Back in July, the hugely wealthy comedy kingpin Judd Apatow (Knocked Up, Girls, Trainwreck) performed a stand-up skit about Bill Cosby, who was still touring despite dozens of allegations of sexual assault. Apatow imagined the disgraced star’s current routine, with the gist that, each morning, Cosby threw away the paper before his wife saw the very personal headlines — until, one day, he didn’t.
“And my wife said to me,” Apatow riffed, mimicking the veteran comic’s voice. “‘What is this in the paper about the raping and the drugging and the women?’ And I said, ‘Do you like your life? Do you like the house, the jet? Then have a cappuccino and shut the f*** up.’”
A few months on, the very tall, American-born, British-based comedian Rob Delaney is still buzzing about this joke. “Ah,” he says, sitting back, sighing, like a man who has just invented cheese. “That was a good comedy high.” It was, he says, “brutal” — up there with the funniest things he’s seen in ages. How so? “At the heart of it, [Apatow’s] doing a silly voice and a silly impression, but the contents are shocking. Shocking and amazing.”
This is how Delaney likes his comedy, and how he and his co-star and co-writer, Sharon Horgan, make Catastrophe — Channel 4’s popular odd-couple baby show, back soon for a new series. Edgy. Serious. Something to say. But plenty of jokes.
Comedy dramas, Delaney says, can end up neither funny or dramatic, so it’s best to err towards the former. “I have a sworn duty to make people laugh,” he says. “Or I’d consider that episode a failure.” Their bedfellows are shows such as Lena Dunham’s Girls, Transparent, a shocking and amazing series about a sad old dad coming out as transgender, and Togetherness, a sad, dysfunctional sitcom about infidelity. Delaney and Horgan are scholars and exponents of this new strand of misery mirth.
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The first series of Catastrophe aired earlier this year. Set in London, it started with a fling between teacher Sharon (Horgan) and visiting ad exec Rob (Delaney). She became pregnant, leading to him moving across the Atlantic to be with this new woman and an imminent baby. Six episodes of raucous smut and unexpected emotion gave the show a cult following, a big American audience on Amazon Prime, and the fastest-returning second series since Father Ted. It is original and honest; how Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy would have played out had Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy been less careful back in 1995.
Like that run of films (Sunrise, Sunset, Midnight), the sequel leaps ahead a big chunk of time. How long? “Years?” Delaney offers, asking Horgan how much he can reveal. “Can we say less than five years?” She is the boss. So, I ask, between two and five years? “That might be correct,” Delaney says.
The duo didn’t want to write about a newborn: partly as it’s tricky casting a week-old, but is it also because it risks being too Three Men and a Baby? “Sharon’s a woman,” Delaney deadpans. (He deadpans frequently.) He argues that babies are basically just nappies, but with a marriage, which their characters are in, “all bets are off”. Both the writers have been wed for a decade or more, not to each other, and both have kids, not with each other.
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The three of us are having lunch in an east London club. Nearby streets are the ones seen in the show; it’s a Hackney-set sitcom brimming with topical thought. The new series tackles the idea of split childcare. Horgan’s husband does most of it in their family, and she says it’s been odd adjusting her own mindset. “You can’t help feeling judged,” she says. “When I do pick my kids up from school, it’s only mums — still, in this day and age. Pass any playground and it’s the same old shit. It’s just built in.” Delaney nods and says “totally” a lot. “Sexism. Misogyny. Entrenched,” he sighs, tucking into a huge club sandwich and chips. Horgan eats a cheesy cauliflower.
The Office (banality); Girls (failure); Togetherness (depression); Transparent (prejudice); Extras (averageness); Peep Show (deficiency); Louie (desolation): the best sitcoms this century are extended sessions on the therapist’s couch for viewer and writer alike. We are a long way from Seinfeld and its nine series about nothing, or from Friends’s decade-long coffee. Comedy — or, at least, the comedy tastemakers like to discuss; sorry, Mrs Brown’s Boys — has changed. When Delaney told an interviewer that Catastrophe was influenced by the bleak True Detective, it seemed like a joke. But it wasn’t.
“There were funny moments in that,” he says, straight-faced. “Primarily between Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. Their forced proximity was similar to [mine and Sharon’s], and that elicited laughs that I think were intentional. So, yes, I am serious.” When your weekly half-hour of escapist giggling takes cues from a show mostly about abduction, it’s safe to say it’s no longer so much tears of a clown as a wake full of clowns, all crying.
One episode in Catastrophe’s first series focused on Down’s syndrome and the possibility that the unborn child may be at risk. Horgan’s Sharon, meanwhile, drinks and smokes during pregnancy. The series, at times, felt like the TV adaptation of Expecting Better, a help guide that doesn’t terrify women into only eating lentils for nine months, but does say, don’t smoke. Smoking, writes the author, Emily Oster, is “really bad”. Was Horgan jittery about the reaction to the cigarette? “I was nervous,” she says. “I didn’t want it to be misconstrued as careless. But I did want it to be as real as possible, and that’s what I did during pregnancy.”
