He’s the guy from Fear Factor, right? That would be the just and normal response to hearing the name “Joe Rogan” in 2024. Even Rogan himself seems to think so; on his new standup special Burn the Boats, he does a whole bit about the Fear Factor segment that got the show canceled – that is, actually canceled, as in when a show is taken off the air, like a fading reality show or a great five-season sitcom (RIP, Newsradio!). This is distinct from the Joe Rogan type of canceled, which is where you command an audience of millions, a salary of millions and a Netflix standup special where you joke about being repeatedly “canceled” for your supposedly harmless antics – presumably also in front of millions.
This is a remarkable trajectory for someone who hosted a second-tier reality show 20 years ago. Hell, it’s a remarkable trajectory for someone who was reliably amusing on Newsradio. It’s hard to imagine Dave Foley, Andy Dick or Vicki Lewis receiving 60-plus minutes on Netflix to say whatever’s on their mind.
What’s on Rogan’s mind would not be difficult to predict, though maybe the exact ratio might surprise you, in the sense that it’s surprising to see anyone doing alien-abduction/anal probe jokes in 2024. There’s some material on cancel culture, cultural sensitivity, snowflake culture ... whatever it is that makes some people speak somewhat more delicately about the idea of gender or avoid various slurs. Rogan doesn’t seem as hardline anti-trans as fellow Netflix darling Dave Chappelle (at least in front of his standup audience), or maybe he’s simply less stubborn about his prejudices than Chappelle, a vastly more talented comedian with a vastly bigger grudge over the perception that he’s “not allowed” to say all the stuff that he says pretty regularly. Rogan is more apt to shrug things off, trying to make self-deprecating jokes about how absurd it is that anyone would listen to him about, say, vaccines while claiming to basically “love everybody”. For example, he purports to believe that, by and large, trans women are indeed women, and only asks that a small margin be allowed for the existence of “crazy”, in that and other situations.
A better comic could probably workshop this idea into something provocative, surprising or funny about the difficulty of making certain mental adjustments in your 50s, or attempting to find various loopholes, exceptions or inconsistencies to social rules. A better comic could also probably find something funny to say about the idea that gay men might nonetheless possess the same caveman sexual drive as their straight counterparts. (It’s a hacky premise, and other comics have probably done it better already, but it’s possible!) Rogan, however, is not that comic. He’s not interested in developing bits, finessing them toward a comic revelation or a clever, surprising turn. He just wants to deliver them, as loudly as possible, and that delivery is frequently sloppy with his frantic urges. As the special goes on, he increasingly resorts to a few tired vocal tricks: bellowing punchlines with red-faced intensity, like the late Sam Kinison (supposedly one of his heroes), and doing a cutesy-swishy voice as a stand-in for any women or gay men. Maybe alien abductions are on his mind because only a genuine abductee, gone for at least three decades, could possibly find some of his this stuff fresh.
On its own, this would simply be a sub-mediocre standup special with reactionary overtones, by a comic coasting on his name recognition with very little technique to speak of. There are, regrettably, a lot of those. They are not all, however, given the Netflix spotlight. To be fair, there are so many Netflix comedy specials – they’re currently releasing about one a week – that there is going to be some very bad comedy in there. But does one major streaming platform really need to lay claim to Chappelle, Ricky Gervais and Rogan, all complaining about being silenced by humorless scolds?
All three of them suffer from the tedious delusion that they are not mere comics, but bold, uncensorable gadflies whose responsibility it is to speak truth to trans people – er, power. The Rogan difference is that his career has reached cult leader levels without even really bothering with the comedy. (Gervais and Chappelle will always have past triumphs to their name, and at minimum, echoes of those triumphs will probably continue throughout their careers.) Standup was once Rogan’s career; now it’s more of a side hustle compared to his ultra-popular podcast which is, notably, not Rogan doing jokes for hours. Jokes are just Rogan’s fallback – what he uses as an excuse when he’s talking shit or using his huge platform to convince a bunch of listeners that they’re getting something more akin to a thoughtful current events chat, instead of an ill-informed ex-comic spouting off.
Rogan gives away his feelings about what he uses jokes for on this very special. Under the apparent impression that only a bold, select few would dare joke about gay people, he notes how his ridicule is used to ferret people out: “If we can’t joke around you, we know you take yourself too fuckin’ seriously.” In other words: you better like my jokes, or else. It’s a solipsistic worldview that nullifies his attempts at self-deprecation, too, because even qualities he pretends to denigrate in himself, he defines in his own weird terms. He seems to think intelligence, for example, is some nebulous combination of intelligence, and hanging out with him, Joe Rogan. It’s hard to wring much (intentional) comedy from a just-asking-questions podcast host who unironically refers to Elon Musk as “the smartest guy alive”.
It’s equally difficult to buy Rogan’s intimations that comedy is a great equalizer when he can’t say a bad word about the world’s richest man. To some extent, I believe Rogan when he implies he doesn’t want to be seen as a leader or a deep thinker (though not when he claims that he doesn’t think people should listen to him). In a deeply strange and backwards way, the hack-comic-to-podcaster-to-leader-of-men pipeline is all about a desire to reverse-engineer kind of standup clout that came naturally to figures like Richard Pryor or George Carlin, who cancellation-obsessed comics always say they admire. When Rogan tries to go Carlin Mode, however, the results are horrifically embarrassing: “I think words are just supposed to be a sound that you make so I know what you’re thinking,” he says at one point, as part of an argument in favor of slurs, part of a mush-mouthed routine about how everyone knew what he meant when he’d throw around words like “fag” or “retard”.
Again, there’s probably a funny conceit that could be developed around the idea of words as no different than grunts or screams – but it would require Rogan to do some work, rather than just grunting, screaming or miming masturbation. For all of his attempts to project a fun, laid-back image, and all of his protestations about the unifying joys of “just kidding”, Rogan’s special is, at its core, astonishingly self-serious. Rogan’s whole late-period career is an extended argument that comedians are so important, they shouldn’t have to be talented, original, or funny to demand that you laugh.
