Dating Over 40 Is Like Thrift Store Shopping. Joe DeVito – Full Special
Comedian Joe DeVito reflects on the challenges of being single at 50, particularly in the dating scene, where he compares it to shopping at TJ Maxx—full of odd sizes and last year’s styles. He jokes about the difficulties of aging, including unexpected injuries, frustrating visits to the doctor, and the absurdity of dating younger women. DeVito also shares amusing anecdotes about his elderly parents, technology mishaps, and his encounter with a friend’s baby born with an extra finger. Throughout, he highlights the humor in the inevitable struggles of growing older, making light of the quirks and inconveniences that come with age.
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So, we get right into the personal stuff. I’m a single guy, and I just turned 50, which means I’m ready to cut a deal. Maybe you have a nut job sister-in-law you’re trying to shove off on someone. I’ll take a look.
You know, whenever I say that, men laugh, and women go, “What about Carol?” Every woman has a specific nut job friend. I immediately think of their single guy friend. Carol’s due for release in a few weeks. What’s the range on her ankle monitor?
Please, I don’t need help meeting crazy women. I’ve got that locked down. Trust me, I’m good. That’s my core demographic. But it is a strange age to be single at 50. I didn’t think that was going to happen to me, and it’s because dating is not designed for people my age. You don’t hear a lot about single guys my age because we’re gross, we’re creepy. I don’t want to hear about it either. I’d rather be up here talking about single women aged 25 to 30, but I can’t do that because they blocked me on Instagram. They shut me down. They said it’s weird.
People say to me, “Oh, dating over 40, what’s that market like?” Market! Well, it ain’t Whole Foods. It’s not the freshest selection. I’ll tell you what it’s like shopping for a partner when you’re 50 years old. Have you been to TJ Maxx? That’s what it’s like. There’s a selection, but it’s a lot of last year’s styles, a lot of odd sizes. And even if you bring something home, you won’t know exactly what’s wrong until you’ve had it on you a couple of times. You’ll start looking for that receipt. “This is irregular. This is very irregular.”
Young people have things I don’t have. They have time, they have energy, they have that other nonsense—hope. They’ve got a lot of hope going on. It’s true. It’s a strange situation to be in because I’m conserving my energy and my money. I don’t do dinner dates anymore. Dinner? Why am I feeding you? I don’t even know you! What am I, meals on wheels? This makes no sense. Women say, “Oh, you’re cheap.” And I say, “It’s not just that.”
Because I’ve been around, and I know that women, when they know they have a dinner date coming up, they stop eating two weeks in advance to get their appetite up. Oh, the last time I went on a dinner date—what a nightmare. Talk about wasting a Groupon. This woman showed up ravenous like she got dropped off by the Donner Party. I’d never seen anything like it. She swallowed a steak in one bite, like a boa constrictor. I saw it moving down the side of her neck in one piece. She was there to eat, stuffing rolls in her dress, pouring ketchup in her purse. The dessert cart came by, and she shot out the tires so they couldn’t leave. Come on! That’s not classy, that’s not paleo.
Women want that free meal, and I don’t do it. Sometimes I said to one woman, “Let’s meet for coffee,” and she said, “Coffee? You think you’re taking me on some kind of Starbucks date?” I said, “Starbucks? You wish. We’re going to meet at the bank. The coffee’s free, grab yourself a lollipop on the way out.”
I had one woman, she was honest, she told me she was looking for a sugar daddy. I told her my wallet is hypoglycemic. No sugar in this recipe, sweetheart. I keep my bank balance sweet and low.
I do have some financial issues. I just got a bill in the mail that said “Final Notice,” so that’s a relief. Took them long enough to get the hint. You can keep wasting postage all you want; I’ve moved on. So, take that, public library.
I’ve tried using the dating technology again. It’s not for people my age; it’s for millennials and so forth. And I laugh when people say, “Well, you know, there are options for middle-aged people who want to meet online.” Okay, I’ve seen the commercials for Our Time. That’s what they call it—it’s the dating site for people over 50. It’s Our Time? No, no, our time was 1998. This is not our time; this is overtime. It’s with sudden death. It says, “Grab a chair before the music stops time.”
As far as these profiles go, we need to pass some legislation about these pictures, okay? Some sort of time-date stamping—write your congressman! This is supposed to be a recent picture, yet I see the Hindenburg explosion in the background. Come on! And no Snapchat filters, okay? A woman’s got a crown of animated flowers and little hearts—what is she trying to distract me from with all of these fireworks going on in the back? Does she have some kind of weird mole, a goiter, a mustache? What’s happening here?
