After scoring massive audiences in May for livestreaming the Roast of Tom Brady and an hour with Katt Williams during the Netflix Is A Joke Festival in May, Netflix has turned to the biggest name in podcasting as their next best bet to engage a global audience. The Brady roast went wildly offensive, while Williams proved himself quite tame in those experiments. Where would Joe Rogan land in his first live special? Would he be as bold as he sounds in his podcasts?
The Gist: Joe Rogan has earned hundreds of millions of dollars from Spotify since the pandemic for scoring the podcasting platform’s biggest audiences. But Rogan hasn’t put out a new stand-up special since 2018.
For his third Netflix special and first in six years, Rogan taped it live from San Antonio, not far from his adopted home in Austin. His move from California to Texas and his stated reasons for fleeing Los Angeles have been a staple of his multi-hour podcasts for the past four years, and regular listeners to his podcast already are well-versed in his well-trodden topics of interest, expressing skepticism about vaccines, obsessing over minute amounts of trans women behaving badly, and proclaiming his love for the “freedom” he enjoys in Texas (even if the facts of that state’s politics and laws go against many such freedoms, including his proclivity for getting high).
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Although his special puts him in rare company alongside Chris Rock and Katt Williams for getting to speak live to the whole world on Netflix, what he chooses to focus on puts him more in line with comedians who enjoy trolling their audiences such as Dave Chappelle and Katt Williams.
Memorable Jokes: Rogan jogs our memories early by reminding us that, despite his first big break coming as a supporting character on the beloved NBC sitcom NewsRadio, he actually became famous for the network’s shocking reality competition, Fear Factor. He does so by bringing up a stunt from the 2012 revival of the show in which they challenged contestants to drink donkey semen. Rogan said he told the network it was a bad idea, and NBC caught major flak for it, and soon thereafter cancelled the show for a second time. “When I’m the voice of reason, you’ve got a really f—ed up program,” he joked.
Rogan also reminded us how much heat he has taken from the media, from scientists, and even from Prince Harry, for peddling misleading and outright bad intel regarding COVID-19. Because of it, he understands full well that “the funniest way for me to die is if I die from COVID.” He knows the memes would go fast and furious, depicting him trusting “horse paste” over science.
Our Take: Not that that’s going to stop him from saying insane things about vaccines and anything else. Especially when he can draw applause breaks and huge paychecks for it.
“We lost a lot of people during COVID, and most of them are still alive,” he said to cheers and an applause break. “Yeah. Right? Right! There’s a lot of people I don’t fuck with anymore. Before COVID, I would’ve told you that vaccines are the most important invention in human history. After COVID, I’m like, I don’t think we went to the moon. I think Michelle Obama’s got a dick. I think Pizzagate is real. I think there’s direct energy weapons in Antarctica.” He knows well enough to immediately retract his slander about the former First Lady.
But he’s steadfastly stubborn about his nostalgia and desire to espouse offensive ideas for the sake of laughs, even if the laughs from the audience aren’t always coming from the right place. And he wants to continue to do so without consequence. Sort of.
Rogan willingly acknowledges that over the course of thousands of podcasts, each several hours long, sometimes talking while drunk and/or high, he has given critics so much evidence and proof that he might be homophobic and racist, and that watching the compilation videos back even horrifies himself. And yet. He hasn’t had to suffer financially, legally or even socially for his transgressions. He suggests a tip jar of sorts for people like himself who want to keep uttering slurs publicly about marginalized groups: “I think you should have to pay money to use the most offensive words and then that money goes to cancer research.”
His excuse that he doesn’t do his own research (on the podcasts he asks his producer to fact-check him by Googling) is that he’s just a dumb guy trying to keep up with his much smarter podcast guests. He has often claimed to be an idiot just making jokes, and in this live hour, he again used it as his primary defense against criticism that he’s purposely misleading his millions of listeners. “But here’s my take on that, sincerely: If you’re getting your vaccine advice from me, is that really my fault?” he said. “That’s not my job, kids. I’m a professional shit-talker, OK? Some of the things I say make sense. A lot of them don’t. It’s up to you to figure out what’s what. That’s the fun part.”
Is it really fun when the stakes are life-or death, though?
When you could die from a disease, or get killed by your government or by your local bigots, is that still ha-ha, good clean fun?
That he keeps coming back to concerns over gay men wanting to have sex with him, or men wanting to dress up as women only to violate women; that he’s nostalgic for a supposedly carefree time when he imagines 4-year-olds dressed up as Hitler for Halloween; that he sincerely believes Elon Musk is “the smartest guy alive.” These are not rational thoughts. These are more in line with the other intrusive thoughts that Rogan does cop to in the hour.
That he reminds us he was born in 1967 would put him solidly within the ranks of Generation X, but his diatribes and complaints simply make him look and sound more and more like a not-OK Boomer.
But since he’s laughing all the way to the bank, do you think he cares?
Our Call: You might think after reading all of that, I’d tell you to SKIP IT. But precisely because Rogan is such a large figure in the media landscape of setting the conversations for 2024, I’d urge you to STREAM IT. If he says you shouldn’t trust what he says out of context while drunk and high in a three-hour long podcast, then perhaps you can get everything you need to know about him and decide for yourself by seeing and listening to what he says here while presumably stone cold sober but slightly sweaty for just over an hour.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
