Our Lady of the Buns

How much do you like our buns? Stop staring at our asses, we’re talking about Albertina Rizzo, who gives you fantastic advice about kissing and wieners every week as the bready half of Hot Dog and the Lady Bun, our relationship column for lonely hearts. Besides telling it like it is about boinking and bunking, snagging sweeties, and using your vagina as a purse for babies, she also writes for all kinds of magazines, newspapers, someecards, and MTV’s “Money from Strangers,” and has co-authored two very silly books that she says “you can probably buy for $3 now on Amazon, but at one point were worth a few dollars more than that.” And Huffington Post recently named her one of the funniest women on Twitter, an award she likens to “basically getting a prize for thinking on the toilet.” Let’s learn some more about her.

VICE: What are your days like, when you're not fiddling with hot dogs and your buns?
Albertina Rizzo: Most of my days are spent writing and searching for videos of kids falling off slides on YouTube. Between that, and toxically comparing myself to other more successful people, my days are pretty full.

To what in life do you owe your wealth of knowledge?
I owe it to the fact that I "think" I know stuff. There's not a lot of difference between "thinking" you know something and actually knowing it. That's basically 100% of the success of the ding-dongs at Fox news.

Are you single or "taken"?
I'm taken, but I maintain the anxiety of a single person.

What’s it like working with the Hot Dog?
Kurt [Braunohler] describes me having the personality of a pigeon who just found a bagel on the street. He is one of my favorite and funniest people in the world. We work great together. Every time I come up with something really fucking stupid, he's clapping and laughing—not like a mentally disabled person, but in a supportive and good way. He always knows where I'm coming from, so it makes me better and more confident in my voice. That said, we're very easily distracted, so one YouTube video of a talking porcupine and the writing day could go to shit. As far as the column, we both have very similar backgrounds, dating-wise, in that we were both in very long-term relationships for all of our 20s. I was with someone for close to nine years before I went of my first “date” at age 30. Kurt was the same. Honestly, my first time actually dating was probably a lot like when you try to make a cat play air guitar with their paws and they just look uncomfortable and like they definitely don't know how to play an instrument. That was me and dating.

What are the top three things that make a successful relationship of any kind?
A sense of humor probably helps because the world is terrifying, according to the internet. Being interested in something other than TV, as a unit, probably also helps. Although, TV is amazing and is 40% of the secret to good relationships (TLC excluded). The third thing is definitely trust, but that sounds boring, so I'm gonna go ahead and say potatoes. Not sure how that applies, but it's potatoes. So, humor, shared interests, and potatoes.