hadn’t written again. He also told us about how his mother has been trying to help him develop material in the wake of his Twitter fame – one time in particular telling him a tragic story about his dying grandparents in the hope that he could turn the tale of woe into a tale of lol. And somehow, he did, although the laughter wasn’t as much from the story itself as Delaney’s charismatic delivery.
Anyone who’s been to a comedy show knows that sitting in the front row makes you vulnerable to the comedian’s off-the-cuff audience riffs, and one girl definitely learned that last night, to the audience’s delight. When Delaney pondered why a dairy farmer would ever need to take an airplane to a business meeting, the front row-girl shouted out in protest. “Calm yourself, milkmaid,” Delaney shot back.
His set wasn’t all comebacks, life stories and shout outs to his loins. The man who once described himself physically as “the love child of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan” skewered them and politics in general as well as he ever has on the internet. Delaney also broke down the London Olympics in the funniest way I’ve ever heard, blasting NBC’s awful announcers and hypothesizing on the secret origins of the Chinese synchronized divers.
Thank god for Twitter. Without it, Delaney would just be another funny dad in L.A. With it, he has hit a level of fame that lets him take that funny straight to those followers who helped get him there.
