Netflix has found the stopgap solution for the periods between Dave Chappelle specials.
Chappelle, the modern-legend comedian whose legacy has been complicated by the anti-trans material in his Netflix specials, has helped to make clear that the streaming service primarily cares about eyeballs at any cost. What’s complicated, and heartbreaking, about Chappelle’s recent material is that he’s a generationally gifted comic storyteller who seems compelled by belief to talk out against trans people. Meanwhile, what seems clear about Joe Rogan, whose latest special, “Burn the Boats,” aired live to tell the tale Netflix Aug. 3, is that he’s a type of inverse Chappelle. He shouldn’t be a generationally gifted comedian, or perhaps a excellent one, but his invocations of culture-war wedge issues bring him attention he would otherwise not have merited.
This shouldn’t be a revelation. Rogan — whose early profession included acting on the sitcom “NewsRadio,” hosting the truth show “Fear Factor,” and backstage interviews for UFC fights — has risen so far as he has by making a degree of being counterintuitive, blunt, strategically mindless. On Rogan’s Spotify podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” his early-COVID-era experiments in discrediting vaccines — less a crusade than aimless verbal noodling about whether vaccines might or won’t be secure, based on little greater than a profession comedian’s instinct for which button to push — got him attention. And that’s the currency that brought him to Netflix, and that prompted Netflix to broadcast him live.
It’s likely that, were his special pre-recorded, the streamer would have had some internal debate about what to chop — allowing the tape to run allow them to off the hook, and allowed Rogan to proceed his shtick as probably the most dangerous man in comedy. It’s definitely true that he has a simple and facile way with a slur, and with merging it into his particular way of seeing the world. I used to be genuinely impressed when he pivoted, in a moment, from saying that there’s nothing unsuitable with two straight men using a homophobic slur in a personal phone conversation to screeching that there isn’t a such thing as a personal phone conversation because, in screeched tones, “they definitely listen!” Rogan, who has through the years come to resemble the UFC fighters he once covered, had, by this point within the special, sweated through his shirt, however the transition from needy self-justification to global conspiracy against him seemed unsweaty, practically seamless. His resentments are his own — and it just so happens that, incidentally, they’re the world’s fault. Easy as that.
Throughout the special, Rogan appeared to be addressing or anticipating a hypothetical critic — a lot in order that criticizing him appears to be playing into his game. It seems naive to handle, point by point, Rogan’s claims in the shape of comedy. It’s an admixture of nasty cruelty (his description of the kid of a “pregnant man” nursing was a failed-comic grotesque), faux-naivete (complaining about how “the world got weird” when Rogan himself is a first-rate mover in shaping American culture), and, ultimately, a sensibility that seems 10 years late. Beyond the topic of COVID — which Rogan notes up top modified lots of his interpersonal relationships (one wonders why!) — little on this special seems like it couldn’t have addressed similar cultural wedges in 2013, right all the way down to Rogan’s grievance that he can’t use certain slurs. (In getting those onto Netflix’s air, Rogan guaranteed his audacity would win the headlines his comedy couldn’t, and earned his paycheck.)
Much of Rogan’s comedy, here, was simplistic to the purpose of sketched-out. Rogan spoke mockingly of no less than some trans people as “crazy people,” saying that, while some transness is legitimate, untold others were just like the villain of “The Silence of the Lambs”; this shouldn’t be only prejudiced, that is amateur stuff. A later bit about feeling intimidated around gay men due to Rogan’s understanding of men’s primal nature felt similar: Outdated. Drained. It ultimately got here as a relief, even for the viewer who disagreed, when COVID got here up in Rogan’s litany, if only since it was a subject that hadn’t already been chewed up by the culture like so many pieces of offal on “Fear Factor”: Rogan, in describing it, wouldn’t go to date as to disavow vaccines. But he mocked those that care concerning the issue on either side, those that consider within the science by his sneering mockery of Prince Harry’s critique of him, and people who consider in Joe Rogan this fashion: “In case you’re getting your vaccine advice from me, is that actually my fault?” Throughout, Rogan has antic, darting eyes; his blocky physicality keeps him fairly glued to the stage, but he’s signaling as best he can that he takes nothing seriously however the pursuit of the punchline. He continually walks as much as a line — as when he praises the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, while noting he was unsuitable about “one big thing” — but doesn’t seem curious enough to interrogate what in him, or in his audience, finds intriguing about pushing this boundary. It’s simply fun to do, identical to telling trans jokes from 1998.
He doesn’t find it as often as would suit: To the uninitiated, Rogan comes across on this special as somewhat inept, and evidently Netflix broadcast it live to capitalize on his notoriety greater than to provide him pride of place amongst other recent live events on the streamer, like a Chris Rock special or the roast of Tom Brady. But give him this much: Rogan is no less than mildly complicated. He is probably not the odd and chewily enigmatic figure Chappelle is, but he’s not solely a partisan. He complains, within the tone of a betrayed friend, that the worst coverage of his having purchased a comedy club got here from Fox News (they referred to it as an “anti-woke” salvo, while he claims there was no political valence in any respect). And he disavows principally every little thing he’s ever said — not that he has modified his mind, but he seems to put in writing off the concept of getting a mind in any respect. He complains that the media “would take things that I had said drunk, high as fuck — put them in quotes, as if it was a thought-out statement.”
Unfortunately, pondering things out — onstage, within the semi-privacy of 1’s studio, or on streaming — is what comedians are paid to do. And, in utterly disavowing his own work whilst it’s happening, Rogan shows that, for all he can have the trimmings of a marquee Netflix comic, he lacks a fundamental quality the very best comics share: Courage.