No more of this. Look, it’s a dating site. There’s only one picture we need to see; it should be required for everyone, and that is you naked on a scale holding a bank statement. That’s it.
Because people are dishonest, and I know it goes both ways. My female friends tell me that the men online lie about their height, which is hilarious because the whole point is to meet that woman. How do you show up eight inches shorter than you said you were? What’s the plan? You just keep moving around the whole night so she can’t get a read on how tall you are? It’s insane. And I say this as a short guy—I’m not trying to fool anyone, mislead you, or create optical illusions. I don’t put up pictures of me surrounded by chihuahuas, wearing a top hat and an umbrella. I’m honest, and I get punished because I tell women, “Look, I’m 50 and five foot six.” They think, “Yeah, he’s 73, he’s four feet tall. I’m not interested.”
But it is tricky trying to find someone, especially when you’re getting older and strange things are happening to your body. It starts betraying you. When you’re younger, if you have an injury, there was an incident, something happened to cause this. You’re 20, you’re playing football, you twist your knee, you’ve got to stop playing football. Then in your 40s, the injury comes back—ah, the old football injury’s in town again. Then you turn 50 and you think, “I was watching someone play football,” and now there’s a bone sticking out of your thigh. You’re not sure what’s going on.
And you can’t get help either. The doctors are useless. They used to give me prescriptions and routines. Now I go in and tell the doctor what’s wrong, and he repeats it back to me, and that’s the end of the session. Trust me, if you’re over 50, you come in and say, “Doc, I think I hurt my elbow.” “Oh yeah, you got a hurt elbow now.” Well, thanks for the second opinion, I guess.
I get injured in ways I can’t even explain. I was running to catch a train, and I wasn’t in a real hurry, so I was doing that weird run where one leg is running, but the other leg’s just kind of hanging back a little bit, like, “I’m not in that much of a hurry, come on, you’re a team, work together, legs!” My other leg was like, “Take the next train.” So I get there, I step on the platform, and as soon as I lift my leg up—ah!—this horrible, shooting, terrible pain in my calf. I thought, “This feels serious; I better try and ignore it.”
A couple of days later, I had to go to the emergency room. The doctor checks me out and he goes, “Well, you’ve ruptured your plantaris tendon.” I said, “Oh, do I need surgery?” “Nah, you don’t use it.” I said, “Well, excuse me, but you have no idea what I do with my plantaris tendon. What does it do?” “No, no, no, you don’t use it. It’s vestigial. It’s left over from when we used to walk on all fours. In fact, a lot of people don’t even have it anymore.” I thought, “How old am I getting? I’m rupturing tendons humans have evolved away from having.”
I said, “Well, while we’re here, Doc, why don’t you snip off my tail and see if I can walk upright and maybe discover fire on the way to the parking lot?”
There’s no way to prepare. I threw my back out. What was I doing? Climbing a mountain, wrestling an alligator? No, just putting in eye drops. I didn’t know I was living on the edge, tempting fate. I leaned back too far, my spine snapped shut like a mousetrap, Visine in a death grip, squirting all over my face. I thought, “I can’t move. Is this what the plantaris does? Does it help put in eye drops?”
Do you understand what this means? This means I hurt myself while I was treating another medical condition. What kind of future awaits? Tear off a Band-Aid, and suddenly, “I can’t hear out of this side! What happened?”
I’m trying to fight it. Even the good news is barely a compliment. Someone said to me the other day, “Hey, you look pretty good for 50.” Pretty good for 50? What’s the street value, the cash value of “pretty good”? Hey, you know, you look like a lousy 45. How do you feel about that? You know, you look like a 38 in some kind of sleep deprivation experiment.
It’s all adding up. Losing my hair, this is my haircut—this is my only option. This is the last stop before bald. We call this “sides and back.” Sides and back—ask for it by name. Sides and back. Top and front are taking care of themselves. If I want to thin this out, I just take a shower, and it washes right out. It’s sides and back.
My barber has been cutting my hair for 10 years. Every time I come in, he says the same thing: “What are we doing this time?” What do you think we’re doing? “Oh, I’d like to try a French braid. How about one dreadlock, like a Slim Jim coming off the top here?” What kind of curveball am I going to throw? Sides and back, that’s all there is to be done. That’s my only option.
I used to have choices. I used to get a mohawk every summer. If I got a mohawk now, it would look like a semicolon—chunk missing. I even had long hair—oh, my long hair. When I was in my 20s, I grew my hair down the middle of my back. Now, it grows from the middle of my back. It’s awful. I go to the beach, and it’s like My Little Pony is running around.
