3QQ interview: River Butcher on Balls

Standup comic and actor River Butcher discusses various orbs.

Welcome to Three Quora Questions, our series of interviews in which a guest expert joins me to field strange and interesting questions posed on Quora.com (the internet’s oddest knowledge repository).

Today, we’re joined by standup comic, actor, and writer River Butcher. You can watch his half-hour Comedy Central special A Different Kind of Dude for free on YouTube, or see him in shows like Good Trouble and Adam Ruins Everything.

River also co-hosts The Knew Guys, a podcast all about masculinity. So I thought there would be no more appropriate topic to ask him about than one near to my heart (and also near to my butt)…

Balls.

---

Do women care how big a guy's balls are?

RIVER: This is such a funny question to ask me. I mean, well, okay, so I'm the expert here. I think the resounding answer is yes. But that doesn't imply like one specific type of ball, you know? Women care about balls, but like, varying sizes apply. Does that make sense?

Not everybody is listening to that AC/DC song, “Big Balls.” Not every lady is rocking that. But there's some ladies that are rocking that, you know, that are looking for big balls. And some ladies are looking for small balls. Some ladies just want to manufacture runs. And then some ladies are like, “I'm a middle of the road kind of ball gal.”

What is the best word that rhymes with “ball”?

I think for me it would be “mall.” Because I'm all about maximizing profits right now. I don't know if you've seen The Economy, but it's pretty difficult right now. And I'm getting a two for one here.

Because you get mall, M-A-L-L, which is a thing that I have a lot of nostalgia and memories about. They're kind of dying, but at one time they were the shit. It was the shit to go to the mall. And then on the other hand, you have M-A-U-L, which is a little terrifying and scary, but you need that balance of light and darkness in your life.

So that's my answer. Mall/maul.

Do atheists know that if gravity was slightly more powerful, the universe would collapse into a ball? This is groundbreaking evidence that God exists. How do atheists feel about that?

Let me clear my calendar. That was a long question.

I don't know. I know that there's a highway near where I live that Atheists United have adopted. So perhaps I could spend some time on that highway and then maybe get back to you in a follow-up interview.

I think that atheists probably do know that. I don't know if you have ever spent any time with atheists, but they know a lot. And they are ready to tell you. This person's clearly not hung out with many atheists if they ask this question, because I would imagine a million atheists responded to it.

But it's funny, number one, that it would turn into a ball. Honestly, as a ball expert, I would prefer that it fall into a tiny little cube. It's also funny that this person is like, “that's resounding evidence.” I can't argue that it isn't, necessarily, but I prefer to look at things like butterflies being in existence. As opposed to, “did you know that if one thing was off just a little bit, we would all be crushed to death into a ball?”