Joe Rogan’s Netflix stand-up special might seem a major moment for comedy – but it’s not

The podcaster is back on Netflix with a live stand-up special, his first in six years. It’s one of the streamer’s tentpole comedy events, writes Louis Chilton... but not for the right reasons

Podcaster and stand-up comedian Joe Rogan (Getty/iStock)

Jokes, folks – just jokes.” So says shockjock podcaster Joe Rogan, in the short trailer for his new stand-up special, Joe Rogan: Burn the Boats. “Feel that? That’s some ride-home arguments in the air,” he says. “Don’t get mad at me. You know why you came here.” And, of course, everyone does. The vast majority of people watching – either in person at San Antonio’s Majestic Theatre, or streaming live on Netflix – will be devotees of Rogan’s absurdly popular podcast. But the jokes aren’t the selling point. No, people are here for everything that comes with it: outspokenness, brash masculinity, and probably more than a dash of dubious conspiratorial conjecture.

After starting out as a stand-up comic and sometime TV actor, Rogan has, in recent years, cultivated a specific and lucrative brand for himself as the world’s biggest podcaster. His series, The Joe Rogan Experience, sees Rogan shoot the breeze with a range of guests – contemporaries, “cancelled” comedy stars, scientists and pseudo-experts – and has 14.5 million followers on Spotify, nearly three times more than the next most followed podcast (TED Talks Daily). It has also attracted no small amount of controversy, crescendoing in 2022 when his show’s promulgation of anti-vaxx conspiracy theories prompted a boycott of its hosting platform from artists including Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. This divisive but astronomically popular podcast has made his once-unremarkable stand-up career a phenomenon by association: two years ago, he sold out London’s O2 arena on the back of his online fame.

Burn the Boats, similarly, is shaping up to be a tentpole moment for Netflix. It’s a continuation of the streamer’s investment in stand-up comedy and in live event programming. (Rogan is sandwiched somewhere between John Mulaney’s experimental chat show Everybody’s in LA, and a forthcoming novelty boxing fixture between YouTuber Jake Paul and a doddery Mike Tyson.) This may be a crowning moment for Rogan the comedian. But for comedy itself, it could hardly feel less significant.

There’s never been much groundbreaking or unique about Rogan’s comedy, whether that’s in stand-up or podcast form. (His early efforts as an actor, particularly his solid regular role on the sitcom NewsRadio, were similarly nondescript.) The 56-year-old comic’s most recent comedy tour saw Rogan talk about many of his usual bugbears, particularly the supposed over-sensitivity of the modern world; Burn the Boats is likely to feature a lot of that same material. His appeal, to much of his fanbase, stems less from his prowess as a humourist than it does the viewpoints he espouses, the relatable, affirming way he slings around an opinion. He approaches big, substantial social issues with a sort of ill-formed credulity that masquerades as iconoclasm. For all Rogan’s individualist bluster, however, his podcast regularly trafficks in tired right-wing talking points – “cancel culture”, for instance, or, just this week, when he weighed into the pernicious row over cisgender Olympian Imane Khelif by branding her a “man”. This has led many to lump him in with comedy’s other foremost rent-a-provocateurs, performers such as Ricky Gervais, Dave Chappelle and Jimmy Carr, who have built their current brands around saying the supposedly unsayable.

Over the past decade, Netflix has become the world’s foremost platform for filmed stand-up comedy. Other streamers, particularly Prime Video, have also dabbled, of course. (Comedy aficionados have long sung the praises of NextUp, a stand-up-centric platform that has a breadth and diversity of performers). But in both its distributive reach and scale of commissioning, Netflix reigns supreme.

There’s a lot to be said for the multiplicity of Netflix’s comedy infrastructure. On the one hand, it has commissioned a glut of diverse, well-received and uncontroversial specials from talented comedians – names such as John Mulaney, Mae Martin, James Acaster, Wanda Sykes, Jacqueline Novak, Hannah Gadsby, and Stavros Halkias to cite but a few. But it has been criticised for platforming sets from comics such as Carr, Gervais, or Shane Gillis, containing material that many have characterised as bigotry. (Abjuration over Chappelle’s transphobic jokes prompted a walkout protest from some of Netflix’s own employees.) Rogan shouldn’t necessarily be tarred with quite the same brush – but the crossover, in both the way the special has been marketed, and his popularity among anti-“cancel culture” reactionaries, make comparisons hard to avoid.

To date, Rogan’s unprecedented success could maybe be seen as a symptom of a society warped by ignorance, misinformation and male grievance. For him to become Netflix’s poster-boy-of-the-week is a damning reminder of what it takes to really “make it” in the world of comedy today. If it was just jokes, that wouldn’t be a problem.

‘Joe Rogan: Burn the Boats’ is streaming on Netflix from 3 August at 7pm PT / 10pm ET (or 3am GMT on 4 August)

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