But I don’t say any of this to my barber because my barber’s Russian. You don’t mess with Russian people. Toughest people on earth, no sense of humor. You ever have a Russian person tell you a joke? It’s just a scary story, then they laugh at the end. They give you a punchline like, “And in winter grandma die. Ahahahahah!” They always act like it’s a translation issue. “Nah, it’s much funnier in Russian. The whole village was killed.” That’s what happens.
And I don’t know what it is for women, but for men, the big moment is the first time you get the electric ear and nose hair trimmer as a gift. As a gift! That means someone who loves you is saying, “Please, do something about that. You’re walking around with that tarantula hanging out of your nose. I can’t even look at you. Please!”
It’s so embarrassing because you put it in your ear, and you hear it make contact, and you think, “What’s growing inside my head?” And I’m Italian—I’m very hairy. Is it normal to go through two or three batteries in one use, or is that too much? I had to put a leaf bag on it like a lawnmower. There’s just so much—they don’t have a mulch setting.
It is scary, yeah. And I’m feeling it. I just went to visit my parents, and they’re older than me. My folks are at the age where any kind of technology—not interested. Anything could be a doorstop, tape dispenser—they don’t want to know. They’re not interested in learning.
As soon as I get there, I pull into the driveway, and my father runs out: “You have to come look at the computer.” Because I’m under 70, so that makes me tech support. I tell them, “You use it three times a year; how bad can it be?” Then I go upstairs. “Oh, how long has smoke been coming out of the printer?”
My dad’s main online activity is he and his retired friends email each other vacation photos in formats no one can open. No one has ever successfully viewed a single photo because they won’t update—they’re all running Windows 75. Nothing works anymore, and they get the notifications, so they think, “Oh, it’s a scam, it’s the Russians. Delete, delete, delete.” Now, I’m looking at an email. “Dad, I think this attachment is an eight-track. How did he do this?”
Yeah, he cracks me up. And I have to say, if you’re a person who has parents who are senior citizens, next time you visit, have them drive you around a little bit. My father’s lost all conception of consistent pressure on the gas pedal. I don’t know if it’s perhaps a torn plantaris—it could be a plantaris issue.
No more of this—what he does now is he floors it, and then he lets it all run out, and then he floors it again. His car looks like it’s skipping down the street. I’m sitting next to him, my neck hurts, I’m getting seasick. We were on the highway; he slowed down so much I thought he wanted me to get out. “He’s going to leave me here on the median?”
But he still does the classic dad move, though. If the traffic stops short, the dad hand to the passenger eye, ear, nose, and throat area—just smacking you right in the face. Still doing it to his grown son. Because the windshield, the seatbelt—these things won’t save me, but his scrawny 75-year-old arm—a little karate chop to the throat—it’s not going to work. And I’ll tell you why: because his reaction time is slow. It’s a little off schedule. So whatever happened, he’s not kicking in for quite a while. And then, out of nowhere—”Hey, Dad, whoa, we’re sitting on the couch! What are you doing? We got home 15 minutes ago.”
He’s making me nervous because he just had a little fender bender. I think it was his fault—he hit a parked car. It was parked in his driveway. And it was my car. Watched the whole thing happen through the living room window. I heard him revving up in the garage—I’d never seen him drive that fast—just bam! Eight feet, full speed, into the side of my car. And I ran. I said, “Oh wow, are you all right?” I couldn’t believe I had to ask this. I said, “Didn’t you see my car was there?” And he got mad at me. My father said, “Well, your car’s not usually there when I back out.” I said, “Hey, Dad, let’s not drive from memory. The world is changing; it’s changing all the time.”
And my mother’s worse because my mother’s shrinking. That’s what happens to Italian people as we get older—we just keep getting smaller and smaller. I saw it happen to my grandparents—they turned into little Italian salt and pepper shakers. You could hold them; it’s like a Disney movie.
So my mother is shrinking, and she drives looking through the steering wheel like she’s holding a hula hoop in her hands. That’s not safe. The other drivers don’t even know she’s in there—they just see the haunted Honda drifting through traffic.
So here’s what I want to do: I want to get Mom one of those big wooden ship’s wheels—you know, the ones with the knobs—and that way, we can stick it in the middle of the dash, and she can drive standing up like a pirate. Let’s put a parrot on her shoulder. “Arrr, I’ll be going to the deli, who’s coming with me?”