The baby, in the end, is fine. (“It’s because she smoked a cigarette that there weren’t any difficulties at all,” Delaney jokes.) So, no complications? No, Horgan says. “But I’m not saying we didn’t think about that.” “We thought long and hard,” Delaney adds. “But it’s a comedy,” Horgan continues. Anyway, there are sure to be gags in the new run that attract unexpected grief. The biggest backlash earlier this year was about the rare muscular condition fibromyalgia, and a suggestion by a doctor in the show that it’s not a real disease. The duo were attacked by “fibromyalgia activists”.
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Yet what most people like about this glut of edgy comedies is that they are non-judgmental and feel real, ripped from our messy lives. My wife, who was expecting a baby when the first series of Catastrophe was screened, appreciated the show’s relaxed morals. Delaney — so big, he seems trapped between table and chair — grins as I tell him. “Sharon’s gestated and delivered two human babies, and my wife had three in five years,” he says, deep voice booming. “And pregnancy is so hard and underserved on TV, so we wanted stuff about motherhood that made it seem real.” His co-star, who is more of a slumper, picks up the baton. “Yeah, just pregnancy can be shit, it’s all right to complain, you don’t have to be blooming and happy.”
She and Delaney are like the White Stripes without the fancy backstory; woman and man in a close working relationship — at one point, she picks fluff off his stubble — who live separately, but bring personal anecdotes to work. If the first circle of a Venn diagram represents the actors and the second their characters, I ask how the show’s Venn would look: a figure of eight; some squashed cleavage; or a circle, where you can’t tell one from the other?
“Love that question,” Delaney says. He’s annoyed, which is rich, considering the fake and real Rob not only share a name, but are both teetotal. It has to be asked. He disagrees. Horgan helps out, saying that the new series tips more off-screen Rob into who he is on screen. His character, they laugh, is more selfish than he used to be. Delaney still hates the question. “I mean,” he says sarcastically, looking to his friend, “you pronounce it ‘Shar-on’, while it’s ‘Shar-on’ in the show.” Tired after weeks of filming, a chaotic photoshoot with errant paint, not to mention a new baby at home, he isn’t as easy-going as his alter ego. Horgan, however, seems the same: friendly, scatty, slightly neurotic.
With the Venn diagram out of the way, the other question with comics who bring much of their own life to their work is always what those close to them think. In the first series, which leads to the baby, Rob and Sharon have constant loud sex. In the second, a hilarious but horrible marriage, in fact inspired by Linklater’s Before Midnight, is the crux of the story. Is watching the show with their real-life spouses like watching porn with parents?
“It’s akin,” Delaney says. The awkwardness is inevitable, though, as most of the conflicts are taken from their families. “I honestly say,” he says, “if you don’t like the show, blame them.”
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Horgan and Delaney met on Twitter as mutual, distant fans of each other’s work. Horgan, 45, wrote and starred in the cruelly canned cult hit Pulling, about being useless, drunk and thirtysomething; Delaney, 38, rose as a Twitter comedian (1.19m followers, and Funniest Person on Twitter, according to Comedy Central) who later found offline success. Social networking sites are made for the spilling of once private thought, and the trend for oversharing has found its way into mainstream comedy. Creatives have found popularity and retweets in increasingly blunt 140-character jokes, so logic would dictate that they be equally open in stage and screen work. It has marked a definitive shift, whether you tweet or not.
“There is definitely a confessional trend, with people saying how they really feel in their work,” agrees Horgan, who — in being relatively tame to her followers — saves the boorish for the box. “I can’t help saying what I think and feel, and it’s the same when writing. It could be gross, but we’ll put it in there.” In series one, a line about giving birth goes: “You see your little troll come tobogganing out of your wife’s snatch on a wave of turds.” She fears this body humour will have its day soon — “I was just thinking, ‘When will it be old hat?’”
I sense Catastrophe is a stepping stone to more dramatic work; it’s why, like so many comedians, from Ricky Gervais onwards, she got bored with just telling jokes and wanted to write emotional scenes in the first place. “I got clown fatigue,” she says. “I’m in my forties and want to use the time I’ve got left to really say something.” The time you’ve got left? “Well, on screen, it’s maybe not that long. I want to use my time well.”
As for Delaney, he says that, post-Catastrophe, he has been offered dramatic roles, including a film in which he was to be given a gun and die. That was tempting. Much of our lunch is a random surge of slightly connected conversation, and we end up talking about the forthcoming Steve Jobs film, starring Michael Fassbender. Could the new dramatic acting skills learnt by Delaney have been used for the Apple boss? He shakes his head.
“Wouldn’t you rather see Michael Fassbender slapping his big d*** on a computer keyboard?” He laughs, still erring, it seems, towards comedy, not drama. “I think that’s what happens in it.”
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Catastrophe, Channel 4, Oct 27