It’s good to visit with them, though. I forgot that my dad is one of the all-time great throat-clearers. Sounds like he’s got a big announcement coming up—a lot of that “ahem” we used to do when we were kids. Oh, we’d hear my dad in the bathroom every morning, tuning up. He’d like to start every morning with 20 minutes of this:
[Makes exaggerated throat-clearing sounds]
Like, you could tell he couldn’t get under it, so he had to come at it from different angles. You’d think, “What are you trying to knock loose at 8 o’clock in the morning? Did you swallow a pine cone overnight?”
My sister and I would laugh; my mother would yell, “Don’t make fun of your father!” And then she’d yell at him, “Frank, stop it!” He couldn’t even defend himself yet. I wouldn’t have laughed if I knew it was hereditary. I got the gene. I got the throat-clearing gene. It’s terrifying.
Oh man, and like I said, I’m trying to date—try dating younger women. That’s a mistake. Every man thinks he can get away with it because we’re so delusional. Every man thinks he’s just a bathrobe away from being Hugh Hefner.
I tried going out on a date with a woman quite a bit younger than me, and I’ll give you some advice. If you’re on a date with someone who’s 20 years younger, when your food comes out, don’t take out your vitamins. Doesn’t look cool. And I have the tray with the compartments—she’d never seen it. She thought it was a harmonica. Now, I have to walk her through everything. “Well, these are my fish oil capsules, so I apologize if we’re kissing and there’s a weird burp. This is my glucosamine-chondroitin blend, which explains the crunching noise my knees made when we sat down. These three are stuck together, but I’m taking them anyway. And this is a dime I was about to swallow, so I’m glad we caught that in time.”
I’m trying to stay healthy. I’m back at the gym. I am so sore right now. How long are you supposed to rest between workouts? Because it was six years. I felt like that should be enough time.
I can’t recover! I can’t. And I know it. I went into my gym, and they put up these motivational posters to frighten you into having a good workout. And they put up a new one by the squat rack that said, “Go heavy or go home.” So I went heavy. Should’ve gone home. I went to do my squats—I went all the way down, and I remained there. I couldn’t get back up. I had to crawl out from under the bar. The guys at the gym saw me, and there are things you want to hear those guys say—things like, “You got it!” or “Nice work!” You don’t want to hear things like, “Are you okay, sir?” or “Do you need us to call someone?” or “Are you wearing a special bracelet, sir? Can you hear me? Can you hear me?” Of course, right next to me, some big gorilla in the next squat rack had 600 pounds on the bar. He looked at me and said, “Can you give me a spot?” I don’t like how you laughed at that already. I told him, “I don’t even think I could slow that down if something went wrong.” I said, “The best I can do is try and talk you out of it.” And I did. He went home. We actually left and got something to eat.
But the way your body turns on you—man, I went to get my teeth cleaned. I thought I was going to be in and out in a couple of minutes, no problem. They wouldn’t let me leave. First, the dentist and her assistant—whatever they call them, their little henchwoman—they come in with this tray of tools like I’m in a muffler shop. She’s working in my mouth, poking and scraping and jabbing and sticking all these things in there. And then, when she’s done, she said, “I noticed a little bleeding in your gums. Have you noticed any bleeding recently?” I said, “How recently do you mean? Because everything was fine when I came in before you started stabbing me in the face with that little ice pick!”
I have a tooth that’s moving around right up front. Anyone here under 40, you have that to look forward to. One day, a random tooth will say, “Oh, time to take a trip around your face!” Right there. The dentist saw that and said, “I noticed you have a little crowding.” That’s what she called it—crowding, like my face is a bus stop. “Notice you have a little crowding. Have you ever thought about braces?”
“Yeah, I thought about them all the time when I had them! I was 12 years old!” “Well, you’re going to need braces again.” Again! Twice in one lifetime? No. I refuse to be balding and have a retainer at the same time. Braces? “Ooh, do they come with some acne and a Def Leppard T-shirt so I can relive the ’80s?”
Her next question—I thought she was messing with me—straight-faced, the dentist said, “Do you grind your teeth when you’re asleep?” “Oh, I’ll have to check the overnight tooth cam.”
So, I grind my teeth. The dentist said I need a mouth guard. If you don’t know what a mouth guard is, for a mere $800, they’ll make a custom-fit orthodontic device the size of a horseshoe, which I will cram into my face every evening to keep me from chewing on myself.
And won’t that be a hit with the ladies? “I’m so glad you could spend the night. Just give me one moment here… [Mimics putting in a mouth guard] …so I don’t claw your eyes out while you have breakfast.”
What woman wants to wake up next to Hannibal Lecter? I said, “I’m not spending $800 on a mouth guard. It would be cheaper to just put a wad of cash in my mouth every night and gnaw on that.”
Then it occurred to me—I thought, “You know, I could probably find a better deal online.” And I did. I went to Amazon. Instead of one mouth guard for $800, I got a pack of 12 for $3.45.
So, before I went to sleep, I put that flimsy, mail-order mouth guard in my mouth. And I don’t know if it worked because when I woke up, it was gone. I don’t know if I swallowed it, maybe it’s under the bed, I don’t know. And I don’t care. I got 11 more to go, baby. Amazon Prime’s free shipping—I’ll put the whole box in my mouth, I don’t care, I’m making money on this!
Then the final insult—my dentist tells me I have acid reflux. My dentist! It turns out that at night, while I’m asleep, the stomach acid refluxes. I guess first it fluxes, and it thinks that’s pretty cool, and then it refluxes over and over. Thanks to the acid reflux, I’m eroding my teeth from the back. But the good news is, with the grinding, I’m eroding my teeth from the front. So, according to my dentist, within two years, I will have eaten and digested my entire head. By the year 2025, I’ll just be shoes with glasses—that’s all that’ll be left. I will have dissolved my entire body and slept through the whole thing.
It sounds—I know the young people here, they can’t comprehend what I’m telling them, but it’s the truth. Listen, you look like you’re on a field trip. How old are you? 28? You’ve got two years left to do anything interesting. You want to do anything crazy, you’ve got to do it before you’re 30. So if you want to do any bungee jumping or getting out of a chair too fast, you’ve got to do that now, okay? They hate you so much. Thank you so much, you’re young.
We could cut your arm off, and it would grow back like a starfish. You have no idea the power you have—it’s annoying. Anybody under 40 gives me their opinion, I say two words: “You’ll see.”
Someone in their 20s—I can barely hear what you’re saying. I look at you, and all I see are stem cells. I can just melt you down and inject you into my ankle.
Oh man. So, I still get a lot of pressure from my family to settle down. I feel bad—my poor father took me aside. He said, “You know, your mother and I really want grandkids.” And I said, “Well, then you’d better get cracking!”
But the guilt trip is real. I went to visit my family, and my mother and father cornered me, yelling at me—I’m a grown man—and the two of them are freaking out: “Joseph, you need a plan! You don’t have any children! Who’s going to take care of you when you get old?”
That’s when it hit me—they think I’m going to take care of them!
Now, who needs a plan?
I’d like to have kids one day, but just for the one day because they’re very annoying—constant demands: “Clothe me, feed me, let me sleep inside.” When does it end?
But some people have cool kids. This is so awesome—a friend of mine just had a baby. The kid’s got an extra finger on one hand. I’m delighted, I’m so thrilled, and no one else wants to talk about it. It’s a friend of the family, and I found out because my mother left a voice message—a strange message: “Judy just had a beautiful baby girl, but she has six fingers on one hand. Don’t say anything.” Click.
So I called back, and I said, “Well, the finger’s on the kid’s hand, right?” “Yeah, of course.” “Well, not if the finger’s coming out of her forehead! We’ve got some issues, right? Unless she has glasses—it’s kind of convenient, then.”
See, I look on the bright side. I don’t mean to offend any unicorn people out here, but on the hand, it’s much better to have that extra finger. So I went to see the baby, and when I walked in, people took me aside and said, “Just don’t draw any attention to the extra finger.” And I said, “Yeah, that’s the only reason I’m here! You think I just come to see people’s babies? What are you, crazy?”
I’m delighted! I say, “Get that kid a guitar. Think about it—this could be the next Eddie Van Halen right here. It’s extra—it’s bonus.” You’ve never heard that before—dun dun dun dun—wow! You’ll hear that and think, “Well, we’ve heard dun dun dun dun before, but dun dun dun dun—that’s a whole new sound. That’s a hit record right there. Keep it in there.”
So I took those parents aside, and I said, “Listen, don’t listen to these other people, okay? No one’s going to make fun of your kid. You tell them it’s a blessing to have that beautiful, healthy, little six-fingered freaky baby there—that is a gift, okay? That is good luck. And I’ll tell you why—because that kid’s going to win every argument that starts with ‘first of all,’ because you don’t know she’s got one in the chamber. She’s got an extra—she’s got reinforcements. So you’ll make your big discussion and your argument and your points—you think you’ve got it all wrapped up, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, she hits you with, ‘And in conclusion…’ I think you win again, six-fingered baby.”
You guys have been a delight. My name is Joe DeVito—thank you so much!
